Beetle Bailey eclipsed the 1,000-newspaper mark with its circulation in 1965 and was only the second comic to do so after Blondie. For a year marked by Lyndon B. Johnson’s “Great Society” declaration, conflict in Vietnam, and marches in Selma, Alabama, Beetle Bailey: The Daily and Sunday Strips, 1965 from Titan Books presents a artifact … Read more100 Days, 100 Comics #92: ‘Beetle Bailey: The Daily and Sunday Strips, 1965’

Two of my favorite moves Marvel has made in the last few years involved relaunching their What The–?! brand as a Robot Chicken-styled absurdist take on their universe and re-introducing Strange Tales as a vehicle for indie creator populated anthologies. The initiatives asserted an awareness of Marvel’s places in the broader ecosystems of online media … Read more100 Days, 100 Comics #91: ‘Strange Tales II’ #1

Paul Cornell and Jimmy Broxton’s Knight and Squire #1 was a rare breed of launch to see up on the shelves this week. In fact, it wasn’t on the first shelf I scoped out in my neighborhood Wednesday evening. Luckily, I put a call in to the crack team down at Chicago Comics, who had … Read more100 Days, 100 Comics #90: ‘Knight and Squire’ #1

There’s a lot going on in The Bulletproof Coffin, and while the coloring choices remain the most compelling component of the artwork for me, the stocky manchild proportions and occasionally anatomically indifferent depictions of women really throw some rust on the story’s flow from time to time — and I can’t figure out if that’s … Read more100 Days, 100 Comics #89: ‘The Bulletproof Coffin’ #2

In the age of the $3.99 30-page comic, it almost seems to take a Matt Fraction/Pasqual Ferry team to get me to pick up the first issue in a new run on a mainstream superhero comic these days. Fraction has become a dependable source of researched character and story depth in recent years, and Ferry … Read more100 Days, 100 Comics #88: ‘Thor’ #615

I’m going to miss Buenaventura Press books now that they’ve closed shop. That may mean that Ted May, M. Jason Robards and Jeff Wilson’s Injury Comics vol. 1 #2 was the last BP book I ended up buying new, which is a shame since they were one of the first shopping stops at about any show … Read more100 Days, 100 Comics #87: ‘Injury Comics’ vol. 1 #2

The first two issues of The Bulletproof Coffin by David Hine and Shaky Kane have been sitting on my coffee table for a good two months. I really have no good excuse beyond the fact that I’ve been reading other things that have been piling on top of them and I finally made it down … Read more100 Days, 100 Comics #86: ‘The Bulletproof Coffin’ #1

“Batman and Robin” has been a fun ride just for the sake of seeing Morrison reunite with his former “Seven Soldiers” collaborators, and I walked away very pleased with his use of Frazer Irving in Batman and Robin #13. In all honesty, these barren backgrounds wouldn’t work in just any superhero comic book context, but … Read more100 Days, 100 Comics #85: ‘Batman and Robin’ #13

A lot of the $3.99 books I can be heard complaining about day-to-day off of the Internet could take a few notes from Jason’s $13 single stories from Fantagraphics. Sequence by sequence and page by page, the re-readability of his stories and scenes consistently offer more densely fulfilling reads than any three or four new … Read more100 Days, 100 Comics #84: ‘Werewolves of Montpellier’

Kody Chamberlain is a comics creator that I’ve been following and respected at least since since I encountered his project Punks, which he co-created with Joshua Hale Fialkov. His work on Marvel’s Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu One-Shot last year really caught my eye, though, and had me interested in his new Image-published crime comic … Read more100 Days, 100 Comics #83: ‘Sweets’ #1