9.03.14 [#BookOfTheWeek]

#BookOfTheWeek is brought to you with generous support from my retail sponsor Yesteryear Comics. Make Yesteryear Comics your first and only destination in San Diego for great customer service and the best discounts possible on a wide selection of mainstream and independent titles. Customers receive an attractive 20% discount on new titles during their first week of release. Yesteryear Comics is located at 9353 Clairemont Mesa Boulevard.

Moon Knight #7 (Marvel): There’s a small selection of really choice books out this week, including the raucous fun of God Hates Astronauts #1 (Image), Jason Aaron's gritty homecoming tale in Southern Bastards #4 (Image), and the luscious-looking Concrete Park: Respect #1 (Dark Horse), but the clear standout is Moon Knight #7, with the new creative team of Brian Wood and Greg Smallwood, with colorist Jordie Bellaire and cover artist Declan Shalvey holding over. Honestly, and I say this with all due respect, I think most people are just hoping the new team doesn't fuck things up, it was a magic formula, and I was initially pleasantly surprised and then quickly blown away by what they pull off. Wood and Smallwood delightfully thread a very tiny needle here, managing to provide a respectful continuation of what Warren Ellis and Declan Shalvey laid down, while still stamping it with their own unique style. Wood grounds the White Knight hard in a noticeably present NYC bubbling with social tension, while Smallwood brings his sensational A-game with layout ingenuity and panel design. If page 20 alone doesn't make you believe in the dynamic abilities of the medium, then it's time to find a new hobby. It’s very rare that you have one creative team that’s can’t miss, followed by a different creative team on the same title that’s equally can’t miss, but these guys have done it.  

The Massive #26 @ Comics Bulletin [Advance Review]

I wrote an Advance Review of this week's The Massive #26 over at Comics Bulletin.

8.27.14 [#BookOfTheWeek]

#BookOfTheWeek is brought to you with generous support from my retail sponsor Yesteryear Comics. Make Yesteryear Comics your first and only destination in San Diego for great customer service and the best discounts possible on a wide selection of mainstream and independent titles. Customers receive an attractive 20% discount on new titles during their first week of release. Yesteryear Comics is located at 9353 Clairemont Mesa Boulevard.

The Massive #26 (Dark Horse): There’s a ton of great stuff out this week, everything from the sales juggernaut that is Saga #22, and Black Science #8 (probably the best thing Rick Remender has produced since that career-high Uncanny X-Force run) to Charles Soule’s Letter 44 #9 and Joe Casey’s post-genre Sex #15. I also want to direct people’s attention to Fuse: Volume 01 by Antony Johnston and Justin Greenwood, which is basically CSI: Galactica if you want some pitch shorthand. For me, #BookOfTheWeek was a very close call, which came down to The Massive #26 and Transformers vs. G.I. Joe #2. Tom Scioli’s take on these 80’s nostalgia properties is just perfect. It captures this manic sense of nostalgia and invades your childhood with an indie comics aesthetic that is equal parts reverence to the source material and deep subversive intent. It was a brilliant move to have Scarlett lead an away team to invade Cybertron(!), I love the sly details of certain scenes actually looking like action figures being played with due to their small scale, or the ruthless Bumblebee head necklace Megatron wears like a baller(!), and Scarlett's interplay with cats like Wild Bill is just sublime. It’s highly recommended and no doubt one of the best books of the year. But. Then there’s Brian Wood, Garry Brown, and Jordie Bellaire exponentially intensifying The Massive to such a degree that these final, I’d say three, arcs are just paying off so brilliantly. There isn’t a whole lot else I can say about the plot itself without encrypting things with big [REDACTED] marks all over it, but needless to say, the three central mysteries that have surrounded the series since the beginning - The Crash, The Massive, and engimatic Mary - are all starting to become more and more clear. Wood has said all along that The Massive is about the end, planned at #30, so I'm very excited to see exactly how he's going to stick the landing. I was also really impressed by John Paul Leon’s rendition of The Pieta on the cover, which is very gripping.

8.20.14 [#BookOfTheWeek]

#BookOfTheWeek is brought to you with generous support from my retail sponsor Yesteryear Comics. Make Yesteryear Comics your first and only destination in San Diego for great customer service and the best discounts possible on a wide selection of mainstream and independent titles. Customers receive an attractive 20% discount on new titles during their first week of release. Yesteryear Comics is located at 9353 Clairemont Mesa Boulevard.

Supreme: Blue Rose #2 (Image): There are several strong contenders this week. There’d be absolutely no shame in picking the flawless lush visuals and morality examination amid crumbling social structures in Manifest Destiny #9, the pop myth masterpiece of The Wicked + The Divine #3, Hemingway and his hemochromatosis upstaging the protagonist in The Life After #2, the overwhelming visual feast from Chris Mitten, Jordan Boyd, and Thomas Mauer in Umbral #8, or the perpetual outsider riff vis-à-vis pseudo-totalitarianism in Trees #4. Like I said, there’s a ton of great comics out this week. But, I’m inclined to give the nod to Warren Ellis and Tula Lotay’s Supreme: Blue Rose #2. The striking visuals are what first caught my attention (though I'll admit the sometimes inconsistent writing from Ellis has been far more "hit" than "miss" of late, just look at the 6-issue phenom that is Moon Knight), but honestly this is what Warren Ellis does best. It’s Warren Ellis channeling his inner Warren Ellis and ruminating on the act of the craft itself. Sure, the sci-fi message is about time as a non-linear construct, and with Lotay’s ethereal, slightly out of focus lines, the compelling premise is that if the loop has already occurred, we can message versions of ourselves from our current position. But, underneath the protagonist’s navigation of that structure is Ellis talking about process, the “protocolization” as one character puts it, similar to what Alan Moore starting doing toward the end of Promethea, a quasi-autobiographical infusion into the genre fiction. I’m feeling like this has the potential to be the best Warren Ellis creation since Planetary. That’s high praise considering I often tell people that Planetary is one of (if not “the”) best comic in the last 20 years. Grade A+. 

8.13.14 [#BookOfTheWeek]

#BookOfTheWeek is brought to you with generous support from my retail sponsor Yesteryear Comics. Make Yesteryear Comics your first and only destination in San Diego for great customer service and the best discounts possible on a wide selection of mainstream and independent titles. Customers receive an attractive 20% discount on new titles during their first week of release. Yesteryear Comics is located at 9353 Clairemont Mesa Boulevard.

Star Wars #20 (Dark Horse): Well, it's the end of an era. For me, this is the last Dark Horse Star Wars book I'll ever pick up off the stands. Brian Wood, Carlos D'Anda, and Gabe Eltaeb deliver a satisfying conclusion to their run. By including Seren Song, a Rebel Alliance deep cover agent, and her stolen Imperial Geological Survey data, it offers readers the opportunity to read in between the lines and learn how the Rebels discovered the remote world of Hoth. The writing is totally solid, dialogue full of Star Wars-isms, fleshed out world-building, and clever new lines ("The Falcon grew talons." Wood seriously nails the slightly smart-ass voice of the ice-cold assassin droid IG-88.). But, one of the greatest treats is seeing Carlos D'Anda work his stout lines and Gabe Eltaeb fill them with a rustic sheen that's right at home in the Star Wars Universe. There are so many memorable moments here, from Seren's Y-Wing (always a design favorite of mine), to IG-88's menacing sniper shot from atop the IG-2000, to a forced perspective shot of the Falcon in full burn, to a close-up of Han Solo's swaggering charm, this was the Star Wars title that really had it all. I've said it before, but it bears repeating: This is the last great contribution to Dark Horse Star Wars comics. If you've gotta' go out, might as well go out on a high note. Grade A+.

8.06.14 [#BookOfTheWeek]

#BookOfTheWeek is brought to you with generous support from my retail sponsor Yesteryear Comics. Make Yesteryear Comics your first and only destination in San Diego for great customer service and the best discounts possible on a wide selection of mainstream and independent titles. Customers receive an attractive 20% discount on new titles during their first week of release. Yesteryear Comics is located at 9353 Clairemont Mesa Boulevard.

Lazarus #10 (Image): There's a small handful of worthwhile books out this week, including Moon Knight #6, Spread #2, and The Bunker #5, but my pick is Lazarus for a few reasons. First, its dark aesthetic from Michael Lark is always the right vibe, and I loved little details in this issue like the damaged Statue of Liberty or the accuracy of the medical shears in a throwaway little moment. The brilliant world-building from Greg Rucka is just so right on, the fleshing out of families as Jonah Carlyle flees to Hock territory after a failed coup against his father and sister, the dystopian propaganda the serfs and waste live in, the juxtaposition of farmed fields with an urban backdrop, and the way Jonah's privilege comes crashing against reality outside the protection of his family's borders. There's an insistence on socially relevant economic fears and resource scarcity extrapolated to their natural extremes in this script, and it really shines with the incredible restraint shown in the dialogue department. Rucka, and David Brothers' editing I think, allow so much of Lark's imagery to carry the storytelling without any pesky dialogue. If The Godfather was crime families amid a twisted disillusionment with The American Dream of generations past, then Lazarus feels like crime families amid paranoid futurism about The American Nightmare in more current socioeconomic times. With the promising "Conclave" arc impending, which will witness a massive sit-down (maybe the biggest since The Macao Accords) between the heads of all the families, this has grown to become one of the best series of 2014. Grade A+.