1.21.15 [#PicksOfTheWeek]

#PicksOfTheWeek is brought to you with generous support from my retail sponsor Yesteryear Comics. Make Yesteryear Comics your choice 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.

It’s a relatively small week for me, but there’s some great material hitting the shelves. First up is Kurt Busiek and Benjamin Dewey’s anthropomorphic world-building full of political intrigue. Perhaps best described as Game of Thrones meets Kamandi, it’s The Autumnlands: Tooth & Claw #3. Another rising star from Image Comics is Ivan Brandon and Nic Klein’s Drifter #3, featuring a wayward sci-fi traveler trying to piece together his past while surviving his intense new surroundings after crash landing on a strange planet. It’s got a twinge of The Twilight Zone, with modern sci-fi sensibilities and plenty of action. Image also has the ever-popular The Wicked + The Divine #7 from Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie, and with news out of the recent Image Expo that more of their seminal Phonogram series is on the way, I don’t see attention cooling off on these guys any time soon.

IDW is bringing us Chuck Dixon and Tomas Giorello’s latest installment in Winterworld #6, a book that doesn’t necessarily rock your socks off, but Dixon is a consistent and reliable writer, continuing this quietly intriguing take on the post-apocalyptic drifter traversing the land and meeting various tribes of people struggling to compose some form of civilization. Last up is the penultimate issue in Brian Wood and Greg Smallwood’s Moon Knight arc, with Moon Knight #11. This team has been vastly underrated in the wake of Warren Ellis and Declan Shalvey’s departure, but they’ve delivered an equally good romp with their grounded urban vigilante I’ve dubbed “The Ghost Protector of New York City.” Most critics have ceded that Wood and Smallwood were worth staying on for, but I’m not sure civilians got the message. I can only hope that we’ll see more from the Wood & Smallwood creative team in the future.

If you’re into comics at all, you should do yourself a favor and check out work by Jacques Tardi if you haven’t already done so. This week, Fantagraphics is bringing us the latest of their Tardi translations with the neo-noir seedy crime story Run Like Crazy Run Like Hell, which has art by Tardi and a story by Jean-Patrick Manchette. Tardi has a way of forcing us to examine deep character motivations by shoveling all kinds of detail-laden action at us, and it’s the rare book that both entertains and makes you feel as if you’ve learned something about human nature in the process.