6.03.15 [#PicksOfTheWeek]

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Leading the charge this week is The Autumnlands: Tooth & Claw #6 (Image) by Kurt Busiek and Benjamin Dewey. It’s the conclusion of the first arc, promising the showdown with the Bison Tribes, and another reminder of what an effortless world-builder Busiek is, always creating something truly fresh and original, probably the most consistent writer working today in terms of sheer crafting of the script and engaging dialogue that’s always at a certain predictable level of (high) quality. 

There’s also the debut of Airboy #1 (Image) by James Robinson and Greg Hinkle, which fans of Starman know, could turn into something really special, as well as Gillen and McKelvie’s The Wicked + The Divine #11 (Image). We’ve also got The Humans #5 (Image) by Keenan Marshall Keller and Tom Neely, Jupiter’s Circle #3 (Image), and No Mercy #3 (Image) by Alex de Campi and Carla Speed McNeil. The Humans is always fun, but of this trio I’m most excited for No Mercy. Alex de Campi is a solid writer who is increasingly on my radar, and for me, CSM is one of those buy-on-sight artists, a person who doesn’t work a lot, but when she does it feels like an event. I’ve still got some of her original art framed up from her Queen & Country arc with Greg Rucka, and that’s after I sold off most of my original art collection, a testament to how special I consider her naturalistic figures and panel to panel storytelling.

Boom! Studios has Arcadia #2, as well as the debut of Broken World #1 by Frank J. Barbiere and Christopher Peterson, which is a premise I’m really looking forward to, about the last remaining survivors who DIDN’T evacuate Earth once the impending apocalypse was discovered. I feel like Boom! is making a larger entry into the world of creator owned comics lately, really trying to step up and take a swing at Image’s creator owned dominance, so it’s fun to see which talent and which projects they attract. Over at Oni Press, there’s The Bunker #11 by Joshua Hale Fialkov and Joe Infurnari, and IDW has both Winterworld: Frozen Fleet #2 and the great (if late) Transformers vs. G.I. Joe #7 by John Barber and Tom Scioli, a book I’m always excited for because of the way it manages to marry blatant 80’s nostalgia with the sly subversion of everything it purports to love, and then just destroys the pages with layered art and an almost unimaginable level of slavish detail to the original toys. 

I can hardly muster any level of interest for anything DC Entertainment these days, especially if it smacks of endless event miasma, and there’s a whole slew of new series (re-re-re)launching after the latest crossover debacle, but I’ll admit I’ll be peeking at Midnighter #1 (DC) because I just have a soft spot for the old WildStorm characters, as well as Omega Men #1 (DC) simply because back when I was reading the old Len Wein and Dave Gibbons run of Green Lantern as a kid, I remember the Omega Men showing up randomly and I thought that was cool, the first time I’d really seen any sort of crossover thing happen within a book I was pretty much reading in a vacuum, blissfully unaware of what a “shared universe” meant, and the (negative) ramifications that would grow to occupy in the modern landscape.

On the collected edition front, there’s The Bunker Volume 2 (Oni Press), Antony Johnston and Justin Greenwood’s The Fuse Volume 2 (Image), as well as The Complete Pistolwhip HC (Dark Horse), the latter collecting all of Matt Kindt’s retro-hip latent-mystery design-fetish indie material that put him on the map as a creator to watch all those years ago.