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Welcome back to our weekly look at what’s hitting the shelves,
as I spotlight my favorite picks! This is a relatively small week, but it does
contain some really choice material. Taking the lead is Manifest Destiny #11, which
blends speculative historical fiction and monster mayhem. It’s a brilliant high
concept: What if ol’ Tom Jefferson’s off-book spec ops mission for Captains
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark was to investigate supernatural forces inhabiting
the Louisiana Purchase (the real reason we got such a deal from the French!) as
The Corps of Discovery charts a path to the Pacific Ocean? It’s rich with
history, action, and imagination at the hands of writer Chris Dingess and
artist Matthew Roberts, with lush colors by Owen Gieni.
Image Comics has other great material out this week too,
everything from Rick Remender and Wes Craig’s Deadly Class #8 (another
entry in Remender’s expanding oeuvre examining the parent-child dynamic,
specifically lost kids in the vacuum of parentis absentia), to a duo from
Warren Ellis that includes Supreme: Blue Rose #4 with artist
Tula Lotay and Trees #6 with artist Jason Howard. These are both the kind of
sci-fi that Ellis excels at, the former is a psychological mind-bender that plays
fast and loose with non-linear time and the very nature of reality, while the
latter is a more classic “what if?” concerned with the way man deals with the
unknown, in the vein of an old Twilight Zone episode, but on a global
sociological level.
Oni Press will also have a really good week, with The
Life After #4 by Joshua Hale Fialkov and Gabo, a story that’s slightly
comedic, but has bouts of poignancy, but isn’t afraid of sudden bursts of
action amid the deeper mystery. It’s a real triple threat in that regard, and
also unique for the “sidekick” (Ernest Hemingway!) sort of upstaging the
ostensible protagonist of the series. I enjoy the book, and I think it’s still
flying under the radar of many consumers. Also from Oni Press, Antony Johnston
and Christopher Mitten are on the last leg of their grand post-apocalyptic opus
with Wasteland
#58, marking just two issues left until the series wraps. Johnston has
taken the book in a completely unexpected direction with this last arc, with
flashbacks to the present which predate The Big Wet and begin to explain the
events we’ve seen taking place 100 years in the future.
Now, I don’t care much about Wolverine, or Marvel Comics, or
a corporation’s intellectual property catalogue, and how they choose to manage
event comics purporting a pseudo “death.” At this point, all signs seem to be
pointing to the fact that it’ll be in name alone, ie: perhaps the character of “Wolverine” (as a masked
adventurer) ceases to be for a time, but I’m sure Logan, nee: James Howlett, will
live on. This gives Marvel the most storytelling mileage after all, they can
bench him, effectively taking him off the board like Han Solo in carbonite, do
all sorts of things on the periphery in the interim, and always tease him
taking up the mantle again. But. All of that said, Charles Soule is a writer I
respect, so I’m curious how he’ll snikt! the landing in Death of Wolverine #4 purely from
a craft standpoint. I was sworn to secrecy, but at a recent event, he was generous
enough to share with me what the final word of the final panel of the final
page will be, so I want to see how he gets from point A to point B.
Lastly, on the TPB front, I’ll recommend Star
Wars Volume 4: A Shattered Hope, the last entry in the Brian Wood run
from Dark Horse Comics. This volume collects some fascinating material,
including a two-part story that was very dark in tone about a black ops hit
squad Vader puts together, all from the perspective of a young Imperial Ensign,
who becomes disillusioned with her once bright-eyed military service. It also
houses the somewhat rare FCBD 2012 issue, a short story involving an early
team-up between Darth Vader and Boba Fett, explaining in part why this go-to
guy is the Dark Lord’s Bounty Hunter of choice. With Marvel now effectively at
the helm of forthcoming Star Wars
titles, these 4 trades will likely go out of print, so snap them up while you
can!