Just a few short months after their previous project together came to a close, Matt Kindt and Tyler Jenkins return with a new story. At first glance, Black Badge #1 (Boom! Studios) has more in common with Lumberjanes than Grass Kings, opening with a handful of boys traveling together as part of a scouting group.…
Few comic-book artists understand the power of darkness like Nate Powell. Darkness hides potential horrors, but it can also create intimacy, bringing people together by keeping the rest of the world out of sight. Powell fluctuates between these two facets of darkness in his new graphic novel, Come Again (Top Shelf),…
There’s no shortage of comics addressing the state of the world, either confronting the political climate directly or with a bit more subtlety. The New World #1 (Image) is only one such vision, set in a middle future just a couple decades out that echoes the present. After nuclear blasts wiped out significant parts of…
Gareth Evans’ The Raid films are two shining stars of modern action cinema, following a special forces cop in Jakarta, Rama, as he beats down wave after wave of attackers in increasingly elaborate action sequences. The movies don’t spend too much time delving into the complexities of the lead character, instead…
In the pages of Euthanauts, death is something to be celebrated rather than mourned. This new series from IDW’s Black Crown imprint has writer Tini Howard, artist Nick Robles, and letterer Aditya Bidikar venturing into the vast frontier of death, a territory ripe for exploration by those brave enough to leave their…
Some of the most popular podcasts today are about murder or tabletop roleplaying games. While it’s not the only show of its type, The Adventure Zone has grown a large and enthusiastic audience, large enough to (hopefully) support a published graphic novel. The Adventure Zone: Here There Be Gerblins (First Second) is…
It should be no surprise to even casual fans that Batman’s impending wedding is the focus of a lot of what’s happening in his corner of the DC universe. Along with Brian Michael Bendis’ new work at the publisher, the Bat-Cat wedding has been one of the most hyped events in a long time. Romance has long been missing…
With Ant-Man And The Wasp hitting theaters this summer, it was inevitable that Marvel would bring these two characters together in the comics, but Scott “Ant-Man” Lang and Nadia “The Wasp” Pym have a very different relationship than their big-screen counterparts. In fact, they don’t really have a relationship at all.…
With the successful relaunch and expansion of the Archie universe, it’s no surprise that publishers continue to revisit other aging classics. They have name recognition across multiple demographics, and many of them are overdue for a revamp. Nancy Drew #1 (Dynamite) is the perfect example of how to initiate a…
Mark Millar is a major force in Hollywood, making bank on film adaptations of his creator-owned comics Wanted, Kick-Ass, and The Secret Service (which became Kingsman on screen) and playing a significant role in superhero movies by writing the comic-book source material that inspired Marvel’s Avengers franchise and…
Comic books from the 1960s and ’70s, even the good ones, often ask contemporary readers to bring to them some degree of moral relativism, and Baron Yoshimoto’s The Troublemakers (Retrofit/Big Planet) is no different. Collecting a number of short stories that the author produced in the late ’60s and early ’70s, the…
Simon Spurrier is not the kind of comics creator who shies away from ambitious ideas. The recently wrapped Angelic sported pastel flying monkeys in an apocalyptic post-humans world, and Cry Havoc mixed monsters and myths informed by modern technology placed over the backdrop of Western colonialist warfare. So it’s…
Anyone who has been on a comic convention floor in the past 20 years knows there are a lot of superhero fans who wish they could be Deadpool. Marvel gives them the opportunity to step into Wade Wilson’s shoes in You Are Deadpool, an interactive weekly miniseries that combines a choose-your-own-adventure story with a…
A Walk Through Hell isn’t a hard sell for the right kind of reader. The largest hurdle it may need to clear is that a lot of readers still haven’t heard of Aftershock Comics, a relatively new publisher founded just three years ago but that’s already recruited talents like Warren Ellis, Marguerite Bennett, Amanda…
Gentrification is a machine made of many moving parts. There are the developers that come to low-income neighborhoods and force out the established residents by building new properties they can no longer afford; the politicians who paint members of a community as undesirable and dehumanize them so the rest of the…
The great joy of reading Soft X-Ray/Mindhunters (Koyama Press) is in not really knowing what’s going on. Characters appear, and you can follow them easily, but what exactly they’re doing and what its significance is cannot easily be discerned. This is in large part due to how the author, A. Degen, structures his book.…
Sean Murphy’s alternate take on the Batman mythos draws to a close this week with Batman: White Knight #8 (DC Comics). It’s hard to imagine how the story could have fit into the previous seven issues, because this final one delivers a significant amount of narrative. White Knight has been selling well enough for DC,…
The Italian cartoonist Gipi is still an unfamiliar name for most American readers. His work first became available in English when First Second imported his Notes For A War Story in 2007, and the couple of works that followed announced Gipi as one of the next great Italian cartoonists in a decade beset with European…
The name of Studio Ghibli co-founder, Hayao Miyazaki, is constantly brought up by comic creators when they need a shorthand for describing a specific blend of spectacle and emotion in their work, but the comparison is appropriate in the case of the new Image Comics series, Isola. Co-written by Brenden Fletcher and…
In Blackbird Days (Fantagraphics Books) the Italian master Manuele Fior plays with form and style in a series of experimental shorts, some of which appear like brief notes on a scene, while others are more elaborated and developed narratives. It’s difficult to pick a favorite, but the collection’s final story, “Gare…
