Ales Kot

The Pull List: Action Comics, Avengers, Calexit, Detective Comics, Jim Henson’s Labyrinth, The Terrifics, Thanos, & more!

March 4, 2018 by krisis

This week The Pull List is holding steady at a still-staggering 32 comic books.

I’m not sure if I was being a moody reader or if every company shipped some bunk books this week, but the average rating for the week was 2.70 – a full third of a point lower than the past few weeks. While that means most of the books were still better than average, it’s not by a whole lot.

Artwork from Thanos #16, line art by Geoff Shaw with color art by Antonio Fabela.

Here’s what I pulled this week, with *s on adds (whether I just caught up with them or started them fresh):

DC Comics
- Action Comics #998
- Detective Comics #975
- The Flash #41
- * Mera – Queen of Atlantis #1
- Milk Wars: JLA/Doom Patrol Special
- Raven: Daughter of Darkness #2
- * Suicide Squad #36
- Teen Titans #17
- The Silencer #2
- * The Terrifics #1
- Wonder Woman #41
Image Comics
- * The Beef #1
- Days of Hate #2
- Gasolina #6
- Twisted Romance #4
- Void Trip #4
Marvel Comics
- All-New Wolverine #31
- Avengers #682
- Captain Marvel #129
- * Champions #17
- Legion #2
- * Lockjaw #1
- Moon Knight #192
- Thanos #16
- X-Men Blue #22
Smaller Publishers: Aftershock, Black Mask, Boom! Studios, Dark Horse, Titan
- Abbott #2, Boom! Studios
- * Alisik #1, Titan Books / Statix Press
- Backways #3, Aftershock Comics
- * Calexit #2, Black Mask Studios
- Hungry Ghosts #2, Dark Horse / Berger Books
- * Jim Henson’s Labyrinth: Coronation #1, Boom! Studios
- * The Wilds #1, Black Mask Studios

Picks of the Pull

Big Two (Marvel/DC) Issue of the Week:
Detective Comics (2016) #975

A great-looking, contemplative issue that brings together the members of the Bat-Family we don’t usually see in this book – Nightwing, Batgirl, Red Hood, and Damian.

Batman has pulled these trusted lieutenants together as an inner council to decide Batwoman’s fate as a member of the Bat-family, yet in some ways their conversation is also a litigation of Bruce and his methods as the head of this dysfunctional household. Meanwhile, Batwoman holds herself accountable for her own actions, with a surprising result.

This isn’t an issue that’s going to appeal to a more casual reader – it looks amazing, but it has hardly any conflict. However, for someone who has been reading from the start this pierces right to the heart of this title and the ideological divide between Batwoman and Batman that has been brewing all along.

Part of what makes it so power is that Batwoman also has an avowed “no kills” philosophy, but she is willing to make exceptions when other lives hang in the balance. Batman won’t make exceptions, so he gets to watches thousands of Gothamites die from his moral high ground.

It’s heartbreaking to think of this book writing by someone other than Tynion or with a cast other than this one. Everything about it works so incredibly well. Yet, we’re in the “disassembled” phase, and there’s certainly more conflict to come before Tynion moves on.

Best Small-Pub Issue of the Week:
The Wilds (2018) #1, Black Mask Studios

A strong and sombre new zombie comic, The Wilds is definitely a descendent of Walking Dead but with a completely different tone – due in no small part to its pair of woman creators, Vita Ayala and Emily Pearson.

We get the same old zombie-pocked landscape with isolated camps trading resources and doing their best to survive, except the zombies are walking plant life – humans who have turned into semi-sentient flower pots. It makes for strangely calming, beautiful zombies to see all of their typical goriest bits covered in blooming flowers.

Pearson’s art evokes such masters of the modern form as Allred and Noto, employing their same plain, truthful faces and uncomplicated backgrounds.

Beneath the flowery dressing, this is the familiar story of a single senior errand runner who thinks it might be time to get out of the game, and how an act of compassion on her last journey might spell the end of the safety of her heavily fortified compound. There’s no slam bang action beats in this one, but the strange stillness of it is pulling me towards reading more.

The Pull List: Batman, Damage, Dark Fang, Ales Kot, & more!

January 20, 2018 by krisis

Welcome back the The Pull List, where I review every new comic I digitally picked up this week that wasn’t X-Men?

I’m still a few weeks away from being caught-up on non-X Marvel books, so my reads were restricted to some young DC titles, DC’s first “New Age of Heroes” launch, and Tom King’s Batman – which I mostly stay caught up upon for the hot takes.

This week’s Pull List includes:

Avengers (2017) #676
Batman (2016) #39
Damage (2018) #1
Dark Fang (2017) #3
Days of Hate (2018) #1
The Further Adventures of Nick Wilson (2018) #1
Ice Cream Man (2018) #1
James Bond: The Body (2018 #1.

20 Must-Read Marvel runs (that ought to be an omnibus) from 2012 to 2015

April 28, 2017 by krisis

Each year, a mysterious and intrepid comic book fan known only as Tigereyes reaches out to some of the biggest collected editions communities on the web to ask them a single question: What are the top 10 Marvel Omnibuses you’d most like to buy?

Thus, the Most-Wanted Marvel Omnibus Secret Ballot was born.

While we only get to see the top 50 or so results of the survey each year, based on the number of voters it’s entirely possible that there are over ten times that many omnibuses nominated by voters. The long tail of the survey would make not only for interesting analysis, but terrific rainy-day reading.

To help inspire that long tail as well as your own rainy day reads, I’m covering dozens of Marvel runs that would make for terrific omnibuses. For the past four days I highlighted every potential missing X-Men omnibus from 1963 to 2015. Now, I’m going to stroll backwards through time to look at the rest of Marvel, starting with their newest comic runs released from 2012 to present.

The fact that these books aren’t currently omnibuses (and may never be) doesn’t have to stop you from sampling them – even if you’ve never read a comic before in your life! Each one is a terrific self-contained comic experience that can be enjoyed without any crossovers or companion series.

You can either pick up existing collections as outlined by Crushing Comics’s Guide to Collecting Marvel Comic Books, or just sign up for Marvel Unlimited, a Netflix-for-comics where 100% of the issues from today’s post are available to read on any device.

Review: Wolf, Vol. 1 – Blood and magic, by Kot, Taylor, Loughridge, Cowles, & Muller

June 1, 2016 by krisis

I’m an increasing supporter of the idea of True Fans as Subscribed Patrons, a mass of individuals who band together to sponsor the work of an artist they trust rather than simply buying it after the fact.

That’s not only because of services like Kickstarter and Patreon taking root, but because it reflects how I actually consume art. Once I’ve decided your work speaks to me, I want it all. Don’t make me keep an eye on release calendars. Don’t let a middleman get a share of my dollar. Take my money whenever you’re feeling the artistic feels and I’ll gladly accept what you deliver as often as you’d like to deliver it.

The beauty (and, let it be said, gratification) of that concept has a single point of failure: editing. Artists who are free to deliver directly to their benefactors run the risk of no longer performing the “Will it float on its own?” evaluation of their artwork. That could lead to unbidden creativity, it could result in fan-pandering, or we could wind up with some half-baked dreck.

Which brings me to author Ales Kot. This is a guy whose brain I’d love to be permanently jacked into based on what I’ve read from him so far. Even if there have been a few duds along the way, the hits are very big hits with me. I’ve exchanged niceties with him on Twitter here and there and a huge part of me simply wants to say, “Look, would you like my $100-a-year up front, because I’m doubtlessly going to buy every damn thing you do.”

He’s doing the utter opposite of that – publishing his creator-owned work through Image, where there is little in the way of advances or guaranteed sales. Every issue he releases is in pure sink or swim mode; every new project must find its own fans until he has an army of auto-buyers like me.

Right now he’s swinging for the fences on every release. I get the impression he wouldn’t have it any other way.

Wolf, Vol. 1 – Blood and magic.

Collects Wolf #1-4. Written by Ales Kot with art by Matt Taylor, color art by Lee Loughridge, lettering by Clayton Cowles, and design by Tom Muller.

#140char review: Wolf, v1: pure comics magic. @ales_kot knows the perfect amount of things not to say on the page. I re-read it one second after finishing.

CK Says: Buy it!

Wolf is a powerful work of low fantasy, casting supernatural elements like vampires, ghostly winds, and a tentacle-faced man alongside the stars on Mulholland Drive and the streetwalkers on La Brea Boulevard in Los Angeles. Kot and his collaborators have conjured a bit of true magic with this ouroboros of a tale that forced me to pick it up for a re-read just seconds after I finished.

The book opens with a gut-punch image of a man on fire. Not a superhero or an immolator, but a burning man on a stroll rendered all in reds and oranges. This is Antoine Wolfe, an immortal weary of life who’d prefer not to be set on fire as much as he’d like to stay out of both spooky plots and police investigations – and, especially anything that synchronizes all of those things together.

This is not his story and we’re left in relative darkness about his history and the exact nature of his powers. All we know is that he’s the kind of death-proof, magical guy you hire to look into things that require looking into in a Los Angeles that borders directly on Hell. (Kot is vague on whether that’s figurative, literal, or both.) He’s also a magnet for supernatural trouble, whether that’s his half-Lovecraftian buddy who is late on rent or a strangely-calm teenager in the midst of a murder investigation with an X-Files sort of twist. [Read more…] about Review: Wolf, Vol. 1 – Blood and magic, by Kot, Taylor, Loughridge, Cowles, & Muller

Collecting Secret Warriors and Secret Avengers as graphic novels

The definitive, chronological, and up-to-date guide on collecting Secret Warriors and Secret Avengers comic books via omnibuses and trade paperback graphic novels. A part of Crushing Krisis’s Collecting Avengers Graphic Novels: A Definitive Guide. Last updated October 2018 with titles scheduled for release through April 2019.

Secret Warriors was a rarity when it launched in 2009 – a brand new team book not relying on an existing name and from a creator not only new to Marvel, but new to comics in general!

(You could perhaps argue that the concept was a mashup of the youthful New Warriors and the variable-cast Secret Defenders, that it was a play on Bendis’s Secret War event with Nick Fury, or even that it was an early Hickman hint of his impending Secret Wars(!) – but that’s an ultra-geeky conversion for another time!)

That creator behind the new title was Jonathan Hickman and the rest, as they say, is history.

Jonathan Hickman became one of the most famous writers in comics in the span of just half a decade. Secret Warriors was the first building block of his extensive examination of Marvel’s secret history both on Earth and across the universe, tied together by Nick Fury and culminating in Secret Wars in 2015.

While Secret Warriors was still running, Marvel spun off a new Avengers team at the top of The Heroic Age in fall 2010 called Secret Avengers. Though it had no direct connection to Secret Warriors, the theme was similar – as America’s top cop, Steve Rogers assembled a rotating strikeforce of covert Avengers to tackle the biggest mysteries and threats.

Secret Warriors ended its run as a self-contained series, but the Secret Avengers branding stuck – the title would see additional volumes that collapsed the concepts of the two books, with SHIELD running the secret team of Avengers. Both series bear a strong resemblance to the television show Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD – it has re-used many of Hickman’s concepts and characters from Secret Warriors. [Read more…] about Collecting Secret Warriors and Secret Avengers as graphic novels