Dark Horse Comics

Back Issue Review: Barbarella, Black Sable, Giants, Grass Kings, Shade The Changing Girl, and Slots

February 11, 2018 by krisis

This week in Back Issue Review I catch up with five indie series that have new issues out this week, plus one DC series that feels pretty indie. Between feminist explorers, giant monsters, recursive mean girls, backstabbing space pirates, and lucky retired boxers, I bet you’ll never guess what my favorites were!

This post contains reviews of the following six runs:

Barbarella (2017) #1-2
Black Sable (2017) #1-3
Giants (2018) #1-2
Grass Kings (2017) #1-6 (AKA Volume 1)
Shade, The Changing Girl (2016) #1-6
Slots (2017 #1-4

Keep reading for capsule reviews of all six runs. [Read more…] about Back Issue Review: Barbarella, Black Sable, Giants, Grass Kings, Shade The Changing Girl, and Slots

The Pull List: Justice League, Mech Cadet Yu, Batman, Giant Days, X-Men Red, & more!

February 9, 2018 by krisis

My pull list just keeps getting bigger and better! This week, The Pull List is twenty-six issues long with seven new number ones, four issues with Batman, and an average rating of 3.17.

What did I pull this week? Well, I’m still not caught up on my Superman, but I’ve got a pretty big cross-section of DC and Marvel on my list, plus a handful of smaller publisher titles!

Aftershock Comics
- Monstro Mechanica (2017) #3
Boom! Studios
- Giant Days (2015) #35
- Mech Cadet Yu (2017) #6
Dark Horse
- Incognegro – Renaissance (2018) #1
DC Comics
- Batman (2016) #40
- Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles (2018)#2
- Justice League (2016) #38
- Milk Wars: Mother Panic / Batman Special (2018)
- Swamp Thing Winter Special (2018) #1
- Young Monsters In Love (2018) #1
Image Comics
- Paper Girls (2015) #20
- Twisted Romance (2018) #1
- VS (2018) #1
- Witchblade (2017) #3
Marvel Comics
- Avengers (2017) #679
- Black Bolt (2017) #10
- Black Panther – Sound And Fury (2018) #1
- Hawkeye (2017) #15
- Iceman (2017) #10
- Infinity Countdown (2018) – Adam Warlock One-Shot
- Rise of the Black Panther (2018) #2
- Rogue & Gambit (2018) #2
- Runaways (2017) #6
- Spider-Man (2016) #237
- X-Men: Gold (2017) #21
- X-Men: Red (2018) #1

Marvel/DC Issue of the Week: Justice League (2016) #38, DC Comics

Justice League is finally back to being amongst DC’s most exciting books every month with Christopher Priest at the helm for the first time since Darkseid War in the latter part of New 52 in 2015.

Marco Santucci’s pencils on this are brilliant right out of the gate! Flash’s one-man reenactment of Sandra Bullock in Gravity is riveting and an absolutely amazing blend of real science and comics magic. It plays out over a League realizing just how reliant they’ve become on technology, both to back them up and to tell them what to do and where to be.

What makes the story unusual is that Batman is the physical representation of that weakness – not Cyborg. As a brilliant tactician who is just a regular man, Batman uses technology to enhance his detective skills and the breadth of his knowledge. Yet, that can easily be used as his own Kryptonite when there’s a situation he cannot strategize his way out of.

Just as Flash keeps emphasizing “I’m only a scientist, not an engineer” as he tries to arrest his free float through space, Cyborg is an engineer first and a tactician second. He’s not Batman. He “doesn’t want to be the boss.”

What happens when Cyborg has to take charge of the League in a way that’s greater than just Boom Tubing them from place to place? Can he fake being a leader with engineering in the same way Flash fakes being an engineer with science?

I don’t know, but I am transfixed by this Christopher Priest arc!

Small Publisher Issue of the Week: Mech Cadet Yu (2017) #6, Boom! Studios

With the way this book has been going, it’s going to be really hard for anything to excite me more in a week that it’s on the stands.

If you haven’t seen my breathless catch-up on this Greg Pak/Takeshi Miyazawa series in this week’s Back Issue Review, here’s the skinny: years ago a giant semi-organic robot crashed to Earth and bonded with a pilot, and ever since then four mechs descend into our atmosphere each year.

To find the four pilots that will bond, the US maintains a Hogwarts-esque Mech Academy to train the best and the brightest. We need them, because a race giant Kaiju monsters named Shargs are constantly creeping into our orbit and can only be repelled by the mechs.

We’re in the middle of the second arc of this book now after it was extended past a mini-series, presumably for just being unbelievably excellent (and also selling a few copies). I cannot tell you the last time I got this nervous about characters in a comic book being in peril.

This series continues to perfectly toe the line between Pacific Rim and Harry Potter, and I just want there to be 20x as much of it so I can keep reading more! [Read more…] about The Pull List: Justice League, Mech Cadet Yu, Batman, Giant Days, X-Men Red, & more!

The Pull List, Jan. 31, 2018: Dark Ark, Detective Comics, Moon Knight, Reactor, The Realm, and more!

February 2, 2018 by krisis

My pull list keeps growing in size as I get caught up with more current comic books! I read 21 new comics released earlier this week on January 31 – and I would have read even more if I managed to catch up on my Superman reading in time for these reviews!

Here’s The Pull List for the week, as broken out by publisher (though they’re reviewed in alpha order, below).

Aftershock Comics: Dark Ark (2017) #5
Amigo Comics: Call of the Suicide Forest (2018)
Dark Horse Comics: Hungry Ghosts (2018) #1
DC Comics: Dark Nights: Metal #5, Detective Comics (2016) Annual 1, Milk Wars (2018) JLA/Doom Patrol Special, Mystik U (2018) #2, The Silencer (2018)
IDW Publishing: Dread Gods (2017) #3
Image Comics: Bonehead (2018) #2, God Complex: Dogma (2017) #4, The Realm (2017) #5, Void Trip (2017) #3
Marvel Comics: Avengers (2017) #678, All-New Wolverine (2016) #30, Captain Marvel (2017) #128, Jean Grey (2017) #11, Moon Knight (2017) #191, Old Man Logan (2016) #34, Phoenix Resurrection: The Return of Jean Grey (2018) #5
Vault Comics: Maxwell’s Demons (2017) #2, Reactor (2017) #2, Songs For The Dead (2018) #1

As you will discover below, I am not shy about giving low ratings to comic books. A lot of sites shy away from covering comics they think are weak or bad, but I think that does the fans and industry a disservice. We can’t only talk about comics that are brilliant or at least better-than-average – that signals a death of critical discourse!

I’m just as interested in the weak books as the strong ones, because they help set the standard of what’s great in comics and the tough reviews might still help those books find fans.

Enough chatter – let’s take a look at my top Big Two and Indie books of the week before getting to the full list.

Top Marvel/DC Comic of The Week

Detective Comics (2016) Annual 1, DC Comics

A stunningly good tragic origin story for Clayface with the best artwork I’ve ever seen from Eddie Barrows, which is really saying something because I always love Eddie Barrows.

This is the kind of comic book single issue you can hand to a brand new fan who only vaguely knows the Batman mythos. Tom King has been knocking out terrific one-offs like that on Batman, but this James Tynion story is different in that it delves into the core of an existing character instead of inventing a new plot.

My understanding is that this departs a bit from the established Clayface original, which we’ve seen several times in the past – so, I appreciate if some regular Bat-readers aren’t into getting more of it. However, considering the events of the recently concluded story arc in Detective, this feels like the perfect time to reestablish Basil’s origin.

Top Indie Comic of the Week

The Realm (2017) #5, Image Comics

This comic is on fire!

The Realm has quickly become one of my favorite comics on the stands with its blend of post-apocalyptic terrain with fantastical monsters out of a Dungeons and Dragons campaign. This issue has a downright wild amount of siege action coming from every which direction, which puts the central quest on hold while our protagonists fight for their lives. (They aren’t all successful in that fight.)

There are major shades of Helms Deep here, with the goblins trying to breech the wall of a make-shift city. The action was frantic, but never hard to follow. It even revealed some new information about our characters in the midst of the chaos. There was some wonderful panelling to build tension to a fever pitch during the battering ram portion, but it also gave us several moments to reveal things about our cast…

…the ones that survive, anyhow.

And now, on to the other 19 comics I read that were released on January 31, 2018!

Crushing Comics S01E068 – Rick Remender’s Fear Agent + The Impermanence of Information

February 1, 2018 by krisis

I begin today by musing on the ephemeral nature of the vast amounts of information we publish daily in this digital age. How will the archeologists and historians access all of this data, and what will they think of it?

After those deep thoughts, I unwrap the pair of library editions of Rick Remender’s Fear Agent. My memory of the plot of this modern take on sci-fi pulp is a bit dim, but I share some of the history of the series as related in iFanBoy’s fantastic three-part oral history and attempt to explain why I don’t love this series.

Want to start from the beginning of this season of videos? Here’s the complete Season 1 playlist of Crushing Comics.

Episode 68 features Fear Agent Library Edition Volume 1 and Volume 2 from Dark Horse Comics. These editions are about to get very scarce, as Rick Remender has moved the publishing rights for this series back to Image Comics!

The Pull List: Avengers: No Surrender, Backways, Detective Comics, Maestros, Marvel 2-in-One, & more!

January 26, 2018 by krisis

The Pull List has grown a lot longer this week – 17 issues in all!

That’s due to catching up with another Marvel book (Thanos), several new indie #1s, and a few Image books I’ve read to the present in the past few weeks. Also, starting this week I’m running very short reviews of the X-Men books covered in This Week in X here, so that you can catch up on all the week’s new titles in one place!

Here’s what’s on my Pull List:

Abbott (2018) #1
Avengers (2017) #677
Backways (2017) #2
Detective Comics (1937/2016) #973
Dissonance (2018) #1
Doomsday Clock (2017) #3
Gasolina (2017) #5
Legion (2018) #1
Maestros (2017) #4
Marvel 2-in-One (2018) #2
Phoenix Resurrection (2018) #4
Raven: Daughter of Darkness (2018) #1
Thanos (2016) #15
Vinegar Teeth (2018) #1
Wonder Woman (2016) #39
X-Men: Blue (2017) #20
X-Men: Blue (2017) Annual 1

I hope these capsule reviews can help you decided what series you should add to your own pull list, or at least catch up with once they hit collected editions! And, remember, this feature is still new and evolving, so your comments and suggestions count a lot! [Read more…] about The Pull List: Avengers: No Surrender, Backways, Detective Comics, Maestros, Marvel 2-in-One, & more!