(I really meant to get this out before Free Comic Book Day, but oh well....)
A few months ago, I got a shout-out when one of my friends, Dups, interviewed another, Seamus, on a podcast. Essentially, I was credited with having excellent taste in comics, but that I was also a huge geek.
Which, fair.
I haven't done many comic book posts on the blog because I can see the numbers when I do,
and they tell me a story. Which is....no one cares.
Having said that, it's been a while since I posted some recommendations. First off, I'll be linking to Amazon, but I strongly encourage you to not buy from them. By all means, read a little bit more about the book there, and then promptly find your local comic book store and support them.
And for those wondering, here are my current favourite Top 5 of all time.
1. Planetary by Warren Ellis and John Cassady
2. DC: New Frontier by Darwyn Cooke
3. Giant Days by John Allison and Max Sarin
4. V For Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd
5. Transmetropolitan by Warren Ellis and Darick Robertson
As for some more recent recommendations:
Writer: Tom King
Artist/Colorist: Bilquis Evely/Matheus Lopes
Genre: Superhero
Accessibility: No links to ongoing stories. Would be helpful if you knew who Supergirl was, but that's it.
If you wondered why on Earth there was a Supergirl movie so soon after the CW TV show, this comic is it. Story aside, what Evely and Lopez have created here is simply one of the most beautiful-looking comics this century. Epic, intimate, detailed, lush, it is just achingly beautiful. It has to convey big cosmic scenes and intimate character moments, and pull it off with style. There are three versions of this book currently in print - a hardcover, a standard paperback and a compact paperback. The latter is cheap, but you will be depriving yourself of the art in its full glory, which would be a shame.
But what King has created here is something unique. Probably the most classic Supergirl story is the one where she died back in the 80s. She's been sweet and occasionally a bad girl when they wanted to juice the sales. But here, King writes Kara as a young woman struggling with the long shadow of her cousin and dealing with massive survivor's guilt over Kryptron. Kal-El might have videos of Krypton; Kara remembers what the rain sounded like on the leaves. She watched her planet, people, neighbours, friends and family die. She is struggling mightily to deal with that. And into her lap drops a young woman on a quest for revenge against the man who murdered her father.
And from that you get a big cosmic adventure against the backdrop of two young woman trying to help each other process their grief. It's not a perfect book, but it's a damn impressive one and absolutely worth picking up.
Writer: Tom King
Artist/Colorist: Bilquis Evely/Matheus Lopes
Genre: Fantasy
Accessibility: Standalone, although a familiarity with Conan, John Carter of Mars, and swords and sorcery would help.
Supergirl is hard to top, and yet....
In their follow-up book, King/Evely/Lopez tell a story that works on multiple levels. The first is a young woman processing her grief after her father, who wrote lurid stories about a barbarian, commits suicide. She handles her grief by drinking...a lot. However, a governess hired by her grandfather brings her back to the family estate. Which is when Helen discovers that maybe the stories her father wrote were more fact than fiction.
So we have a young woman and an old man trying to bond over their loss. Epic fantasy adventure, a little side plot on the nature of fandom, all while being told by a narrator who may not be the most reliable.
A lot of what I wrote about Supergirl applies here. The writing and art are top-level. Evely/Lopez have to jump around and cover a lot of different worlds and creatures, and they do it with ease. And King brings real grief to two of the main characters, all while diving into serious action-adventure scenes.
I haven't heard if they're working on something else together. I can only hope they are.
3. Friday
Writer: Ed Brubaker
Artist: Marcos Martin
Genre: Mystery
Accessibility: Standalone, but you'll appreciate it more if you were a Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew fan.
Friday Fitzhugh and Lancelot Jones, the smartest boy in the world, spent their teen years solving mysteries and occult secrets in Kings Hill. But then Friday screws it up and then goes away to university. When she comes back for Christmas, she wants to make things right with Lancelot, but promptly gets caught up in their biggest mystery yet.
The only person who adores this book more than me are Brubaker and Martin, who clearly had the time of their lives putting this together. Friday and Lancelot are such amazing characters that you feel like they've been around forever. You want to go back and read their earlier adventures. It's a huge disappointment that there aren't any. The mystery itself is grand, over-the-top and a little bit silly, but who cares? Just enjoy watching Friday trying to figure out what the hell her friend is up to.
And Martin's art is delightful. Fun, great storytelling, and so much detail goes into every panel. Drawing this was a labour of love, and it shows on every page.
Creators: Greg Rucka, Eric Trautmann and Mike Henderson
Genre: Insane Military Space Opera
Accessibility: Standalone
Greg Rucka has long been one of my favourite writers. And yes, I could recommend Old Guard, but it feels like it's unfinished. And there's the brilliant Lazarus, but between delays in publishing and the fact that it occasionally reads as a 'How-to' guide for tech bros to take over the world, perhaps not.
So, The Forged then, which is marvellous fun. Five vat-grown super soldier women wearing high-tech armour, the absolute best of the Empress Eternal's soldiers, get sent on a retrieval mission on a hostile planet where absolutely everything that could go wrong goes wrong, and then finds brand new spectacular ways to go wrong. Including first contact with an alien race that fucking hates them.
It's over-the-top spectacular science fiction action, with ridiculous space ship names ("Her Endless Radiant Triumph"), conspiracy theories, court intrigue, alluring Cassandras, and badass women with great banter:
"I've heard bad stuff about how those mindwitches can dildo up your brains but good."
"That so? Then you must've encountered a thousand of them given the sorry state of your brains."
"Roger that, you complete bitch, Sir."
The art by Mike Henderson is also insane. Rucka and Trautman ask him to draw madness and he does it with style. There's a joke in comic book circles about a writer bragging about how much better comics are than movies because "I can write a fleet of 1,000 space ships and it doesn't cost a fortune." That's when the artist tries to kill him because they have to draw it. I wonder if Henderson thinks that sometimes when drawing this series.
I love this book. There are three volumes out now, with the fourth coming out in September. It's going five, so you might have to be patient. But so far, it's a bizarrely under-the-radar book that is great fun.
Creators: Kelly Thompson, Hayden Sherman, Mattia De Iulis, Jordie Bellaire
Accessibility: Part of DC's new "Absolute" line of books. Some superhero knowledge is good, but this is a starter Wonder Woman book by design.
Diana is having a good comic book moment, and it's about time. It's tempting to recommend Tom King and Daniel Sampere's excellent run on Wonder Woman, but it is still mired in mainstream DC Universe storytelling, which means it can be confusing for new readers.
However, this is part of DC's "Absolute" (dreadful name) line of comics. The premise is, what if you took Diana, Bruce and Kal-El and stripped them of everything, would they still be who they are? So Kal-El arrives on Earth as a teenager with no Kents to raise him. Bruce is not rich, and his father, a teacher, died in a mass shooting. And Diana? She didn't grow up on Paradise Island with thousands of loving sister Amazons. She grew up in Hell, with Circe as her mother.
The Superman and Batman titles are fine. I find the Batman book, in particular, is good, but overrated. But this series is a knockout. A Diana who is as much a witch as a warrior. Who is kind, but completely terrifying if you're on the wrong side. Big mythological battles, a fantastic looking redesign of Diana and just overall top-level writing from Thompson, who is a favourite, and incredible art by Sherman.
The second volume, "As My Mothers Made Me" came out recently and a third volume will be out in the Fall. At some point, these books will all start to interconnect and become needlessly complicated. It happens. But for right, enjoy the best Wonder Woman comic to come around in a while.
Creators: Mike Mignola and Dave Stewart
Accessibility: Dead easy to walk into. An appreciation of Mignola's storytelling/art and folklore wouldn't go astray
I love Mike Mignola and started reading Hellboy when it first came out. But after decades, it's a daunting task to try to get into it. There are dozens of volumes at this point, not all of which are drawn by Mignola.
But one of the reasons I love the two books out so far in the "Tales from the Lands Unknown" series - Bowling with Corpses and Uri Tupka and the Gods is that they are essentially collections of short stories. My favourite works in Hellboy were always the short stories, including the haunting "Wolves of St. August" and the romping "The Corpse".
My favourite story in the bunch is "Bowling with Corpses", which is fun and appropriately weird. But the better of the two books is Uri Tupka, where the title character relays his adventures to old friends. He's on the run from the emperor, but with his encounters with thieves, pirates, monsters, and the gods, that's the least of his worries.
They're beautiful, wonderful books and easy to get into. A third volume Uri Tupka and the Devils will be out in November.
Creator: Evan Dorkin
Accessibility: Easy, but you need a tolerance for language and over-the-top violence, and you'll occasionally have to deal with some truly unpleasant humans.
This is a cheat, because I don't own it. But I do own the Complete Milk and Cheese, Complete Dork and Complete Eltingville Club books. All of which makes up this volume.
This book is a steal at the price. It's 648 pages of chaos, humour and rage. My friends often used to yell "Gin makes a man mean!" at each other in university. With the appropriate response being "Everybody booze up and Riot!"
We were big Milk and Cheese fans in university.
Milk and Cheese are literally a wedge of spite and a carton of hate going on rampages, committing over-the-top violence while yelling lots. There is a strip where they destroy New York while screaming "Merv Griffin!" over and over, and it is hilarious. Eltingville are four boys who are the absolute worst aspects of fandom. It's horrifying. And Dork is random strips and comics, including "The Murder Family", "Fun Comics", "The Devil's Puppet" and more.
It'll be a dense book, and not something you're going to blow through in one go. And some of it, well, is just deeply weird. But the stuff that hits is genius.
Honourable Mentions:
Owen the Barbarian has been cursed to do good by witches. His moral compass is a talking axe that only he can hear, and it won't shut the fuck up. Oh, and the axe has a drinking problem. The drink of choice. Blood. Lots and lots and lots of blood.
This is a ludicrous, hyper-violent, ridiculously stupid book and I laughed out loud numerous times. I'm not saying this is great literature, but if you love barbarians and stupid levels of violence and talking axes, you'll be hard-pressed to do better.
One day, for no apparent reason, everyone on Earth gets a genie who will grant them exactly one wish. Given the current state of the world, it's not hard to imagine how stupid and catastrophic things get in a hurry. There are regular updates on how many genies are left, along with how many humans. Let's say both numbers drop significantly as the series goes along.
It's not all horror. It's action, humour, weirdness and some mocking of humanity. But there's also sweetness there as well. It's a lot. But what else can you expect with so many genies?
Last Five
1. Fog of Writing - Barenaked Ladies
2. Asking for flowers - Kathleen Edwards*
3. Desdemona - The Beaches
4. Yes - Coldplay
5. Trash tongue talker - Jack White
