Top Comics to Buy for May 8, 2019: Black Hammer Age of Doom #10, Vault Comics, and more!

By Zack Quaintance — This is a nice week for new comics, one in which the releases are mercifully a bit smaller in volume. This can perhaps be attributed to Free Comic Book Day taking place on Saturday. Publishers wisely got as much of their product as they could on shelves last week, so the hordes of FCBD attendees could scope it out and (hopefully) buy it.

Nevertheless! There are plenty of great choices for our Top Comics to Buy for May 8, 2019. This week’s group is headlined by…

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Comic of the Week: Self/Made #6 is a layered and complex finale

By d. emerson eddy — Since the first issue, Self/Made has been about change. Unexpected change and strange revelations, but change nonetheless, going from one state of being to the next. A large part of that has been rooted in playing with genre conventions and upending the status quo from issue to issue, so I don't want to go into detail about the plot so much, but I will say that the structure of revealing layers upon layers as the story progresses, like an onion, is one of the freshest narrative methods I've seen in some time. It's not so much an “everything you know is wrong” type of shock, but a continuous evolution of perspective. There is always…

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TRADE RATING: Brian Michael Bendis' Fortune and Glory is a masterfully-paced true Hollywood story

By Hussein Wasiti — This is the second of Brian Michael Bendis’ early creator-owned work that I’ve read, the first being his true-crime epic Torso. Like Torso, this book also happens to be a  true story. Fortune and Glory details Bendis’ personal experience trying to adapt his comic Goldfish for the big screen. In it, he depicts Hollywood as this strange other land, one which constantly surprises while also living up to every stereotype we’ve all heard about it. Bendis also provides the artwork for the comic, a dramatic deviation from Torso while also feels…

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Age of X-Man Round-Up: Waiting for the Other Shoe To Drop

By Allison Senecal — Rude of Marvel to announce the Hickman Era of X-Men before Age of X-Man even hits its climax. But I still believe most of these creative teams have something interesting to say with their series, so I’m hanging in there, but it has taken the wind out of X-Man’s sails a bit. We’re officially over the hump though, and May should be real exciting.

I haven’t addressed this before, but at this point I can reasonably say that all of these series should read fine on their own in trade once this is over. If a bigger event isn’t your thing, maybe a little AU side-trip to a slice of Nate Grey Heaven will be.

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The Saga Re-Read: Saga #39 drops an interesting clue about the book’s future

By Zack Quaintance — We’re roughly at the midway point of the War for Phang storyline, and, as is in keeping with the rest of Saga, we really haven’t seen all that much warring. Instead, our central characters have remained at the margins of any actual fighting. The war is still a threat to them, but none of our main cast are all that invested in how it’s going or who wins. They just want to be rid of it, which I think is…

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Doom Patrol Comics Guide, Part 3

By @Kimota1977Welcome back for the third and final installment of the Doom Patrol Comics Guide. With the remainder of the series, I am not going to make recommendations on runs to read. The more recent Doom Patrol series have lasted two years or less, and should really just be read in their entirety.

That said, – let’s see what they did to our favorite group of strange heroes after they said their last goodbyes….

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REVIEW: War of the Realms #3 remains strong at its halfway point

By Zack Quaintance — With this issue, Marvel’s massive War of the Realms event hits its halfway point, which is as good a time as any to discuss how it’s been so far. I’d like to focus primarily here on the main series of this event. The tie-ins are another thing, and we don’t have space for them here, so let’s instead take this comic as the third in a six-part series, independent from the auxiliary titles. In that context, it’s been very good, especially for any readers (like myself) who have followed Jason Aaron’s long Thor run…

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REVIEW: Gogor #1 practically shines with its bright designs and clean linework

By Zack Quaintance — Gogor #1 is my first exposure to comics auteur Ken Garing, known primarily for his book, Planetoid,  a 2012 series about a space pirate stranded on a titular planetoid. That series to date has been comprised of an initial five-issue miniseries, as well as a follow up entitled Planetoid: Praxis that ran for another six. I Googled all of that, which is to say, yet again, this is my…

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REVIEW: Descendent #1 is driven by deep mysteries and authentic characters

By Zack Quaintance — From the moment I paused to take in Descendent #1’s trippy, psychedelic, and slightly sinister cover by Juan Doe, I knew I was in for something different. The imagery on the cover here really sets an interesting tone. It’s powerful, perplexing, and maybe even a little dangerous. It’s all abstract, yet it manages to evoke a shadowy danger coursing throughout history, which the preview text for this book mentions heavily. It’s a really impressive cover, bolstering the narrative before it….

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Top Comics to Buy for May 1, 2019: The Green Lantern #7, Paper Girls #28, and more

By Zack Quaintance — This was a big weekend for pop culture, with Avengers: Endgame and Game of Thrones: The Battle of Winterfell marking a massive concentrated culmination of the zeitgeist's ongoing concerns for the past decade. This is all a fancy way to note that this Monday morning I am very tired. Yet, here we are as always just two days away from new comics. Commerce must go on, even more so than Thanos or…

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Comic of the Week: Ghost Tree #1 is a well-done opening chapter for a horror story

By d. emerson eddy — I'm a sucker for fairy tales, folklore, and mythology. It doesn't really matter to me where it's from, I'm always interested in what different cultures and peoples came up with for their morality tales, for their explanations of natural events, and everything that formed their core beliefs. There's often a lot of overlap and similarities between the stories, but also some very unique differences that give a perspective to how a culture, or parts of a culture, thinks about certain concepts. Like household gods or ancestors being tied to a family's home serving them as a kind of supernatural protector. And I enjoy seeing differing cultures interpret those folktales from other lands, though I can certainly understand people being put off by…

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The Saga Re-Read: We say goodbye to a beloved character in Saga #38

By Zack Quaintance — The War for Phang story arc has been billed as a self-contained event for Saga, and so as you’ll see in a moment, that means teasing the death of a character. Indeed, in modern comics no event is complete without loss, and even indie-minded Saga capitulates to…

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Thanos and Captain America in Infinity Gauntlet: How one moment celebrates two iconic characters

By Jarred A. Luján — Thanos has a special place in my weird, comicbook nerd heart. When I was 13, a friend lent me an Infinity Gauntlet trade...and it blew me away. That comic was the first one I remember that showed superheroes losing—definitively. While that doesn’t exactly keep by the end of the book, watching so many iconic heroes fall to this ambitious, lovestruck purple alien was really a shock to me, and I was…

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Doom Patrol Comics Guide, Part 2

By @Kimota1977Welcome back to our Doom Patrol Comics Guide. You can click here to read the Doom Patrol Comics Guide Part 1, or you can forge ahead with us now, inching closer to the present day. Anyway, the modern era of the Doom Patrol began in 1987 with a revitalized series from the same creator of the Bronze Era team - Paul Kupperberg…

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REVIEW: Fearscape #5 is a finale that elevates all that came before

By Zack Quaintance — Fearscape #1 absolutely blew me away when it hit last fall. Armed with a singularly pompous meta-narrative voice, the book was a graphic sequential deconstruction of literary culture. It’s main character was a struggling and dysfunctional writer, who was big on ambitions and seemingly short on work ethic and talent. The plot of the series’ debut seemed to put him a trajectory to collide with….

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REVIEW: Queen of Bad Dreams #1 is another great book from Vault Comics

By Zack Quaintance — The concept behind Vault Comics’ newest book, Queen of Bad Dreams, grabbed me right away. In the world of this story, dream entities known as figments can emerge from dreamer’s minds, and, when they do, there are inspector judges tasked with catching them and deciding to put them back or let them remain in our world. It’s an interesting concept, obviously. What really appealed to me though was how singular it sounded, an especially impressive thing given that…

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INTERVIEW: Danny Lore, writer of Vault Comics’ Queen of Bad Dreams

By Zack Quaintance — Vault Comics’ newest series, Queen of Bad Dreams, launches this week. Like the publisher’s other offerings, this one features a thoughtful and complex concept executed with honed storytelling chops and a fearless eye for narrative innovation. In other words, it’s very…

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Why Matt Kindt’s XO Manowar is Valiant’s Best Run Ever

By Toren Chenault — When I started reading Valiant Comics, my first title was XO Manowar by Robert Venditti and Cary Nord, launched in 2013. It follows a Visigoth prince named Aric of Dacia, who is as headstrong and stubborn as a hero can get. But he’s also got a lot of heart. When his people are captured by an alien race, Aric steals a sentient alien suit on their ship, becoming a superhero. Yes, this comic is exactly as cool and crazy as it sounds. Since that issue…

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Top Comics to Buy for April 24, 2019: The Replacer, Criminal #4, and more

By Zack Quaintance — One of the things I’ve pushed against since creating this site is recency bias. All of us—fans and critics—have a shared tendency to praise and promote new #1 comics above mid-run installments or even finales. While there is a certain and acute level of brilliance required to create a strong debut, I think we as an industry tend to lose site of just how impressive and also difficult it is to sustain an interesting graphic sequential story for five, 10, or—as is the case with one of our...     

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Comic of the Week: B.P.R.D. Devil You Know #15 is the end of an epic

By d. emerson eddy — Hellboy celebrated its 25th anniversary just last month. Honouring the plucky little creation of Mike Mignola that began in 1994 featuring a red demon with a funny hand, a pyrokinetic, and a fish guy in a bad disguise searching out frog monsters and a Russian madman. That initial series, Hellboy: Seed of Destruction, planted a figurative seed in the imagination of the world and it would bloom into a multimedia juggernaut. Bearing fruit in the form of Sir Edward Grey: Witchfinder, Lobster Johnson, Abe Sapien, and others, as well as…

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