This melancholic song excerpt is what closes out the story Hellblazer: Dangerous Habits, collected in Hellblazer #41 - #46. Dangerous Habits is also the debut story written by now-comics legend Garth Ennis with art by William Simpson. In it, John Constantine is dying. Having just been diagnosed with terminal lung cancer thanks to his addiction to cigarettes, how will he spend his last moments in the land of living?
Read MoreBy Zack Quaintance — You know it’s a good month when only one of our Best New #1 Comics of April 2019 has anything to do with superheroes. Why? Because this indicates that there has been a surfeit of great ideas for new creator-owned books, so many in fact that publishers like IDW landed multiple books in our quick hits section…
Read MoreBy Zack Quaintance — I’m not shy about saying this: Wasted Space is one of my favorite creator-owned comics. It’s a space opera in the most grandiose sense, one that features a band of plucky rogues fighting to save the galaxy while dealing with their own issues, agendas, pasts. It’s a book that through eight issues now has built a tone and voice that are so versatile, the story can now do everything from high sci-fi action to deep philosophical monologues over a pint (or several) of space brew. This is all evident….
Read MoreBy Zack Quaintance — Throughout the first three issues of this series, the real carnage has been a bit understated, with death and monsters often regulated to shadows. Last issue we saw that start to break. This issue, it’s totally gone. The opening sequence is a bloody one, in which we see the supernatural creatures at the heart of this story in the light of day. It’s fantastic….
Read MoreBy Zack Quaintance — First things first, Excellence #1—the new comic from Brandon Thomas (Horizon, Catalyst Prime: Nobel) Khary Randolph (Mosaic), Emilio Lopez, and Deron Bennett—has an incredibly powerful opening scene. And it’s not the usual comicbook thing of fiddling with time to put an explosion, violence, or death up front. No, in Excellence #1 the opening scene finds its power in the universal while at the same time setting the tone for the themes that will….
Read MoreBy Zack Quaintance — Welp, it finally happened. After four full months and a few very close calls, we have our first perfect 10 comic of 2019. It is (as one has likely already surmised by this headline) Eve Stranger #1, an absolutely perfect debut comic. There’s a powerful one-two punch on the surface of this comic that really makes it go go go from the first page…
Read MoreBy 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…
Read MoreBy 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…
Read MoreBy 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…
Read MoreBy 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.
Read MoreBy 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…
Read MoreBy @Kimota1977 — Welcome 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….
Read MoreBy 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…
Read MoreBy 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…
Read MoreBy 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….
Read MoreBy 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…
Read MoreBy 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…
Read MoreBy 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…
Read MoreBy 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…
Read MoreBy @Kimota1977 — Welcome 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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