By Zack Quaintance — Welcome back to the weekly feature that I ripped off (concept-wise from the nation’s best national basketball reporter, Zach Lowe). This week there were four total comics things I liked and didn’t like, including a new book that has been on fire through two issues, a book about creating fire, and more.

Enjoy!

1. The high volume of Chris Samnee art headed our way soon

This week, Image Comics announced that the new comic Fire Power from Robert Kirkman and Chris Samnee would release its first two issues simultaneously on June 3. That came on the heels of another relatively recent announcement that in April Samnee was illustrating a prelude OGN with roughly eight issues of Fire Power content. There’s also a Fire Power special due on FCBD. That’s a whole lot of Samnee, and we haven’t seen Samnee (one of the greats) doing full interiors for a comic steadily since a very brief run on Captain America with Mark Waid that concluded all the way back in April 2018. This is like a downpour after a long drought, and I like it a lot.

2. IDW Publishing’s new comic Kill Lock

I also really like this new book IDW Publishing is putting out, Kill Lock. The second issue came out this past week, and writer/artist Livio Ramondelli (who has mostly worked on Transformers comics for IDW) is really putting on a clinic about how to best write interesting group dynamics. What’s even more impressive, is that he’s doing this distinct character work while writing robots, which I don’t need to tell you are a bit shorter on humanity than actual humans. There’s four more issues coming out of this book, which marks the second mini-series from IDW I’ve been very impressed by in as many years (the first being Canto).

3. Al Ewing as Marvel’s newest superstar writer

I got a pretty stark reminder this week of how far writer Al Ewing has risen in the ranks at Marvel in the past four years. I was reading his new Guardians of the Galaxy #1 (a collaboration with artist Juann Cabal) comic (which I reviewed and liked a lot), and I was struck by how it felt like such a natural mix of two of his runs from 2015 — The Ultimates and New Avengers, blending the high-concept sci-fi form the former with the bonkers superhero hijinks from the latter. I liked both of those comics quite a bit, but I felt like the ideas in them didn’t get the editorial support they needed to really thrive. They just kind of went for 12 unheralded issues or a few more and then withered. Well, that’s changed now. Thanks to the surprise success story that is Immortal Hulk, Ewing is getting the prominence at the publisher to really do his work, and I like it.

This cover is basically a thematic opposite of Flash comics in the 1990s. — This cover is basically a thematic opposite of **Flash** comics in the 1990s.

4. The 1990s Flash #750 cover

Oh god, DC Comics really does hate ‘90s Flash fans, don’t they? This week, they unveiled the decade-specific variant covers for their forthcoming Flash #750, a giant-sized 80th birthday celebration of the character. All of the covers ranged from great (the Nick Derington piece) to a nice evocation of the decade they represent (the 1980s cover by Gabriele Dell’Otto, which depicts Crisis on Infinite Earths). But the 1990s cover by Francesco Mattina is directly at odds with the decade it represents. During the 1990s, The Flash was essentially a Flash Family comic, a light-hearted romp through generations of Flash characters, including Wally West, Bart Allen, Jay Garrick and more. Instead of getting a cover that acknowledges that, we get a photo-realistic Flash scowling like a villain. Here’s the thing: I think this is a villain. Look a little closer on this cover, and you can see the Flash emblem on his chest is backward, as if they just re-colored a cover starring the Reverse Flash. Terrible. Why not just put out a cover with a giant middle finger that says, FUCK OFF 90s FLASH FANS!. I did not like that.

Read this week’s comic book reviews here!

Zack Quaintance is a tech reporter by day and freelance writer by night/weekend. He Tweets compulsively about storytelling and comics as Comics Bookcase.