These times call for a lot of things, from helping your kids get through school from your living room to donating time and money to those in need. It can be a lot to handle and it’s not always easy. What is easy is using a tired cliche, but sometimes: laughter really is the best medicine. This is where my recommendation comes in. Shirtless Bear Fighter.
Read MoreMy recommendation for quarantine reading is Excalibur: The Sword is Drawn Epic Collection by Chris Claremont and Alan Davis. Initially released at a time when the X-Men were at their peak grim and gritty, this series was a breath of fresh air. It was adventurous, fun and optimistic in stark contrast. This was the most absolutely unexpected book at the time it was released, and I was immediately hooked. For me, it's the one run of that time I can go back and reread and never get tired of.
Read MoreIf there's any emotion we can all relate to right now it’s feeling disillusioned and jaded with the people whom we’re meant to view as heroes, and ZENITH: PHASE 01 (and the subsequent three "phases" that follow that follow it) by Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell are here to cradle those feelings in a warm blanket made of Generation X powered apathy. Zenith manages to act as the perfect follow-up to a post-Alan Moore era of comics where heroes are not all they’re chalked up to be and evolves from being a parody of celebrity culture to a full-on parody of American superhero culture. I
Read MoreIf you want something with a little bit of everything, go check out Swords of the Swashbucklers. If you like space operas, if you like pirates, if you like the Starjammers — you'll love this book. Written by Bill Mantlo (the creator of freakin' Rocket Racoon!) with art by Jackson Guice, Geof Isherwood and Colleen Doran, it's a dense story that'll draw you in and keep you entertained for hours. And when you’re done, you’ll have all that wonderful art to pour over again and again. Also, if you love lettering like me, you'll find some truly gorgeous lettering from greats Ken Bruzenak and Gaspar!
Read MoreFans of The Expanse and Altered Carbon looking for a sci-fi fix will be satiated by this highly character driven story. While people look for comfort in this time, it’s also important to reflect on the uncomfortable. This graphic novel is not for the faint of heart; it touches on mental illness, PTSD, and the most human struggles of wanting to matter and personal failures. At its very core, it’s about life, death, and rebirth. If you can make it through the heavier themes, the ending is worth it.
Read MoreWhen people talk about the big boundary-pushing genre comics work of the 1980s, they always mention Watchmen and Dark Knight Returns, but American Flagg – which began publication three years before those works – has had even further reaching impact on the medium and beyond, seeing as techniques that writer/artist Howard Chaykin pioneered (the use of television screens as panels, for instance) were later famously used in those other epochal comics.
Read MoreCartoonist Beth Barnett recommends Golden Kamuy, a tale of high adventure and survival on the Japanese frontier! Created by Satoru Noda More about Golden Kamuy. In the early twentieth century, Russo-Japanese War veteran Saichi Sugimoto searches the wilderness of the Japanese frontier of Hokkaido for a hoard of hidden gold.
Read MoreI’m an artist. The stuff I love has more to do with the art and storytelling than the script (fun fact: artists are writers too, we just use pictures, haha). Storytelling is the most important thing to me – I need to be able to read the book just by looking at the pictures. Everything else after that is just bonus.
Read MoreMy all-time comfort read has to be Amazing Spider-Man by JMS Omnibus Vol. 1 by J. Michael Straczynski and John Romita, Jr. There's so much heart and emotion and action on display in this book, whether it's the Web-Slinger leaving it all on the field in his battle royale against the unstoppable Morlun, or how a New York icon like Spider-Man faced the real-life tragedies of 9/11, or the decades-in-the-making conversation between Peter and May Parker over his secret identity.
Read MoreONE comic for a quarantine of this magnitude? I say thee NAY! A single title be not enough for this Ragnarok which doth engulf us…and so lo, I must pick TWO! Both of my choices are inspired—in very different ways—by the original Marvel titles created and pioneered by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and refined by Roy Thomas and his many collaborators, in the early to mid 1960s.
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