All throughout April, we’re crowdsourcing a coronavirus comics reading list. Each weekday for a month, we’ll post a new recommendation from someone in the comics industry to help folks get through the quarantine. It’ll be a crowdsourced list of recommended reading from writers, artists, letterers, editors, comics journalists, publicists, and more…all paired with a local shop that’s currently selling the books via mail order.
Read MoreI've beaten this drum until it's broken, but I'll keep recommending Coda by Si Spurrier and Matias Beraga until everyone reads it. Visually, it's one of the most gorgeous comics ever produced (yes, ever). But within the pages you find a story filled with heart. To me it's about living with someone with mental illness, about supporting someone without trying to 'fix' them. Hell, I'm going to reread it myself!
Read MoreAs a writer sometimes it's difficult to not dissect a successful story and just enjoy it for what it is. That series for me at the moment is Killadelphia by Rodney Barnes and Jason Shawn Alexander.
Read MoreThe first memory of Superman is my older brother explaining why Superman is boring because nothing can hurt him. It was the prevailing opinion of the time. Cool kids liked stories about the people who can be physically hurt, and hurt others. The late great Darwyn Cooke had this issue in mind when asked to write the debut arc for a new monthly series, Superman: Confidential. The theme of the series being a exploration of firsts in the career for the Man of Steel. First visit to Metropolis, first use of Jimmy’s signal watch, and in this case first exposure to Kryptonite.
Read MoreDoctor Strange, Namor, The Hulk, and the Silver Surfer together with the jokes and feel of Justice League International. It was a blast, and there’s sure to be at least one laugh out loud moment in there if you have a funny bone in your body.
Read MoreIt was decades ago, so I don’t quite remember how a copy of TMNT #1 found its way into my hands. I was at Bard College in 1984. Did I get it an Iron Vic’s in Poughkeepsie? Pick it up on a trip to Manhattan, at Forbidden Planet? However I found it…
Read MoreI’m not a big horror fan. I’ll just put that out there. I understand the thrill of a scare, and I don’t begrudge anyone for their love of the genre, but when I wanted to expand my comics repertoire a few years ago, I reached out to the incomparable Nancy Collins for some Vampirella recommendations.
Read MoreI'm going to recommend a book that's not exactly an unknown indie, but it has a special place in my heart. I also happened to just re-read it during my own quarantine time...it's Batman: Hush! Maybe it's not as well known as it once was — we're coming up on almost twenty years since the release of the first issue! To set the scene for how long ago that was, I was at the time getting the monthly Batman title from DC by SUBSCRIPTION. In the MAIL. Which is how we're all getting comics now, right?
Read MoreMuch like this current moment, DOOM PATROL OMNIBUS by Grant Morrison & Richard Case starts in the darkest of places. Cliff Steele, a brain trapped in a robot body, has checked himself into a psychiatric hospital after too many losses and tragedies in his superheroic life.
Read MoreThrough most of the ‘90s, I hated comics. The decade started out well enough…I joined the army in 1992, and during basic training, any time the drill instructors would march us down to the PX (the Post Exchange, where we could spend our money on pizza, haircuts, toiletries and in my case, comics) I was picking up the Ghost Rider run. This was the Danny Ketch era…the art was good, the writing was good, I was happy enough.
Read MoreWhen I first saw this at APE in San Francisco, I didn’t need any encouragement to pick it up as I’d already read and loved Craig’s Top Shelf book BLANKETS. Even then, when I sat down to read HABIBI one bright sunny Sunday morning in Los Angeles, I was not ready for the captivating, heart breaking and magnificent work of art that Craig created here. I had planned to read just a few pages of this outstanding graphic novel but as Sunday lunchtime came around I was not about to put HABIBI down and didn’t do so until I was finished with the whole book.
Read MoreSweet Tooth is an incredible post-apocalyptic story with heart and charm, featuring 40 issues of beautiful comics with one of the best endings ever. It's special to me for many reasons, but primarily because it helped bring me back to comics. I was pretty much out of comics from 1993-ish until 2010. I had started going to SDCC around 2004 or 2005, though. Not for comics originally, but because I live in San Diego and always wanted to go. Initially I just checked out big Hollywood stuff and toys. In 2009, I decided to start bringing a sketchbook. I had seen others doing it, and it seemed cool. That first con I met a then much-less-known Jeff Lemire at the DC booth. He had a signing related to The Nobody.
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