REVIEW: BANG! #1 is bold, exciting, and weird in a perfect way

in

By Toren Chenault — I remember an interview with comic writer and artist Matt Kindt on YouTube. I think it was an interview he did right before the release of a new Valiant book. Kindt was talking about how everything in his career would be judged against his breakout hit, MIND MGMT. He said anything else he put out would be compared to a comic a lot of people consider a masterpiece. Kindt even admitted he wasn’t sure he could harness the same level of creative energy for a story like MIND MGMT ever again. Not only has Kindt channeled that creative energy since, however, he’s done it repeatedly with sensational stories like Dept H, Black Badge, Grass Kings, and Ether. Bang! #1 from Darkhorse Comics is another example of a writer clearly in the midst of an extended creative prime.

Read More

REVIEW: Undiscovered Country #4 alternates between world and character building

in

By Zack Quaintance — Four issues in, Undiscovered Country feels like it’s still just scratching the surface of what the book can be, both in terms of the world the creators have constructed as well as the characters they’ve put within it. This is all meant as a tremendous compliment.

Read More

REVIEW: Space thriller Canopus #1 is ‘really brilliant work’

in

By Jarred A. Luján — Dr. Helen Sterling wakes up on a lifeless planet orbiting the star Canopus, which is 300 light years away from Earth. She has a ship that is missing parts, a childlike robot, and no memory of how or why she is there. This is the starting point for the excellent new sci-fi thriller Canopus #1, which is written and illustrated by Dave Chisholm and published by Scout Comics.

Read More

ADVANCED REVIEW: Best of 2000 AD #1, a perfect entrance to a world of excellent comics

in

By Zack Quaintance — The first page of Best of 2000 AD #1 tells you exactly what this book is — “Best of 2000 AD #1 is for new and curious readers; science-fiction fans who love their comics dangerous and thrilling but have never read 2000 AD. A perfect mix-tape, if you will.” This is exactly what I’ve been looking for for I don’t know how long now.

Read More

TRADE RATING: Nib #5 Animals, a thoughtful exploration of our relationships with animals

in

By Zack Quaintance — Nib #5 Animals is a tough book to review. While there is a unified theme — animals — it is a broad one, and it enables a wide variety of work from the roughly three dozen creators involved. This inherently makes it difficult to discuss the quality of the individual pieces, but I can describe the holistic reading experience I had with the entirety of the anthology, and I can — enthusiastically — note that that reading experience was quite good, adding that journalism done via this medium is so rare that whenever I come across some of this quality, it tends to linger with me for days (and days...and days).

Read More

REVIEW: SFSX (Safe Sex) #6, in which the big bad gets tased in the ball bag

in

By Zack Quaintance — I’m not quite sure when this happened, but there has been a bit of a tonal shift in SFSX (Safe Sex), a book that started off feeling like an Orwellian exploration of the dangers of imposing sexual norms on a society...and has now become a bit of slapsticky action-comedy, which I suppose is still also an Orwellian exploration of the dangers of imposing sexual norms on a society.

Read More

REVIEW: Nebula #1 dishes out headbutts and ethical tech philosophy

in

By Zack Quaintance — There is a question at the center of Nebula #1 and it is this — just because one can invent a certain technology, does that mean they should? This, of course, is a timely question, as the impact of big tech on the world and country is a continued source of consternation in society. We are as a civilization emerging from an age where we invented fast and often, and now because of the results of those inventions, we’re having to grapple with whether advances (especially in social media and data collection) were good ideas in the first place.

Read More

REVIEW: Gwen Stacy #1 has a tough job but does it well enough

in

By Zack Quaintance — Since reading Gwen Stacy #1, I’ve been torn about how broad this book’s appeal is. It is, essentially, a prequel to Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s Amazing Fantasy #15 / Amazing Spider-Man #1, way back in the 1960s, and its a prequel that centers on Gwen Stacy, a character who as the backmatter for this book notes did not appear in Spider-Man’s world until Amazing Spider-Man #31 (crazy, right?).

Read More

REVIEW: The Clock #2 wastes no time breaking your heart

in

By Zack Quaintance — It’s just two issues, but I’ve so far been continuously impressed with the new Image/Top Cow comic, The Clock. As I noted in my review of the debut, this series takes real world political challenges as well as deep knowledge of current scientific research, and it blends them with a well-done character-drive comic book story. This, of course, is nothing new for writer Matt Hawkins, who has done this with several other comics in the past, most notably with the relatively long-running series Think Tank, which was largely centered on DARPA research.

Read More

ADVANCED REVIEW: Join the Future #1 is a sci-fi western about the fate of Smalltown, USA

in

By Zack Quaintance — Join the Future #1 is a comic built on a lot of ideas I think about often. In the world of this story (which I believe is sometime in the future, not quite near but not quite distant either), the U.S. has proliferated into paradisiacal mega cities. The hinterlands have emptied out and gone almost feral, populated by worn traders and stubborn hold outs that don’t want to submit to a polished life driven (and likely controlled by technology).

Read More

REVIEW: Ant-Man #1, is Ant-Man a creator’s best friend?

in

By Zack Quaintance — I’ll just get right to it — I liked Marvel’s new Ant-Man #1 (written by Zeb Wells, illustrated by Dylan Burnett, and colored by Mike Spicer) so much, that upon finishing it, I found myself wondering why Ant-Man was such a lightly-used character. Now, to be fair, I know his powerset is a tough sell. It’s a weird one. He gets smaller or bigger, which maybe doesn’t lend itself to dramatic binds or kinetic illustrations on a comic book page. Oh, and also he can talk to bugs.

Read More

REVIEW: X-Men + Fantastic Four #1 delivers on some of the HoX/PoX promise

in

By Zack Quaintance — Back in July, House of X/Powers of X spent 12 weeks building a new status quo for the X-Men to inhabit, doing so with alternating weekly releases, a constant stream of fascinating sci-fi concepts, nods to the core of the mutant world, stellar art, and strong writing. Then, Dawn of X started, and it was relatively up and down, skewing a bit more toward up. The problem with the six Dawn of X books, was that they almost uniformly felt like part of a violent shift from the urgent quality of HoX/PoX to a more withholding, built for a long monthly run style of periodical comics.

Read More

REVIEW: Going to the Chapel #4 is a sweet and fitting finale

in

By Zack Quaintance — It’s been a long week for me (filled with day job work travel...sort of), so I’m going to start this review of Going to the Chapel #4 with a summary of this series that I wrote for this week’s Top Comics to Buy feature: Simply put, this book is hilarious, combining a gangster heist story with the already-loaded relationship drama inherent to a wedding, mixing together zany family members, past relationships, and plenty of other volatile elements.

Read More

REVIEW: Gideon Falls #21 is a paradigm shift for a mysterious series

in

By Zack Quaintance — Since it first launched back in 2018, Gideon Falls has presented itself as a horror comic. And it’s certainly been that for much of its run, owing to the imagery from artist Andrea Sorrentino and colorist Dave Stewart, which at times has made me feel an actual chill (no exaggeration). After reading Gideon Falls #21, however, I’ve noticed a genre shift in this comic from horror to existential mystery, more in line with Twin Peaks (an obvious inspiration for this story throughout) or perhaps Stephen King’s Dark Tower series than any narrative of the straight stab-stab or traditional monster variety.

Read More

REVIEW: Amazing Spider-Man Daily Bugle #1 has an almost-impossible task

in

By Zack Quaintance — Newsrooms used to organically find their way into superhero comics, so prevalent were former reporters who’d gone on to tell stories within more fantastical worlds. This owed to newspapers and comics being kindred mediums for many decades, paper-based periodicals one picked up at a drug store or newsstand for an inconsequential fee, reading it on the train or passing it to a child as a treat. Everything I just wrote has changed now, and it’s into this changed world (obviously...duh) comes the new book, Amazing Spider-Man: Daily Bugle #1.

Read More

REVIEW: Black Stars Above #3 unveils more of its mystery while sacrificing none of its tension

in

By Zack Quaintance — We are now three issues into Black Stars Above, a cosmic horror historical fiction story set in the snowy Candian wilderness (redundant, much?) during the 1800s, and I am both happy and deeply unsettled to report that this book has lost none of what made its debut one of the best of last year. On the contrary, as this book has continued it has started to accomplish something that is incredibly difficult.

Read More

REVIEW: Artist Ben Stenbeck does unsurprisingly excellent work in Frankenstein Undone #1

in

By Zack Quaintance — Since the main Hellboy / BPRD narrative ended last year, there’s inherently been a bit of re-orientation going on with all things Hellboy. This even applies to series like Witchfinder, which have always sort of been their own thing while at the same time doling out connections to the main story, or clearing up bits of continuity. Anyway, this reorientation involves the following: with the main question about what the end of the world will look like and the role Hellboy will or won’t play in it finished, will the stories be able to feel as vital and connected to a larger world as they always have? 

Read More