By Zack Quaintance — Hey all, first off I need to apologize for the tardiness of this column. We’re now three full New Comic Book Days into the month of May, and here I am still writing about my favorite books in April. I do, however, have a legit excuse! I’m in middle of moving across the entire damned country.
Read MoreBy Zack Quaintance — One of the things I’ve pushed against since creating this site is recency bias. All of us—fans and critics—have a shared tendency to praise and promote new #1 comics above mid-run installments or even finales. While there is a certain and acute level of brilliance required to create a strong debut, I think we as an industry tend to lose site of just how impressive and also difficult it is to sustain an interesting graphic sequential story for five, 10, or—as is the case with one of our...
Read MoreBy Zack Quaintance — Writer Zac Thompson (Age of X-Man, The Dregs) has a truly powerful new graphic novella due next month, on April 24, to be precise. The work, which is called The Replacer, is illustrated by Arjuna Susini, colored by Dee Cunniffe, and lettered by Marshall Dillon. Set in the 1990s, it tells a story from Thompson’s childhood tinged with horror genre trappings to accentuate the feelings, fears, and events.
Read MoreBy Zack Quaintance — The Replacer is a different sort of comicbook release for a few reasons. First is the format. This is a 64-page, full color graphic novella. What does that mean? Essentially, it means that you’re getting about three issues worth of comics (for the price of two, btw) all at once, so the story doesn’t have to take breaks. The Replacer is a dense and concentrated read with a streamlined beginning-middle-end, enabling its narrative to move with patience and really build to a crescendo without periodical trappings like obligatory last page cliffhangers, first page recaps, etc.
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