Manga and Comic Reviews
Rick Remender’s creator-owned output through Image can be charitably described as “uneven.” Though he’s clearly a skilled writer, he needs to find a new approach beyond simply tossing his characters into hopeless situations and then starting to grind them down. It’s an approach that has worked on “Deadly Class,” is on the verge of breaking […]
After “A Girl on the Shore” didn’t entirely satisfy my craving for a new quality manga from Inio Asano, this one hits the mark. Let me say upfront that it’s kind of a depressing read as well. It’s about average grade school kid Punpun Punyama trying to make his way through life as his situation […]
Alan Moore tends to leave very deep footprints in his non-creator-owned work. His run on “Swamp Thing” still reverberates to this day whenever someone tries a new take on the character. The short stories he told with Batman and Superman still stand as some of the most memorable ones featuring the characters. Even his run […]
I probably should’ve mentioned this earlier, but tie-ins to “Secret Wars” came in three different flavors. The titles branded with “Last Days” showed how their characters reacted to the end of the Marvel Universe (such as it was). “Battlezones” gave us a look at the goings-on in different regions while the main event was going […]
The sprawling “Batman Eternal” weekly series gets a follow-up of sorts focusing on all of the sidekicks the Caped Crusader has had over the years. It may be telling a less epic story in half the space (this ran for 26 issues rather than 52), but that decision turns out to be the right one […]
Everyone’s favorite wookiee gets his own miniseries from Marvel with some fantastic art from Phil Noto! Seriously, the art is the strongest thing about this series as Noto invests a great amount of detail and style in rendering the world that Chewbacca has crash-landed on. From the mines filled with explosive larvae, to the rural […]
I talked about the first two volumes a bit at the end of the “Gantz” podcast as they represented a dramatic shift from mangaka Hiroya Oku’s seinen sci-fi action series. It’s still a sci-fi action tale, but one more concerned with how a timid old man, the titular Inuyashiki, adapts to the power granted to […]
After the previous volume saw master thief Conrad “Redmond” Paulson get himself and his family out from under the thumb of Lola, it would appear that our protagonist has finally got everything he ever wanted. Well, except for the fact that his ex-wife still hates him. And, more pressingly, his former partner Celia is still […]
Don’t call it a reboot, because they’ve been to that well a bit too often for that to work again. As DC describes it, “Rebirth” is simply the company getting back to the basics of their characters and focusing on what works best for them. While most of the titles and creative teams weren’t that […]
If the first volume of this series from “B.P.R.D.” co-writer John Arcudi and frequent artist James Harren had one problem, it was the fact that it took a few issues for its point to come into focus. That’s not a problem with this second volume as it quickly brings us up to speed on the […]