Manga and Comic Reviews
Dark Horse Comics started publishing Stan Sakai’s “Usagi Yojimbo” series way back in 1995. This was “Usagi’s” third official publisher following a 38-issue run at Fantagraphics and a 16-issue run at Mirage. “Usagi’s” run at Dark Horse handily eclipsed its previous ones with the series lasting for 165 issues, a graphic novel, a couple of […]
Do you know what “Murcielago” has been missing up until now? If you said, “Giant Robots,” then this is the volume for you! Is it the volume for me, though? While I’d never accuse “Murcielago” of being realistic in any fashion, the presence of mecha does threaten to break the particular kind of suspension of […]
Above-the-Board Recommendation: The Umbrella Academy vol. 3: Hotel Oblivion No, I haven’t got around to watching the Netflix series yet. I have a million other things to catch up on watching, not the least of which is the second season of “Castlevania.” If there’s anything that I have to give the “Umbrella Academy” TV show […]
Above-the-Board Recommendation: Batman: Last Knight on Earth You know how it is. One day you’re Batman, Dark Knight protector of Gotham City, key member of the superhero community, with lots of friends and supporters to help you fight your war on crime. Then one day you wake up in an asylum to find out that […]
There’s a scene towards the end of this volume where one of the main characters wakes up in a hospital following a pretty disturbing hallucination (Or was it!?) and a lot of plot points from the previous issues are reiterated at a fast clip. When asked to make sense of this, Jedidiah Jenkins responds with […]
Kiyoshi dies in this volume. He gets better, though, and his experience puts him in a manic state that gives his shoulder-wars comrades the momentum they need to take the fight directly to Kate. How did he come to die in the first place? That’s… best left for readers to experience themselves. All I’ll say […]
After you’ve written “Amazing Spider-Man” for the past decade, what do you do next? You start working your way through the rest of Marvel’s A-list characters, beginning with Tony Stark. Dan Slott’s take on the character isn’t that different than what we’ve seen in previous runs. He’s still the charismatic, fast-talking futurist whose proclivity for […]
I thought I had a pretty good idea of what to expect going into this volume. You see, whenever a series does a big “Death of [Insert Character Here]” arc, there’s usually a pretty good chance that we’re talking about death in a metaphorical sense. The character won’t actually die, but instead come through the […]
“Cave Carson’s” first volume was a surprisingly entertaining adventure that displayed an impressive balance of humor, quirk, and action. Its second volume disrupted that balance by bringing in a bit too much psychedelia and surrealism into the narrative. This third (and sadly final) volume manages to strike a welcome middle ground by having the psychedelia […]
After Dan Slott’s epic decade-long run on “Amazing Spider-Man” who did Marvel get to follow in his stead as the writer on that title? None other than Nick Spencer! Yes, that’s right. The writer who previously had a run on “Captain America” that can best be characterized as really controversial and followed it up with […]