Image Previews Picks: April 2012

While Image publishes a lot of comics that I do buy, they also do a good job publishing many that I didn’t know I wanted.  Series like “Orc Stain” or “Forgetless” that I’ve either heard about in passing or are now written by an established author.  Sometimes they’re great, other times they’re flawed but interesting and I generally don’t find this out until raiding the half-off bins at Comic-Con.  This month sees solicitations for 27 vol. 2:  Second Set, Green Wake vol. 2, The Infinite Horizon, and The Strange Talent of Luther Strode vol. 1.  All titles that have had some buzz to them, but the word of mouth hasn’t been enthusiastic enough to get me to consider ordering them when they come out.  Of course, they will be on my list once Comic-Con rolls around…

America’s Got Powers #1 & #2:  Bryan Hitch recently ended his longtime partnership with Marvel to go do more creator-owned work and this series with British TV personality Jonathan Ross, also the writer of the prohibition-era gangsters and vampires series “Turf,” is his first such project.  The solicitation text is fairly uninspiring as the plot sounds like “American Idol” for superheroes, but with a dark catch.  More interesting is the fact that TWO issues of this series are shipping in the same month.  Now, as great an artist as Hitch is, his work at Marvel was riddled with ridiculous delays with his work   on “The Ultimates” being a prime example.  After I bought the first series in single issue form, I felt I’d be better off waiting for the inevitable trade paperback than suffer through those kinds of delays again.  So unless this series is already in the can, it’s doubtful that we’ll see this reach completion in the calendar year.

Secret #1:  After launching a new ongoing last month with “The Manhattan Projects,” Jonathan Hickman returns this month with another one.  It’s being called an “espionage thriller that takes a deep look into the shadow world existing between the government and private security firms” which makes it sound like the first series Hickman has done that it set in the present since his breakthrough “The Nightly News.”  No idea if he’s going to expand upon the ideas present there, but his name is enough to get me onboard when the collection comes out.

Supreme #63:  Now this is something that I’ll have to pick up because the inevitable trade paperback will collect a lot of the issues that I already own.  To recap:  about a decade ago, Checker Publishing got the rights to Alan Moore’s “Supreme” comics, along with a lot of other work he did for Rob Liefeld’s “Awesome” comics line, and reprinted it in two collections.  However, the entirety of Moore’s run was never published because “Awesome” went belly-up before his final two scripts were illustrated.  With Liefeld doing a “soft relaunch” of the “Awesome” titles through Image we’re now seeing those final two issues completed with art from Erik Larsen.  While I’d like to see a mini-collection of the final two issues, it’d make more sense to reprint the entire second arc as one collection.  So for me, it’s either re-buy the inevitable collection or have two issues bagged next to the old one on my shelf.  In this case, those two issues will be on my shelf eventually.

Chew vol. 5:  Major League Chew:  Nothing to say here except that its inclusion should be obvious.  And that I’ll be looking forward to seeing the cliffhanger from the previous volume resolved here.

Severed HC:  Yes, it’s only co-written by Scott Snyder, but I’ve heard enough good things about it that I’ll be picking it up when it comes out in hardcover.  However, I am hoping that the promised “bonus material” includes commentary by the authors regarding the story’s origin and development and not just the usual collection of sketches and “work in progress” pages from the artist that we see in just about EVERY collection.  In other words, I shouldn’t get my hopes up.