Dark Horse Penguin Picks: April 2025
Above-the-Board Recommendation:
Cat + Crazy vol. 1
I wasn’t sure if there was going to be enough of an audience to support a series like mangaka Wataru Nadatani’s “Cat + Gamer” when Dark Horse first published it. The series was, after all, a simple little slice of life series about a gaming focused office lady who adopts one cat (and then another) and uses her gaming skills and knowledge to raise them. It sounded like another manga series that we’d be lucky to see more than three volumes from the publisher. Yet not only is Dark Horse going to publish all eight volumes of it, they’re also going to publish Nadatani’s other cat-centric series as well.
Kensuke is a high schooler who loves cats but has never owned one. That’s because the other members of his family are allergic. So when he meets a self-styled cat guru who claims to know everything about kitties, he thinks he’s found the answer to all of his problems as he begins to learn the Cat Fist Way. I’m not going to expect anything great from this series, as “Cat + Gamer’s” charms have always been low-key at best. But any ongoing manga success from Dark Horse deserves to be championed, as do good cat comics in general.
Los Monstrous #1: James Robinson looks to be making the most of his imprint at the publisher as he debuts a new series (or miniseries) this month. The time is the 50’s and all kinds of monsters are walking around the city of Los Monstrous from vampires, to mummies, to fish-men, to werewolves like series protagonist Perry Cutter. His latest gig involves finding a missing vampire heiress that – wouldn’t you know – turns out to be a lot more complicated than it first appeared. It sounds fun enough, and it’ll have art from Jesus Merino. I just think that it needed a better title as “Los Monstrous” doesn’t tell you a whole lot about the series, but “Perry Cutter, Werewolf P.I.” sure does.
Robo Wolf #1: The solicitation text states, “Robo Wolf and his crew of bank robbing criminals are in a race against time to get a fat stack of stolen money to the villainous Colonel Massacre, who has kidnapped Robo Wolf’s daughter for ransom! The Colonel’s not the only one with an eye on the money, however, and our heroes will have to use their combined skills to tear through an onslaught of bloodthirsty cannibals, ninjas, robots, and more!” Going by this and the gonzo cover to this issue, it would appear that creator Jake Smith really wanted to do a “Far Cry: Blood Dragon” comic, but couldn’t and decided to do this instead. Let’s hope the result is as good as its inspiration.
From the World of Minor Threats: Welcome to Twilight #3: So I thought it was announced that Gail Simone would be writing a Crab Louie miniseries at last year’s Comic-Con. Apparently she’s just doing this issue, which will probably still be good. Especially since it’s going to feature art from the always incredible Gene Ha.
Anansi Boys HC vol. 1: Well, this has aged poorly.
Dimwood HC: Dark Horse’s latest installment in their library of works from the late, great Richard Corben. It’s about Xera, a woman with large gaps in her memory of her past who has returned to her family home in hopes of filling them in. However, this is a story written and illustrated by Corben, and if the gnarly cover to this volume is any indication, filling in these gaps may only lead her to lasting regret. If she even survives the experience. “Dimwood” was the last graphic novel completed by Corben before his death and this is the first time it’ll see publication. It’ll be interesting to see how it reads as one of the extras promised in this solicitation is an epilogue from Jose Villarrubia, the master colorist who has been helping to spearhead the restoration work done on these comics.
Madman Omnibus vol. 1: Mike Allred is a fantastic artist and “Madman” has long been regarded as his signature work. I’ve been wanting to read more of it, but I just never got around to plunking down the $100 for the hardcover editions of his work with the character. Now that they’re putting these omnibi in softcover – and knocking off $50 in the process – I think I’ll have finally run out of excuses for not reading this when it arrives in June (I hope).
Mob Psycho 100 vol. 16: You know how it goes: Another round of Dark Horse solicitations, another round of comics that have been re-solicited from their initial release. This one is special because while the solicitation tells us that this is set to come out in June, a quick look at Amazon says that the actual date is now September, with vol. 15 arriving in July. So it’s time to cross your fingers and pray that they actually arrive in these months and aren’t re-solicited again.
Survival Street vol. 2: The Radical Left: Putting the cast of a thinly-veiled riff on “Sesame Street” as freedom fighters in a near-future American dystopia sounded like a recipe for some absurd satire. That worked in vol. 1, up until co-writers James Asmus and Jim Festante abandoned dark humor for pleas of friendship and understanding. Will they, and artist Abylay Kussainov, get the balance right this time around? Given that the story this time involves the Salutation Street crew rescuing kids from cruel corporate towns, only to find that approach slowly self-destructing, the answer doesn’t sound good.
Where Monsters Lie vol. 2: Cull-de-Sac: Connor Hayes survived blowing up all of the serial killers and monsters of Wilmhurst only to find out that his wife was part of the worst family there. Now they’ve all migrated to Site B, “Wilmhurst Two,” and Connor is expected to get with the program after he proved has as much of a killer as the monsters he’s been after all these years. Except that he doesn’t think so and it’s very much likely that his in-laws really don’t know what their new son-in-law is capable of. The first volume of this darkly comic riff on what movie slasher villains and serial killers get up to when they’re not raising hell in the real world was a lot of fun from writer Kyle Starks and artist Piotr Kowalski. I was pleasantly surprised to see that it got a follow-up and am looking forward to see if the creators can manage the same kind of murderous fun that drove vol. 1.