Manga and Comic Reviews
What happens when Kieron Gillen teams up with fellow former games journalist and “Rock, Paper, Shotgun” co-founder Jim Rossignol? Something that is easily the most Gillen-esque thing I have ever read. Whatever Rossignol’s contributions were, they’ve either enabled the writer’s most ridiculous notions, or just harmonized with them to produce a work of singularly unmitigated […]
Kate Pryde is dead. This isn’t something that should be possible for mutants in the Krakoa Era, but Sebastian Shaw found a way to use the woman’s problems with the gates to his advantage. He also managed to get away with it scot free. Which leaves the Marauders — Emma Frost, Bishop, Storm, Pyro, and […]
Why yes, it has been quite some time since we last checked in on the adventures of budding neurotic radio personality Minare Koda. Even though Kodansha started publishing the series in individual chapters, I still figured they’d give us the digital volumes as well. They didn’t. So I figured I’d wait until they did, or […]
Above-the-Board Recommendation: Decorum HC It’s not like you need to twist my arm to get me to buy anything written by Jonathan Hickman. Especially when he’s working with a great artist like Mike Huddleston. They could be doing a comic about their respective grocery lists and I’d still buy the trade paperback. In hardcover. “Decorum,” […]
Above-the-Board Recommendation: Batman by John Ridley HC It was supposed to be a lot bigger than one volume. It still might be. The plan was to have Bruce Wayne retire and for Tim Fox, son of Lucius, to take over the mantle of the Dark Knight. It was going to be the most high-profile in […]
Above-the-Board Recommendation: Grandville Integral HC Unfortunately this isn’t a new installment in Bryan Talbot’s excellent series of graphic novels set in a late 19th Century steampunk world where humans are second-class citizens compared to the anthropomorphic animal individuals who run the show. “Integral” is just a fancy way of saying that this is an omnibus […]
Above-the-Board Recommendation: Way of X #1 Right now, there’s room for a lot of “X-Men” stories. We’re getting a modern-day pirate story with lots of conflicting agendas in “Marauders.” Character-driven detective action in “X-Factor.” Dark comedy and action in “Hellions.” And whatever Head of X Jonathan Hickman feels like writing about in a given month […]
If you’ll recall (from last week, when I finally remembered to post my review), the first volume of this series didn’t make the best impression on me. Much of it felt like self-parody as mangaka Shuzo Oshimi tried to cultivate an air of sinister intent in a way that felt more ham-fisted than suspenseful. It […]
“X of Swords” isn’t quite the next volume in Jonathan Hickman’s run. This volume collects the five “Giant-Size X-Men” one-shots which were released over the course of last year. Aside from their slightly expanded page count, these issues wouldn’t have felt out of place in the pages of the writer’s “X-Men.” This is because these […]
I already talked about half of this volume with Rob, and the other half when talking about the tie-in issues to “Empyre.” Still, as Hickman and crew are onto something special with their “X-Men” relaunch, I felt that this volume deserved to be written up here and assessed as a whole. Even if it does […]