Manga and Comic Reviews
It’s only been a little over two-and-a-half years since the release of vol. 11. That’s progress, right! Well if you’re looking for an explanation as to why the second decade of “Black Lagoon’s” serialization has been more sporadic, the lengthy interview at the end of this volume with mangaka Rei Hiroe and his editor will […]
Call me a glutton for punishment, but I decided to pick up the second volume of this series. Vol. 1 of Keanu Reeves’ first comic, with Matt Kindt doing the actual heavy lifting as the writer and Ron Garney providing the art, didn’t impress me. It came off as a very self-serious story of the […]
Vol. 1 of “Arrowsmith” was a well-done melding of high fantasy and World War I tropes. Predictable as Fletcher Arrowsmith’s introductions to the horrors of the Great War were, they still felt fresh thanks to the smart worldbuilding from writer Kurt Busiek and slick art from Carlos Pacheco. Vol. 2 continues the fine work from […]
This is the only series where I could say that the previous volume ended with one of its primary characters having parts of his body flash-frozen to the inside of a car and call it “business as usual.” That’s not to say that such a thing, or the resulting battle of wits involving Mista and […]
Above-the-Board Recommendation: A.X.E.: Judgment Day & Companion Kieron Gillen once said that he’d only return to the Marvel Universe if he was given the keys to take on a major storytelling role within it. Something comparable to what Jonathan Hickman was doing with the “X-Men” at the time. Marvel took the writer up on that […]
Above-the-Board Recommendation: Eight Billion Genies HC Charles Soule has written a lot of comic books over the years. Some have been good, some have been dull, others have been just OK. However, he’s never had a big breakout success on the level of “The Walking Dead” or “Immortal Hulk” when it comes to his creator-owned […]
Above-the-Board Recommendation: The Nice House on the Lake vol. 2 When I picked the first volume for this series for this slot a year back, it was mainly because I didn’t know what to expect from it. All I knew about the series was that it involved this guy who invited his friends for this […]
Above-the-Board Recommendation: Survival Street “It’s ‘Sesame Street’ meets ‘The A-Team’ in a future American dystopia,” is how I imagine the pitch from co-writers James Asmus and Jim Festante and artist Abylay Kussainov went. Fortunately for us, Dark Horse agreed that it sounded like a good idea and now we’ve got the collected edition of this […]
I said that I wasn’t looking forward to reading this volume at the end of my review of vol. 10. That’s what happens when you try to make the reader as uncomfortable as possible while heading towards a thoroughly obvious plot point. I’ll give mangaka Shuzo Oshimi this, he makes the first third of this […]
Unlike another miniseries I just wrote about, the solicitation for this one didn’t endear itself to me. Matt Kindt and Tyler Jenkins’ latest miniseries for Dark Horse, after the intriguing but ultimately forgettable “Fear Case,” was described in a way that made it feel like it was overstuffed with lots of random ideas. All you […]