Above-the-Board Recommendation: Barrier Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin do great work together.  Everything they’ve done up to this point, “Doctor Strange:  The Oath,” “The Private Eye,” and “The Walking Dead:  The Alien,” is well worth checking out by any comics fan.  “Barrier” is their most recent collaboration and it’s taken a little bit longer […]

Above-the-Board Recommendation: HULK SMASH EVERYTHING We’ve known for a while that Hulk is really strong, but anyone can beat up a superhero.  What about going back in time to beat up on all the dinosaurs?  Or taking on the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy?  Or what about who he’s going to […]

I thought I knew what I was going to get with this series.  Al Ewing spent a good amount of time at Marvel tackling its cosmic side through series like “Guardians of the Galaxy,” “S.W.O.R.D.,” “X-Men:  Red,” and through events like “Empyre” and “The Last Annihilation.”  So when he was announced as taking on the […]

From one perspective, the title story is as solid a story as you’d expect from this series.  Usagi, Yukichi, and Gen wind up in a village renowned for its plums and the pickled variety, umeboshi, that are produced from them.  However, someone is currently trying to ruin it through fire and murder, leading the shogun […]

In June of 1962, convicts Frank Morris, Clarence Algin, and John Algin did the impossible:  They escaped from Alcatraz.  What happened to them next is lost to history, but in this story only Frank and Clarence made it back to the mainland.  Their plan was to meet up with their contact and then go to […]

As the volume opens, Hisako is still a prisoner of Kageyama who is still under the observation of The Maester.  This character is still carrying out some secret plan to utilize the power of mutants at the behest of Viper called MY-X and he’s continuing to maintain the Children of the Atom cult in order […]

Aubrey Sitterson is a writer who’s been knocking around the fringes for a while now doing series that either haven’t had a whole lot of success, or that should’ve had more success than they did.  The two “No One Left to Fight” miniseries I’ve talked about before definitely fall into that category and I’ve been […]

It’s standard issue for things to be bad in Maika Halfwolf’s life.  Yet, the last time we saw her, things were especially dire.  That’s because she, and anyone else who had touched the mask of the Shaman-Empress had been possessed by another member of Zinn’s race:  The Defiled.  Which means that, as this volume opens, […]

Having found himself relegated to Earth after falling out of favor with Satan, Dracula has now taken up root in his old homeland of Transylvania.  He lords over the gypsy folk in the old castle above their town while feeding on the unwary as necessary.  Yet the tedium of rule soon begins to gnaw at […]