Manga and Comic Reviews
500K+ orders for the first issue of “Secret Wars” in the direct market alone. It’s no “Star Wars,” but those are “Amazing Spider-Man #1” numbers from last year, and that had the benefit of whatever momentum the film brought to that launch. So it would appear that the Marvel Hype Machine has pulled off an […]
Here is a miniseries that very much wants to be like one of those movies with a sprawling cast of characters whose lives start to interconnect over the course of its running time. It’s the death of a woman that gets the plot in motion after she falls to her death from a building onto […]
In the pantheon of late comics, “Nonplayer” is a special case. There have been many series where there was a big fuss about the first issue, and then disappeared completely after delays destroyed its moment and/or people realized that what they had bought was total crap. (This happened most often with a lot of Image […]
His runs on “X-Men: Legacy” and “X-Force” aren’t writer Si Spurrier’s only excursions into the oddball fringe of the X-Men franchise. This miniseries pre-dates both of them and it has Spurrier indulging his love of outlandish superhero sci-fi concepts to the hilt. It involves the title group, the X-Men’s “science team,” made up of Dr. […]
With “Convergence” behind them in these solicitations, the company (presumably safely ensconced in its new Burbank headquarters) moves on to the business of the mini-relaunch of its superhero universe. Though DC is leaving the “New 52” branding behind, as they haven’t published 52 monthly comics for a while now, the continuity of that relaunch will […]
A special above-the-board mention for this round of solicitations goes to “The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service Omnibus Edition: Book One.” While “Eden: It’s An Endless World!” is still — and will always be until the final volume is published — the Dark Horse manga that I most want to see completed, this is another series […]
Now this is more like it. Judging by the reviews and word-of-mouth online, I was one of the only people who didn’t think that “Fatale” was another stunning addition to the existing canon of works from Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips. It was a solidly constructed supernatural tale, but the stories it told never grabbed […]
Jon and Suzie have a problem. Contrary to what the back cover of this volume says, it doesn’t involve their orgasmic time-stopping abilities. No, their problem is that they’re the stars of a winning comedy/romance/fantasy series that’s being dragged down by an actively unlikeable antagonist. The kind of villain who it’s impossible to have sympathy […]
When I talked about how I hoped that “Trees” represented a return to form for Warren Ellis, I was selling him short in that regard. As I was reminded while reading the first volume of that series, there are a lot of things I like about his comics even if he tends to play up […]
What keeps me reading this series? Three volumes in and I can say that it’s the delicate balance of terror Kieron Gillen maintains in the struggle between the Allied and Axis powers. At the start I was worried that a series about how the Nazis developed superhumans to fight as soldiers in WWII would mean […]