I thought that the first volume of writer Warren Ellis’ “Astonishing X-Men” was an interesting failure.  It had a lot of good ideas, coupled with the man’s talent for razor-sharp dialogue, but it also managed the dubious trick of feeling both too slow and not long enough to allow its story to really work.  As […]

A few weeks ago, Rich Johnston over at Bleeding Cool reported that Vertigo’s original graphic novel line was part of the “walking dead.”  This is in the sense that no new OGNs were being scheduled and the only ones that will be seeing release are those too far along in the production cycle to be […]

Or, part one of the redemption of Matty Roth.  It’s not called that because I imagine writer Brian Wood finds such sentimentality anathema to his style.  The volume’s title comes from the dead soldiers Matty finds in a crashed helicopter while hiding out from pretty much everyone after the tragic events of the previous volume.  […]

If you’ve been hanging around comics news sites on the internet as long as I have, then you’ve probably heard a lot about this series.  Specifically, how good it is, how it influenced a lot of other series, and how it has yet to be collected.  Over a year ago I picked up the miniseries […]

It’s a new Heroic Age in the Marvel Universe and Tony Stark enters into it flat broke and missing his memory of nearly everything that’s happened since he was upgraded with Extremis.  So what’s a former billionaire playboy to do now?  Apparently the answer is to take the technology that the Iron Man is built […]

Brendon Connelly had a chance to speak to Warren Ellis in connection with the upcoming DVD release of “Red” over at Bleeding Cool.  It’s a short interview, but interesting to read for Ellis’ perspective on the movie and its potential sequel.  More interesting to me was what he said about his involvement with Marvel’s anime […]

Twin brothers Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon are phenomenal artists.  Anyone who has seen their work in “The Umbrella Academy,” “Sugarshock,” “Casanova,” and “B.P.R.D. 1947” should know that they excel in realizing the strangest of worlds while giving the characters that grounds them, and the reader, in the work.  Before this, I had never read […]

You knew this was coming.  With an inevitability matched only by death and taxes, the next step of any major A-list superhero who “dies” is their return.  Though Bruce Wayne’s apparent demise was meant to be one of the climactic parts of writer Grant Morrison’s “Final Crisis,” I doubt that any fanboy who read that […]

This volume of “Jack of Fables” finds the series in a position remarkably similar to what “Star Wars:  Knights of the Old Republic” was at the same point in its run (believe it or not).  Both series had/have concluded the story they began telling in the first volume and used/are now using the time they […]

The podcast is in the entry below, but 24 hours after recording it I’ve had some second thoughts about how I wrapped it up. While my overall opinion still stands, I feel that I came down too hard on the series at the end. The thing is that I read through 15-odd volumes of the […]