Above-the-Board Recommendation: Star Wars:  Life Day #1 The existence of this comic shows that either Marvel is completely shameless when it comes to exploiting the “Star Wars” license, or utterly fearless about doing the same.  For those of you who are either too young to remember or have blocked it from your mind until now […]

Simon Spurrier’s concluding volume of “Hellblazer” wasn’t everything I wanted from a story about John Constantine.  Neither is “Rise and Fall.”  To writer Tom Taylor and artist Darick Robertson’s credit, however, they get a lot closer to nailing the appeal of the character and why I like reading stories about him.  Even if the story […]

The first couple of Aaron Kuder-illustrated issues of this volume are fun as they address the fallout of the first volume, show what happens when a random man gets the power of Thor, and feature a satisfyingly tense encounter between the title character and Iron Man.  This is good because the next six issues are […]

Al Ewing has been writing great, and underappreciated, comics at Marvel for a while now.  Though the likes of “New Avengers:  A.I.M.,” “Ultimates,” and “Loki:  Agent of Asgard” were all quite entertaining, none of them set the sales charts on fire.  Then along came his work on “The Immortal Hulk,” which vaulted Ewing onto the […]

We’ve reached the penultimate volume of Al Ewing and Joe Bennet’s run on the title.  Usually when this happens, you can expect things to slow down for a bit before things ramp up again for the finale.  That’s true here too.  For all of two issues.  In the one that opens the volume we get […]

“Reckless” had the misfortune of being the “least good” book in what was a banner year for Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips.  They had already released the excellent graphic novella “Pulp” and followed it up with the even better “Criminal” collection “Cruel Summer,” which made my Top 10 list for 2020.  “Reckless” was by no […]

For a series whose premise is, “What if Former President John Adams was a vampire, and tried to stage a vampire takeover in modern-day Philadelphia?” the first volume of “Killadelphia” played it remarkably straight.  I wouldn’t say that led to a wholly disappointing vol. 1, but I was curious enough to see if writer Rodney […]

Rick Remender’s creator-owned output has been something of a mixed bag with me.  “Deadly Class” has been pretty great, and that’s the exception.  The first volume of “Low” was so depressing that I didn’t read another.  I did make it to the end of “Black Science,” even though it gave me some good reasons to […]

“Holy Diver” by Dio features one of the most iconic metal album covers of all time as a demon throws a priest bound by chains into the sea.  It’s a great image that’s simultaneously fantastic, weird, and horrific at the same time.  You could argue that it’s also great because nothing about it is being […]

I’ve made my feelings on Ultimatum, the Miles Morales from the mainline Marvel Universe, clear in the past.  So any storyline using him was facing an uphill grind to get me to care about it.  Saladin Ahmed does his best here to do that as he plays up the connections that Miles has to this […]