Above-the-Board Recommendation: Joy Operations #1 (of 5) This gets here mainly on sheer force-of-will as the big news last week was that Bendis is bringing his Jinxworld line of creator-owned projects to Dark Horse.  Expect new editions of his previous titles, a new edition of “Pearl” was mentioned, along with a softcover edition of “Powers:  […]

Above-the-Board Recommendation: What’s the Place Furthest From Here? #1 Matthew Rosenberg and Tyler Boss broke into the industry via their smash indie hit “4 Kids Walk Into a Bank.”  It was a really entertaining heist story, told from the perspective of the kids who were planning it, that was only held back by it’s too-dark […]

Above-the-Board Recommendation: Batman:  One Dark Knight #1 (of 3) Hey, it’s another “Batman” title in this spot!  Surprising, I know.  The thing is that there’s a lack of promising new titles in these solicitations and the collected editions I’m interested in are debuting hardcover-first, so a new miniseries featuring the Caped Crusader gets this month’s […]

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 […]