Image Previews Picks: October 2021
Above-the Board Recommendation:
Friday, Book One: The First Day of Christmas
Deciding which series gets this spot this month was a very difficult choice for me. My picks were both new series from established creators that both look and sound very promising. Ultimately, my decision to give this spot to “Friday” came down to the fact that this is coming from online comics site The Panel Syndicate and it’s never a sure thing whether or if their series will be collected in print. I’m still waiting on the collected edition of “Barrier,” dagnabbit!
“Friday” comes to us from Ed Brubaker and Marcos Martin, who are as A-list a comics team as you can get these days. While their involvement alone would be enough to get me to read this, they’ve got an interesting premise here. The “Friday” of the title is Friday Fitzhugh who spent her teenage years as a detective investigating crimes and occult mysteries with her friend Lancelot Jones. She’s since moved past that part of her life in college, but when she returns home, Lancelot has found a whole new case to pull her back in. A case that is described as the “literal” Christmas Vacation From Hell. It’s that last part that gets me as it implies that Friday’s childhood was less like “Encyclopedia Brown” and more like “The House With a Clock in its Walls.” While I have no doubt that Martin would draw the hell out of a supernaturally-influenced former teen detective story, I don’t have quite the frame of reference for what it would look like coming from Brubaker. Which makes the whole project that much more interesting.
Fine Print vol. 1: Stjepan Sejic, creator of “Sunstone” (a.k.a. The only ongoing erotic graphic novel series worth reading for its story and characters), is doing another erotic series? This time with a supernatural bent? SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY! Even better is that this sounds just as irreverent as Sejic’s signature series. “Fine Print” is about Lauren Thomas who is currently dealing with the pain of a broken heart. She wants to get over it, but she’s also prone to making bad decisions. Which is how she comes to have her heart mended by the highest-rated god of desire, who I’m sure will want nothing for his services. Yes, this sounds like it could be a premise right out of a hentai manga. Fortunately Sejic has shown that he can make the story-related bits just as involving as the sexy bits.
Gunslinger Spawn #1: In a word, “No.” In multiple words: Look, you can see the word “Spawn” in the title and you can tell whether or not this is going to be for you. In fact, this might be even less for fans of “Spawn.” That’s because Ales Kot is co-writing this series with Todd McFarlane. It’s not that Kot is a bad writer, it’s just that he tends to deal more in undigestible surrealism on the series I have read from him. I’m speaking of “Zero” his series that started out as a near-future story about an assassin that turned into a tribute to the works of Beat writer Charles Bukowski. Or how he wrangled the story of “Bloodborne” into comics form only to give into the game’s highly abstract style of storytelling in subsequent arcs. Now that I think about it, reading “Gunslinger Spawn” may be worth it just to see when it jumps the rails. If McFarlane replaces Kot as co-writer after the first arc, I won’t be surprised. If Kot lasts a year on this title, that’ll surprise me.
Hellcop #1: This is about the humans who patrol Known Reality Plane 1301-A, also known as Hell. It’s also shipping with “Spawn” incentive covers. Do you really need to know anything more?
A Righteous Thirst for Vengeance #1: Rick Remender is back again and this time he’s working with artist Andre Lima Araujo. Judging by the cover of this series, it looks like they’re trying to evoke the pitiless spirit of Korean crime dramas like “Oldboy” and “A Bittersweet Life.” The series does have an outlandish premise that sounds like it could work as that kind of movie: An ordinary guy comes across a dark-web assassin’s plot to kill a family and decides to turn himself into the family’s guardian angel. This sounds fine to me and you probably know by now whether or not Remender’s writing agrees with you. It still works for me, even though I’ll have some choice words for the first volume of “The Scumbag” once I get around to writing about it. While we’re on the subject of stuff where it’s obvious to see if it’s for you or not…
Nita Hawes’ Nightmare Blog #1: This is a spinoff of “Killadelphia” from its writer, Rodney Barnes, and also features its artist, Jason Shawn Alexander in this issue. It’s my guess that the other artist mentioned here, Patric Reynolds, will be the main artist on this series as Alexander continues to work on the parent title. This series takes us back to Det. Jimmy Sangster’s old stomping grounds of Baltimore, where his ex-girlfriend Nita is gearing up for her own crusade against the supernatural. There’s nothing here to indicate that Barnes’ approach is going to be fundamentally different than what he’s doing on “Killadelphia,” which is why I’m giving it a pass. Two volumes in and this series about former-president-turned-vampire John Adams and his also-a-vampire wife Abigail, just isn’t as entertaining or fun as a series with that kind of setup should be.
M.O.M.: Mother of Madness HC: “Game of Thrones” star Emilia Clarke’s (co-)writing debut, with co-writer Marguerite Bennett and artist Leila Leiz, is collected in a hardcover edition. The Mother Of Madness referred to in the title is Maya, scientist by day, vigilante superhero by night, mother 24/7. My guess is that the struggle to balance all of these things in her life is where the “Madness” in the title comes from. It’s only going to get worse for Maya once some bad dudes from her past show up to hassle her in the present. While this does sound like a fun setup, I’m less sold on this being a $25 hardcover whose biggest selling point is its untested co-writer. That said, I never got around to watching “Game of Thrones” so Clarke’s presence on this series isn’t as much of a draw for me as it would be for just about everyone else, I would imagine.
Time Before Time vol. 1: Declan Shalvey and Rory McConville both have experience writing crime stories (with “Bog Bodies” and “Write it in Blood,” respectively). Artist Joe Palmer also has experience with drawing one of them (that’d be “Write it in Blood”). So it makes sense that they’d all team up to write a science fiction riff on “Looper”… that is also a crime story. Tatsuo is a smuggler for the Syndicate, an organization that specializes in smuggling people back in time to start a new life. Tatsuo doesn’t want to keep working for these guys for the rest of his life, but when his escape plan is spoiled by an overzealous FBI agent, they both find themselves on the run through time from the Syndicate. This is an odd case where the premise is intriguing, but none of the creators have really impressed me with their previous projects. None of these comics were bad or anything, but they didn’t make me think that Shalvey should stop illustrating comics and write full time. Or that McConville and Palmer should stop doing stories for “2000 A.D.”
Bitter Root vol. 3: Legacy: Will the third volume for this series finally be the one that gets me fully onboard with its story? Will I even buy it after the first two volumes failed to really excite me? The answers to these questions are, “I sure hope so,” and “If I can find it at a deep enough discount.”
The Department of Truth vol. 2: The City Upon a Hill: If you remember how much I raved about this series in my review of the first volume, then you’re probably wondering why it wasn’t a three-way-race for the “Above-the-Board Recommendation” this month. That’s because this volume only collects issues #8-13. If you’re wondering why issues #6&7 aren’t being collected here, so am I. Looking at their description on ComiXology, they appear to be stand alone issues that dig into the past of the Department. So it’s likely that creators James Tynion IV and Martin Simmonds are saving them for a later volume wherein all such issues will be collected. As for this volume, the solicitation doesn’t imply much more than THINGS GET WORSE for Cole Turner and the rest of the Department staff. Which, after that first volume, is good enough for me.
Inkblot vol. 2: Either the story about a reality-jumping cat and its bookish pursuer comes together in this volume, or I’ll decide to put it on my “To Sell” pile with “Killadelphia.” Yeah, that sounds harsh, but space on my shelves is at a premium these days.
Moonshine vol. 5: The Well: Brian Azzarello and Eduardo Risso’s Prohibition-era mobster werewolf story reaches its conclusion. Coincidentally, Prohibition reaches its end in the time of the story, which leads to an all-out war between the Holt family and the mobsters who wanted their booze. Where does protagonist Lou Pirlo fit into all this? Nowhere, is likely what he’s hoping, but I’m sure fate and his former flame Delia have other ideas. Though this hasn’t been on the same level of their other collaborations, Azzarello and Risso did manage to deliver an entertaining series, so long as you’re willing to forgive its lack of depth. We’ll see if they can keep up appearances one more time this October.
Sea of Stars vol. 2: The People of the Broken Moon: It may have only been a two-volume series, but the arrival of this concluding volume means that co-writer Jason Aaron has finally completed another creator-owned title. This comes a decade after he finished “Scalped,” a few years after he put “Southern Bastards” on hiatus and who knows how long it’ll take him to finish “The Goddamned.” Still a win is a win, and it’s also one that belongs to co-writer Dennis “Hopeless” Hallum and artist Stephen Green as well. I remember thinking that the first volume was alright, but if this is only going to be a two-volume series, I don’t see why I shouldn’t pick up vol. 2 to see how it ends.