Manga and Comic Reviews
With a new numbered “Star Wars” movie due out in a couple weeks, tradition dictates that we’re due another “Journey to” comic ahead of it. Where “Shattered Empire” showed us what things were like for everyone immediately after “Return of the Jedi” and “Captain Phasma” was a nice character portrait of and continuity fix for […]
A “Star Wars” story inspired by the new themed land of the same name at Disneyland? I was all but prepared to pass on this because such a premise sounded deeply skippable. Now that I’ve actually read through it, I can say that it’s a fair bit better than that and actually makes me want […]
Above-the-Board Recommendation: The Weather Man vol. 2 There are the new Image titles that I buy with the expectation that they’ll be good (lookin’ in your direction “Die”) and those that I buy with the expectation that they might be good. The first volume of “The Weather Man” was firmly in the latter category when […]
The plot of this series does move forward in this volume, albeit incrementally. There’s some drama at the beginning as Mari and Yori’s relationship goes through another rough patch. It’s more the latter being angry at the former for trespassing against her boundaries, though we do learn a little more about Yori’s family life in […]
Above-the-Board Recommendation: Batman: Creature of the Night HC Around 15 years ago, Kurt Busiek wrote, with Stuart Immonen providing the art, a “Superman” miniseries called “Secret Identity.” It was set in the real world and followed a young boy with the name of Clark Kent. Mind you, this was a world where “Superman” existed in […]
Above-the-Board Recommendation: Hellboy and the B.P.R.D.: The Return of Effie Kolb #1 (of 2) I like “Hellboy” stories as much as the next person, but do you know what they usually aren’t? Scary. For whatever reason most comics pegged as horror don’t usually scare me. That includes the vast majority of “Hellboy” and Mignolaverse stories. […]
Above-the-Board Recommendation: King Thor (or Thor by Jason Aaron vol. 18) Seven years. That’s how long Jason Aaron has been writing “Thor.” It’s a virtual eternity in this comics marketplace where a creative team is kicked to the curb if their series doesn’t hit the ground running. Aaron’s work on “Thor” has been consistently good […]
This current storyline has the feeling of a final arc, what with how everything hits the fan here, but it still feels like we’ve still got a ways to go yet. That’s because Sato has finally revealed his plan for destabilizing Japan. It employs the same kind of stupid/clever planning that this series has specialized […]
Here’s the second half of Matthew Rosenberg’s story and it doesn’t quite nail the same entertainingly downbeat vibe that the first one had. That’s mainly because the story goes off in a lot of different directions in vol. 2. From funerals for friends, to finding out what Emma Frost has been scheming, to fighting forgotten […]
…write about the comic that it got me to buy. I wasn’t planning on buying any of the other “Age of X-Man” series since “Marvelous X-Men” made for a pretty self-contained spine of the story. It’s just that seeing Apocalypse in the role of someone who wants to let love live is so utterly bizarre […]