Comic Picks by the Glick

Manga and Comic Reviews

Blade of the Immortal vol. 23: Scarlet Swords

Yes, it’s still incredibly awesome.  I’m not going to bore you with the details since you’re all well aware that I drank the Kool-Aid for this series quite some time ago.  Instead, some observations: If you told be back when I was reading, say, vol. 3 that twenty volumes later that the Itto-Ryu’s ambitions would […]

Daytripper

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 […]

Batman: The Return of Bruce Wayne

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 […]

Jack of Fables vol. 5: The Fulminate Blade

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 […]

Addendum to Comic Picks #74:

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 […]

Biomega vol. 5

We’re entering the home stretch here as the series is set to conclude with vol. 6 in May.  In exploring this strange new world, Zoichi is taken to the village of the “people” he met at the end of the previous volume.  They’re such a peaceful and friendly people that it should surprise no one […]

The Killer vol. 3: Modus Vivendi

What I like most about this series is the way it deviates from your expectations.  Vol. 1 introduced us to our nameless “Killer” and set him up as someone who was highly competent at his job, but starting to crack under the strain of it all.  You’d think that vol. 2 would continue to show […]

Bakuman vol. 3

With the series’ focus narrowed to showing what makes great Shonen Jump manga, it narrows the focus further still as aspiring creators Mashiro and Takagi now have to determine what kind of manga will work well in Jump.  Smartly, they realize that pirates, ninja, and shinigami have already been taken, so they have to come […]