Manga and Comic Reviews
“Defenders: There Are No Rules” was an entertaining high-concept miniseries from writer Al Ewing and artist Javier Rodriguez that saw the team traveling back in time through the conceptual ages of the Marvel Universe. It was successful enough that we’re now graced with its follow-up, “Beyond,” that sees Adam “Blue Marvel” Brashear leading an even […]
That’s right, this is going up on a Tuesday night. Why the change? With there not being a direct link to the podcast as part of the blog, there’s a three-day gap every other week now. To deal with that, I’ll be posting things every Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, and every other Wednesday when a […]
This is a volume of table-setting as we see lots of different factions getting their affairs in order before the fighting starts. We check in with Duke Guiscard first as he delights in having found a way to get rid of his brother, the king: Have the newly captured Princess Irina do it as she […]
Above-the-Board Recommendation: Innocent Omnibus vol. 1 What we have here is something much rarer than I’d like it to be in solicitations from Dark Horse. That would be the debut of a new manga series without any ties to film or TV. “Innocent” is the fictionalized story of Charles-Henri Sanson the executioner for the French […]
Above-the-Board Recommendation: Black Cloak vol. 1 “Heart in a Box” was an excellent graphic novel that took an obvious premise – a young woman gives up her heart to escape a recent heartbreak and comes to regret the decision – and wrung a genuinely engaging story from it. It came to us courtesy of writer […]
Above-the-Board Recommendation: Rom: The Original Marvel Years Omnibus HC vol. 1 Now here’s something I never thought I’d see in these solicitations. To recap: Rom was originally a toy made by Parker Brothers that Marvel published a tie-in comic for back in the (very) late 70’s/early 80’s. While the toy came and went without much […]
The ongoing narrative of this series kicked into high gear at the end of the previous volume and that momentum carries through the entirety of vol. 17. While Philomena’s awakened form isn’t able to cause (much) more damage at the college, she still manages to slip outside the wards guarding the place. Where is she […]
Donny Cates’ ambitions at Marvel may be on hold for now, but he and his “Venom” partner Ryan Stegman are delivering a new creator-owned title from Image. “Vanish” is a series that takes a lot of stylistic cues in its art from the publisher’s early 90’s era. Given how Image titles from that time were […]
The good news is that this title will be continuing past this volume. Much as I’ve enjoyed Ewing’s work in the cosmic and mutant spaces at Marvel, they haven’t been blessed with sales worthy of their quality. Whether or not “X-Men: Red” will be continuing past the “Fall of X” is another big question mark […]
At the end of vol. 3, the cast had been split up into three parts. Vol. 4 starts off with Daniel and Alex “Destiny Man” Graves off to the side, getting to know the latter’s backstory. It mainly consists of “My parents didn’t love me enough so betrayed them and got into genetic engineering in […]