Luke Judge

This April, it is estimated that Diamond Comics Distributors sold 5,567,648 of the top 300 comic books to American comic stores.

The previous April, it is estimated they sold 6,733,040 of the top 300 comic books.

That’s a drop of a fifth, year on year.

Now, there’s plenty of caveats. These industry estimates on Diamond sales are often criticised for underestimating figures. They also don’t count UK, South American, or European sales which can be significant. And these figures can’t account for greater variance in sales, month on month, with the far end of the “long tail” being unaccounted for. They only thing they are good for is measuring trends. And whatever the actual figures are, there is one conclusion. Comic books sold in the direct market are slipping.

Coupled with bookstore markets not exactly supporting the likes of Viz or CMX sufficently, and there’s a fair bit of worry out there.

Marvel have made the largest move out of any big publisher into digital sales, but their product is generally at least six months old, and runs are spotty and sporadic.

The price increase for many comics, from $2.99 to $3.99 may be both the cause and saviour. Sales may be slipping linewise as fans can now only afford to buy so many comics, made worse by the recession. But even a fifth drop on sales still means more revenue for publishers and retailers alike. As long as sales don’t continue to slip, that is.

But it could be bad news for creators, as print titles repeatedly fail to meet royalty of “incentive payment” levels. And Marvel still don’t pay creators for any sales of their work, digitally.

Is it just me, or does this feel like there’s worse to come?

captain America Comics comic stores, creators, publishers, saviour, variance

Both Kurt Busiek and his Wildstorm published,creator-owned series “Astro City,” require little introduction. The series, illustrated by Brent Anderson with designs and covers by Alex Ross, has never been on a monthly schedule, but since it debuted in 1995, the series has had a loyal fan following and has won multiple Eisner and Harvey Awards, including Best New Series, Best Continuing Series, Best Serialized Story and Best Single Issue.

In fact, it’s a series that’s been steady in quality for so long that it’s often easy to take it for granted. Indeed, what’s most striking reading “Astro City” is just how moving many of the stories are. While Busiek is perhaps best known as the writer of some of the great, action-filled “Avengers” stories like “Ultron Unlimited” and “Kang Dynasty,” his stories in “Astro City” are character-based tales that often take place between epic battles

One character who has been a part of the series since the beginning was The Silver Agent. While readers knew that the character had died in the 1970′s, the details of his death went unrevealed until the publication of the just concluded “Astro City: The Dark Age” miniseries. Today, the first of a two issue story focusing on the Silver Agent hits the stands, and though there were no spoilers revealed over the course of our interview, Wildstorm has provided an exclusive look at the first five pages of the issue.

CBR News: Where did the idea of the Silver Agent, his story and his fate come from and how has it changed from your initial conception of the character?

Kurt Busiek: The idea of the Silver Agent came early on, but a lot of his story came along later. His name and his fate were the first things to come along – as I recall, I was on a plane to San Diego when the name “Silver Agent” fell into my head, and I realized that I could build a character around that, a character who’d kind of be emblematic of the Silver Age, a straight-up “good guy” character like Barry Allen or Hal Jordan, and he’d die in the early 1970s, making him the perfect instigating event for the Dark Age.

At the time, I was talking with Dark Horse about “Astro City,” and Bob Schreck was sitting about six rows behind me, so I wandered back and pitched “The Dark Age” for the first time while standing in the aisle of an airplane. As it worked out, “Astro City” ended up at Image, but that’s still the only time I ever pitched a story on an airplane.

None of that original conception ever changed, but detail got added to it and the character got fleshed out as I figured out more about his life, his origin, his fate and how it would affect “Astro City,” both immediately and in deeper ways that nobody’s seen yet. I wanted him to be a local hero, a civic hero, a cop or fireman writ large, rather than a soldier-hero like Captain America. That’s why his costume has elements of a fireman’s helmet in the faceplate and a police badge in the chestplate.

But beyond that, we kind of accumulated detail as we went along, not changing what we had, but adding to it.

The time-travel aspect came when we were working out the actual plot details of “The Dark Age.” I knew from very early on that he’d be “rescued,” pulled into the future by heroes of another era, but that he’d return to the time of his execution anyway. But I realized that as long as he was heading back in time to his date with the electric chair, he could certainly stop along the way and see what became of Astro City after his time – and if he was doing that, he could appear during “The Dark Age” at various points, which would heighten the drama and give us a different viewpoint.

What was behind the decision to have the character in the background of the series from the beginning, waiting years to reveal his story?

Well, he wasn’t exactly in the background from the beginning – he was the most prominent hero in our second issue, so he came on stage pretty early. But mainly, he’s a part of history, a very public part, so it would make sense that people in the present would think about him or see his statue or whatever. We’ve got a lot of things that have been planted here and there, that’ll come up in stories later, not because I have a grand plan to keep people wondering about this stuff for years, although that’s fun. [It's] more because I know the history of Astro City, more or less, and so I’ll use it. Just as Marvel characters might refer back to Galactus or something, but in this case [the characters are] aware of history that the readers aren’t.

We took a long time after mentioning the Experimentals before they came on screen, and still haven’t seen the Astro-Naut, though he’s been alluded to – there’s lots of stuff like that in the series.

It wasn’t a specific plan that it would take this long to get to the Agent’s story – that was part of the series having delays abnd us having lots of stories to tell and that sort of thing. The way I look at it, as long as we’re telling interesting stories, we don’t have to tie off every bit that’s been planted in the background as quickly as possible. Knowing there are important events out there, things the characters remember and discuss, helps present the idea that this is a big complicated world with an extensive history, even if the reader doesn’t have all the details.

How much of Astro City and its history and environs had you planned out from the very beginning, even if only loosely? Do you still have lots more up your sleeve that you simply haven’t gotten around to revealing?

Oh, I’ve got lots up my sleeve. And there are new hints in “Silver Agent” #1 toward big stuff that’ll bubble along in the background of the next period of “Astro City.”

What I did, starting out, was approach it as if there was a comics publisher called Astro Comics that had as long and storied a history as the others, and they reacted to the same things the other guys did, so we had Western heroes and pulp heroes in the Thirties, and Golden Age superheroes and a fading-away to other things in the Fifties, and a resurgence in the Sixties and so on. And when James Bond was popular, there’d have been espionage stuff, and when Lassie and Rin Tin Tin were popular there’d have been heroic dogs and all the various cultural influences that any comics company would have responded to. So that gave me a sense of the world’s history, of what kind of heroes would be appearing at any particular time, and we worked out a bunch of major heroes and made up others as we needed them, but we had a structure to work with right from the start.

I also did a crappy little map of the city, that I think is reprinted in the back of the first trade paperback, and Brent did a better one, and has added to and fleshed it out since. And that’s geographically the same sort of thing – we had the big picture roughed out, as to where things were and what the neighborhoods were like, and when we need something else – a Chinese neighborhood, for instance, or an industrial park – we figure out where it fits into the structure and flesh things out a little more. It works pretty well.

We may never get to show it all, but that’s okay. The point of it being there isn’t for everything to get explained and have its turn in the spotlight, it’s for the world to feel complex and full enough to feel like a real place. If we never find out the origin of Nightingale and Sunbird, is that a problem? It’s more important to know ordinary people and get their stories, rather than to fill out an Official Handbook, or at least that’s how it feels to me.

You were born in 1960 which make me curious. The Silver Age “ended” as we think of it, around the time you were 12-13 or so. Did you, as a comics reader, notice a sudden change in what you were reading? Did you perceive what you were reading differently, either as a function of getting older or the events going on in the world? Or was it not that dramatic as those of us who weren’t there might think?

I can’t really say, because I didn’t start reading comics regularly until 1974. I only rarely read comics as a kid, and didn’t read them often enough to have any sense of structure or consistency – I can remember reading an issue of “Avengers” and being pissed off that Batman wasn’t in it. That’s how much I knew about comics, that Batman should be in the book with the big team of heroes in it.

So my sense of the Silver Age ending is informed by reading the comics as back issues, not as something I experienced myself. But when I was researching “Marvels” or reading a big block of comics of the era, it’s a pretty noticeable change. The transition from Stan Lee to Roy Thomas as editor at Marvel has a pretty strong change in flavor – not really good or bad, just different. And the Superman books shifting from Mort Weisinger to Julie Schwartz is another big change, the departure of Gardner Fox, Arnold Drake and others from the DC talent pool, Kirby going to DC, the arrival of new writers to the industry like Conway and Englehart and Gerber and Wein and Wolfman, and lots more, it really does feel like a time of transition.

“Astro City” is the most psychologically realistic and complex of your superhero comics. Is this the major challenge for you the emotional depth, or does that come more easily than we might think?

It’s more a matter of how to bring it through, I think. Most superhero stories are about what happens, “Astro City’s” about how people react to what happens, how they feel as much as what they do. So a lot of that is internal, and that’s not as easy to make visual as, say, a punch or an explosion. But that’s the challenge of it, that’s what keeps it interesting. Finding a way to establish a voice, a viewpoint, to make the story come alive in a way that the reader feels like he’s there alongside the characters, feeling what they feel, rather than watching it as an outsider.

Sometimes it comes easily, sometimes it feels impossible. But that’s what makes it worth doing.

How many “Astro City” stories start, at least in part, as a way to challenge yourself? I ask, because the story of the Silver Agent would seem to have a few challenges. First, you have a main character who needs to be more than just a symbol – he needs to be a real person. Then, you have to tell his story and make us care in the midst of a grand epic that also happens to be time travel story. All of this says nothing of the pressure from years of us fans waiting expectantly to know more about the Silver Agent…

I think the series is in part about challenging me, but that’s part of the process, not the starting point. Each story generally starts with an idea, a scene, a conflict, something that gets the story going that I build the rest around. That’s when the challenge comes in, when I start making it work. And if a story’s too easy, if it feels like nothing’s going on that’s challenging to me, I figure it’s not going to be interesting to the reader either, that it’ll feel like the same old same old, so I look for a different way to do it.

So is that starting with the challenge, or looking for it?

But making these characters feel like real people and serve a role in the story is just writing, to my mind. Making the reader care about the people involved even when there’s big splashy stuff happening – that’s what makes the big splashy stuff effective, that you care about the people it’s happening to. If you don’t care, if you don’t have a context in which to make it mean something, then you can make it as splashy as you want, but it’s going to feel hollow.

As for the pressure of the fans, well, I’ve been living with these guys as long as you have or longer, so if it feels like an honest, satisfying story to me, I’ve got to figure it will to you, too. Plus, I know what’s being set up for the future, and how we’re introducing it, so I tend to look forward to the fan reaction more than worry about it. That’s what I tell stories for, to affect the audience. I want to get that feedback, see how it works…

When thinking about the character and the story, I was reminded of a quotation by I.F. Stone, “History is a tragedy, not a melodrama.” One of the aspects of your work that I think is often overlooked is just how often that quotation of Stone’s is true of your stories. There’s loss and heartbreak and destruction, and yet it doesn’t lessen or negate the heroic actions or beliefs or ideals that anyone holds. I’m curious to what degree this is something that you’re conscious of and to what degree it represents your own philosophy towards life and how we should live?

What a great question. I wish I had a good answer.

I don’t think it’s something I’m conscious of, in that I don’t think about it while I’m writing – I’m just trying to write a story that feels “right.” But naturally, that means it does represent my philosophy toward life, because if it resonates with the way I see the world, then it’s going to feel right. I don’t know that I’d agree with I.F. Stone, there – I agree that history’s not a melodrama, but I wouldn’t say it’s tragedy. But there aren’t happy endings because there aren’t endings. Things always continue, life always goes on. Even if someone dies, life goes on around them, and whatever impact they had on the world will be a part of events as they continue.

Tragedy implies endings. Melodrama implies pat endings, though, and that’s where I’d agree with Stone. I don’t want endings that feel like everything’s been tied up neat in a bow, I’d rather have the sense that whatever the resolution, it’s a part of things that still move forward, that still change. Life is life – we struggle, we endure, we hope, we find happiness or lose it, but the struggle still goes on. If you quit trying, you’ll get buried by events, so you keep going.

I don’t think that’s a negative view of life – I think our key drive as humans is hope. That’s what gets us to keep trying, to hang on to what we’ve got, to make life better, to look for the next thing. That’s why we reach for better. Hope keeps us going, and despair is what makes people stop trying. In the end, we’re all going to die, so the point isn’t to somehow “win,” to reach an ending. When you get to the ending, you stop playing. The point is to keep playing, to try to do better, to surround yourself with people and work and things that you enjoy, whether it’s family or jewels or sunsets over the ocean. I’ll admit I’m more in sympathy with the people who want to amass good memories and experiences more than the people who want to amass wealth – I want to make money, sure, but the point of the money is to make a good life for my family and enjoy those sunsets and good food and music and friends and all.

But the point is to keep going, to live the way you want to and strive to make your hopes real.

And life isn’t easy – at least not if it’s going to be an interesting story – so I find I write about bruised hope a lot. But it’s the way people keep going in the face of adversity that makes them human. That’s the stuff of drama.

Discuss this story in CBR’s DC Imprints forum.  |  14 Comments

captain America Comics epic battles, harvey awards, initial conception, wildstorm

“Joker’s Asylum II: The Riddler” is, at a glance, a standard story about the Riddler. Set in the past before the Riddler began his reform in the pages of “Detective Comics,” it follows the Riddler as he falls in love with a woman during an art heist, and then finds that the one riddle he can’t solve is how to make her fall in love with him.

On that level alone, it’s fine. Peter Calloway (who comes to comics via writing episodes of the television show “Brothers & Sisters”) has a fun time making the Riddler squirm, and watching the Riddler have to solve a riddle himself is more entertaining than you might think. It shows off the flaws in his character, and at the same time makes him slightly sympathetic even though he’s still quite firmly (and at times horrifically) a bad guy, one who does his own share of killings along the way.

Killings might not be a normal part of a Riddler story, but it’s important here. That’s because there’s more going on in “Joker’s Asylum II: The Riddler” than you might think at first. Early on the Riddler is approached by a mystery figure to help put together a master plan to finally kill Batman. The identity of the figure is never directly given to us, but as the Joker-as-narrator explains at the end of the comic, we are told the answer. It’s a riddle within the story about the Riddler, and the identity of the figure is left up to you to determine. It’s a nice twist, and once you start to put together the clues yourself it’s a fun bonus in what would have otherwise been fairly run of the mill.

Everything here is carefully drawn by Andres Guinaldo and Raul Fernandez, who provided some guest art on “Gotham City Sirens” just recently. Their art is slick and lush, and there’s a surprisingly high amount of detail for both the characters and the backgrounds of the comic. Best of all, though, are all the little touches along the way. There’s an early scene where the Riddler first sees Jessica and his eyes behind his domino mask transform into two little red hearts while a dumbstruck expression comes over his face. It’s funny and it’s attractive, and it helped sell me on the look of the comic from that point on. The art is also a crucial part to finding the clues as to the mystery figure, and once you figure out the pattern it makes the art that much more impressive at how well it’s integrated into the final look.

Reading “Joker’s Asylum II: The Riddler” was much more fun than I had expected. I don’t know if the mystery figure story will continue into the later one-shots (although I suspect so), but regardless, I’m giving it a big thumbs up. It was a nice enough story even without the additional riddle, but that inclusion made me happy to have spent the time going back through the comic. I’d definitely like to see more from these creators down the line.

captain America Comics art heist, fun time, guest art, riddle

What Are You Reading?

Welcome once again to What Are You Reading? This week our special guest is Justin Aclin, editor of ToyFare magazine and writer of Hero House and S.H.O.O.T. First, which you can read on MySpace Dark Horse Presents. To see what Justin and the Robot 6 crew have been reading lately, click below …

Chris Mautner

DC was kind enough to send me a copy of the new collected edition of Wednesday Comics, though It took a bit longer to reach me as my office space moved to a new location. Anyway, reading through the anthology for a second time, I found myself being a bit more forgiving and generous to most of the stories I had previously dismissed or disdained. Overall, I think having the chapters bound together and printed on glossy paper actually rewards the contributions a bit more. That’s certainly the case with Ben Caldwell’s Wonder Woman story, which is the most formally daring and interesting piece in the book, though not necessarily the most successful.

No, I think my favorite piece by far is the Flash story by Karl Kerschl and Brenden Fletcher, which manages to reference both silver age superheroics and the soap opera strips of the same time period and use them to not only create a stirring adventure but connect on a more emotional level regarding Barry and Iris’ relationship. It’s a smart, invigorating work with flashes of genuine genius.

As for the rest of the book, it mostly exists on the level of “beautiful to look at, story isn’t much.” Some, like Paul Pope’s Adam Strange and Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner’s Supergirl, rise above this, but most — the Deadman story, the Batman tale, the Green Lantern bit — don’t. That’s not necessarily a deal-breaker. These entries are certainly enjoyable on an immediate “eyeball” level and make good use of the larger page (only the Demon/Catwoman mash-up and the Teen Titans tale sink like a stone), but there’s no getting away from the fact that most of these stories play in the shallow end of the story pool. I’m grateful for both the book and the experiment, but I hope if they do a sequel the writers take a few more chances as well.

Sean T. Collins

I was on the artcomix end of the street this week. Click the links for reviews:

Lose #1-2 by Michael DeForge: You can see why DeForge won the Doug Wright award for promising new talent in the first two issues of his one-man anthology title, featuring very funny comedy and very creepy horror.

Gags and Sloe Black by Michael DeForge: Weirder, more lo-fi zines from DeForge–still very funny.

New Painting and Drawing by Ben Jones: This may be the most viscerally exciting-to-look at art book I’ve ever seen.

Tom Bondurant

Captain America #606 (written by Ed Brubaker, drawn by Butch Guice) was a good start to a new storyline featuring Baron Zemo and a Bucky/Cap who’s feeling a little, shall we say, conflicted about gunning down ’50s Cap last time around. (That last bit, by the way, is recapped in a psychedelic flashback panel whose choice of homage was a very pleasant surprise.) So yadda yadda yadda, it’s Zemo Jr. vs. Cap Jr., and it gets those preliminaries out of the way efficiently by incorporating the adversaries’ character issues into the plot. That leaves just Zemo vs. Cap in the proverbial deadly came of cat and mouse, and that sounds like a pretty entertaining arc.

It was good for Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis, and Chris Batista to get the Justice League International comparisons out in the open in their second issue of Booster Gold (#33). Those scenes take up most of the issue, and of course they hit all the notes and beats of the JLI style … but at the same time, they work pretty seamlessly with the rest of the issue. (One difference which doesn’t feel that different is J’Onn’s first-person narrative captioning, which in the old days would have been a series of thought balloons.) The banter between Rip Hunter and his “granddaughter” Rani, and Booster’s battle with Brigadoom, both echo those JLI rhythms. However, “our” Booster’s interactions with his friends and colleagues demonstrate pretty clearly that (gasp!) he’s more mature, and Booster Gold doesn’t rely exclusively on previous work. This issue came out the same week as the latest Generation Lost, so the combination sends the message that Giffen is movingon, even if he’s not quite done with these characters.

Finally, I liked a good bit of Batman #700, although I have to say it’s not my favorite Batman centennial issue. That remains the first one I read, issue #300′s “The Last Batman Story,” by David V. Reed and Walt Simonson. (And it still comes in second to Detective Comics #500.) Set in the not-too-distant future, when Bruce’s temples are grey and Dick has graduated to Neal Adams’ “adult Robin” costume, it finds the aging Dynamic Duo going into action one last time to stop a color-coded conspiracy. Subsequent centennials were tied into ongoing storylines: issue #400′s gauntlet of villains, with Ra’s al Ghul at the end; issue #500′s takedown of Bane by Jean-Paul Valley; and issue #600′s “Bruce Wayne, Murderer” installment. So this issue #700′s story of time travel and Batmen Through The Ages was a nice change of pace, if a bit uneven. For example, I’m not sure why Scott Kolins went for a quasi-animated style when everyone else’s artwork was more “realistic.” I would also have preferred more story to the pinups, or at least more veteran Batman artists on the pinups. The Batcave map was a nice touch, though.

Michael May

This week I got caught up on a couple of friends’ projects that I’ve been meaning to read. The first issue of Mystery Society was a lot of fun. When I wrote about looking forward to it in an old Gorillas Riding Dinosaurs column, I mentioned that it sounded similar in premise to John Rozum’s Midnight, Mass (which is not at all a bad thing since I loved that concept and think there’s lots of room to play with it). It’s not surprising that Mystery Society takes a different angle to the Thin Man meets X-Files idea, but I didn’t expect the larger team approach that Steve Niles is apparently taking. Instead of just having a witty, wealthy couple solve supernatural crimes by themselves, there seems to be an actual “society” forming with the first member being Secret Skull from the mini-series that Niles did with Chuck BB (Black Metal) a few years ago. As a sucker for crossovers and universe-building, I love that.

I also read The Perhapanauts Special: Molly’s Story written by Scott Weinstein and illustrated by my pal Jason Copland. I’m not that familiar with these characters (I mistakenly bought the confusingly titled Perhapanauts, Volume 1: Triangle from Image thinking it was where the story began and haven’t yet gone back to buy Perhapanauts, Volume 1: First Blood from Dark Horse to correct my error), but I didn’t need to be to enjoy the creepiness and heroism present in Molly’s Story. It’s a standalone tale that makes me want to track down the collections I’m missing and read more about its main character.

Finally, I read Agents of Atlas, Volume 3: Turf Wars and I feel sort of the way I do after a great meal: comfortably satisfied and already starting to think about the next one.

Brigid Alverson

The Treasure of Peg-Leg Wilson

At the top of my stack this week is the Muppet Show graphic novel The Treasure of Peg-Leg Wilson. I’m probably not a good candidate for these books, as I never watched the show, but I get it, and it’s pretty funny in places. Roger Langridge’s art is sweet. All the characters have a lot of personality and even though he crams the pages full of figures and action, the threads are always easy to follow. I have a hard time seeing this as a kids’ comic, though. It’s crammed full of dated allusions—a line from Casablanca, a mock Gilbert & Sullivan skit, and the Electric Mayhem band, which is straight out of 1967. Do kids these days get that? The story is pretty nonlinear—there’s a treasure hunt, a Kermit impersonator, and a mad scientist who is trying to raise Monster’s evolutionary status, and the different storylines all get tangled up with Star Trek skits and odd little jokes. I think a lot of kids would have trouble following it, but I can also see kids getting a real belly laugh out of the goofy jokes.

After blogging about Ed Piskor’s Wizzywig, I downloaded the first two volumes of the graphic novel. He has a fascinating topic—the misfit who becomes a phone phreak and an early hacker—and I like the ingenuity of his protagonist, Kevin Phenicle. I’m only a few chapters in, but my biggest criticism so far is that there is too much narration. Big chunks of the exposition occur in text boxes at the top of the panels, or in thought balloons. Piskor is reformatting the comic as a webcomic now, and I’m looking forward to seeing how he refines it. His art is a classic underground-comix style, fairly realistic with a decent amount of detail, and you can see the R. Crumb influence, especially in the original, where he uses a lot of hatching. He’s using toning in the new comics, and his style is a bit more sophisticated—I think it’s a big improvement.

Justin Aclin

Thanks to the Robot 6 crew for letting me rant about comics in a public forum. The best thing about working in Wizard central is that you get access to every major release, every week. So I read a whole lot of comics, but these are a few of my recent and ongoing favorites.

Secret Six: I think Gail Simone is a criminally underrated writer. She’s one of the best things DC has going right now, and this is her best book—it’s hilarious and hardcore and unpredictable in a way that very few continuity comics manage to pull off. The way that she gets you to root for the bad guy, then pulls the rug out to remind you how bad they really are, it wouldn’t be a stretch to call it The Sopranos of superhero comics.

Fantastic Four: Marvel’s the spot for a lot of really exciting new-ish writers right now like Jason Aaron and Jonathan Hickman, and the fact that they’re able to put out work that’s so idiosyncratic and plays so much to their strengths says a lot about the way things are run over there. I’ve enjoyed a lot of FF runs over the years, but in just a few issues Hickman’s run has become my defining Fantastic Four. I don’t care if Thing never throws another punch, I’d read 100 issues of Reed Richards being the smartest guy in the room if Hickman was writing it.

Beasts of Burden: I’ve mentioned this in interviews, but Beasts of Burden is what inspired me to create S.H.O.O.T. First, just by virtue of how awesome it is. Jill Thompson’s artwork is clearly gorgeous, but what really floored me was how emotionally affecting Evan Dorkin was able to make it (translation: I cried) without it feeling like cheap manipulation. All that, plus monsters and magic and cute animals.

Ultimate Comics Spider-Man: This is my favorite Bendis book right now by a country mile. The shared universe has always been my favorite part of superhero comics, and I love the fact that they didn’t try to rebrand this book as “Ultimate Young Super-Allies” or something. It’s a book about Spider-Man, but Spider-Man happens to live with Human Torch and Iceman and a girl who used to be Carnage and down the block from Nova. It’s just so damn fun.

Axe Cop: This webcomic was hot poop on Twitter a couple of months ago, but I want to give it a special shout-out because it managed to do something amazing: the joke has not worn out at all. And you can entirely chalk that up to the fact that it’s written by a 6-year-old (Malachai Nicolle, and drawn by his much older brother Ethan). You never think, “Ho-hum, a gun that shoots a tornado of unicorns and bullets. He’s trying too hard now.” Because a 6-year-old has unlimited enthusiasm, and it will never feel like he’s trying too hard. His plot twists are brilliant. Please, keep reading Axe Cop.

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New Painting and Drawing by Ben Jones,

is one of my favorite books and would be among the items I would save from a fire, were my house burning.

I dusted off my copy of “Whatever Happened To The Man of Tomorrow?” by Alan Moore. I’m sure that there has been lots already said about this 2 issue collection from the mid-80′s but it still reads fresh.

Even though I’m a superhero fanatic at heart, I’ve been tuning into some lesser known “alternative” titles as of late.

I really like the new Eric Powell series Chimichanga. It’s one that took me by surprise and if you’re lucky, you still may be able to find the first couple of issues at your LCS. You’ll never look at circus life the same way again! Not to be missed.

The Bulletproof Coffin by David Hine and Shaky Kane is one of those “lying low on the radar” series. Twisted madness in a fun way not so uncommon with Chimichanga. The first issue should still be at your comics shop (if they ordered it).

Daytripper is another one of those series that even though you know the outcome after the first few pages, it grips your conscious and pulls you in. By the end of each of these issues, I feel like I’ve been violated. I don’t want it to end so abruptly! Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba work their mastery again in this limited series that has my inner voice reading it like they’re episodes straight out of the old Alfred Hitchcock anthologies.

Hickman’s FF is my favorite of his Marvel work…I’m looking forward to catching up on it after switching to trades-only towards the end of the Four Cities stories.

I’m looking forward to the Baron Zemo story. Ed can do no wrong in my book. Except, when it comes to team book like X-Men, although, I’m sure I will like it five years from now.

I disagree about the FF. When Hickman’s run is completed, it may hold up as a great run. For now, it gets an incomplete.

The last six issues have set up future stories. Even the characterisations for Ben or Sue are being set up for future issues as they have not done anything in the ten issues published so far.

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Definitely Not a Thin Week

Staying home sick two days this week means that I got quite a bit read & watched. Here we go.

1. Ghost Rider: The Last Stand

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