Army@Love vol. 1: The Hot Zone Club / Veitch (writer, pencils) & Erskine (inks)

Welcome to Afbaghistan, soldier.
The Bagh, as we call it here, is hot, dirty, and crawling with baghis armed to the teeth. And the li’l buggers ain’t scared of dying, neither, and will stop at nothing to take you with ‘em. So remember your basic training, make good use of our superior technology, and be ready [...]

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YAM: Bite-Size Chunks / Barba

YAM is a small boy, wearing hooded orange jammies and owning a pet TV set and a hover-pack. But I’ll see you that and raise ya – YAM is a comic book by Corey Barba told entirely without words. For kids.
Knowing these rather extraordinary facts, I expected YAM to be extraordinary. In a a sense, [...]

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Kingdom Come / Ross (art) and Waid (writer)

Red Arrow, Aquaman II, The Whiz, Braniac’s Daughter, Avia, Atom Smasher, Phoebus, Alloy, Magog, Pinwheel, Nightstar.
These are just some of the new super-heroes introduced in the Kingdom Come miniseries (now collected as a trade paperback), saying nothing of virtually every important hero – and many villains – from the DC universe. Little surprise, then, that [...]

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Monster Tech / TenNapel

Creature Tech cover

What makes for a good comic?
I’d have to stay story comes first, but – unlike a regular book – art also comes into it. This is rather obvious, I know, but there’s more: the pacing is crucial as well. It doesn’t have to be fast – or slow – to be good, but [...]

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White Shaka Boy / Brody

White Shaka Boy cover

In the 19th century, John Dunn, a white South African hunter, became quite a sensation when he was declared a ‘White chief of the Zulu’: the British gave him the largest piece of land of the thirteen chiefs of Zululand, and The New York Herald ran a piece on him in 1881.
Over [...]

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Usagi Yojimbo: Book One / Stan Sakai

Usagi Yojimbo is the ongoing saga of a lone ronin (a masterless samurai) by the name of Myamoto Usagi. The story takes place in Edo period Japan, a feudal period of harsh realities: the shogunate has been established, but the lords of several clans undermine it; the land is governed by law but still overrun [...]

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Mr. Monster: His Books of Forbidden Knowledge, Volume One / Michael T. Gilbert et al

It was a dark and stormy night when I stumbled into the mysterious shop in one of the city’s winding side-alleys, seeking shelter from the pouring rain. The lights seemed to be out, but a sole candle was burning, its flickering flame sending shadows racing up and down the jumbled heaps of books.
“Yessss? What do you [...]

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Boneyard Volume One / Moore

Michael Paris thought he had a lucky break when he inherited some land from his grandfather. It was located in the remote town of Raven’s Hollow, but that was okay – the municipality was eager to purchase the plot from Paris, and he was just as eager to sell.
However, upon arriving in Raven’s Hollow, Prais [...]

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The Tale of One Bad Rat / Talbot

Most of the comics series published revolve around superheros, with the occasional divergence towards science fiction, fantasy or horror.  As a result, the vast majority of trade paperback collections are in these genres. Most graphic novels, on the other hand, are either autobiographies (Stuck Rubber Baby, Blankets and even, in a sense, Maus) or experimental indie projects, [...]

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The Ultimates: Super-human, vol. 1 / Millar (writer) & Hitch (pencils) & Currie (inks)

The Ultimates Super-human vol. 1 cover

In 2000, Marvel comics launched their Ultimate Marvel imprint. Basically, the Ultimate version of Marvel’s lead characters attempts to make them more accessible to new readers by creating new origins for the characters, freeing them from decades of long, elaborate, and often illogical histories (this is known in the comics [...]

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