All my reviews are sales pitches for series’ first volumes even if I’m reviewing book three. No spoilers, but a new angle which I hope will intrigue. For current comics I rate LAZARUS by Greg Rucka & Michael Lark right up there with SAGA, VELVET and THE FADE OUT. LAZARUS VOL 3 below!
The Tea Collection (£12-99) by Andy J. Poyiadgi.
Such colours, 
such craft and such a surprise!
This demure yet decorous package Page 45 has popped together from Andy Poyiadgi’s two fold-out stories ‘Teapot Therapy’ and ‘On Reflection’ plus all three of his ‘Teabag Theory’ minis. Each of those – I kid you not – will need to be prised from a teabag threaded with string.
You see? You’re smiling already! I’m an absolute sucker for packaging.
You won’t need to tear them, just tease open at the top betwixt the twine then lift the mini-comic message out with two fingers! Or tweezers. Or chopsticks. Sugar tongs would be deliriously apposite but who even owns sugar tongs any longer outside of those serving Cornish Cream Teas? Actually one of my Aunts does. I think they’re silver, just like that spoon I was born with.
‘Teabag Theory #2: The Primordial Brew’ discusses Charles Darwin’s famous proclamation in 1871 that the ideal conditions for the origin of life were those of a “warm little pond” or – as Andy would have it – a slowly stewing pot of tea. You’ve got your receptacle and your geothermal juices then “Infuse with a combination of local minerals and organic compounds” is the tea leaves’ role. I hate to spoil a good punchline but “Allow to cool before evolving into millions of unique, self-sustaining organisms” takes the true bravado biscuit.
The other two I’ll leave you to discover yourselves but before we move on we’ve also added on of Andy’s various postcards to each pack, like ‘The Fine Art Of Facial Acting’. I’d be inclined to kill the director.
And so to ‘Teapot Therapy’, the largest component standing tall at just under A4 and folding out twice into what would make a smashing framed print on your wall. With its subdued farmhouse colours and plenty of pristine white space surrounding diversely clustered panels, it’s far from cluttered and not a million miles for Chris Ware in the classy department.
In it kindly Mrs Peartree, perhaps a little past middle-age, relishes the opportunity to share her love of tea time and all its traditions and trimmings – including her homemade cake, biscuits and more biscuits – with the man who’s come to fix her boiler. Of course that’s not all that’s happening because traditions have to come from somewhere, don’t they, and this is pure Alan Bennett ‘Talking Heads’ material.
‘On Reflection’, however, was cleverest of all. Folding out accordion-style it is a little like Paul Auster’s CITY OF GLASS (adapted by David Mazzucchelli for comics) in that it’s about the loss of self. A young man moves into an unfurnished apartment and buys an antique, full-length mirror. And a bed, table and two chairs, but that seems about it. His life appears to be very spartan. It is only gradually and subtly that Poyiadgi introduces the oddities.
“One day, I thought I saw my reflection fall asleep.”
Andy could have chosen any discrepancy of movement yet chose the one thing you cannot ordinarily do in front of a mirror.
The next is a faint “?OLLEH” coming from the mirror although Andy has reversed the shape of the lettering as well as its order into a true reflection. Fortunately for the longer pronouncements I can read backwards. (And I can recite the alphabet backwards within 3 seconds, but I digress.) Unlike the protagonist who is so drained that he’s pretty much lost the will to live, his reflection – now afforded the opportunity to make himself heard, does so. Because think on this: you can choose to stare at your reflection in the mirror any time you want; or you can choose to stop doing that any time you like and look at an infinite number of other things in books, in comics, on TV, out of the window, down your street, in the city, in the countryside between our cities, across the seas which separate our countries or up and down those foreign countries instead. Your reflection can’t.
All your reflection has to stare at is your ugly mug.
Very few mirrors face a window because, you know, lighting, so your reflection has probably never even glimpsed the outside world behind you.
So what do you imagine your reflection wants most?
SLH
Buy The Tea Collection and read the Page 45 review here
Pablo (£16-99, SelfMadeHero) by Julie Birmant & Clément Oubrerie.
“I need
a goddess for 10:30.”
You won’t get a line like that in most prose biographies!
You’ll get hardly any of this delirious dialogue.
Drawn with infectious animation by AYA: LIFE IN YOP CITY’s and LOVE IN YOP CITY’s Clément Oubrerie then coloured in predominantly sombre, sandy hues, unlike the other recent entertainment VINCENT (Van Gogh), this cover is the only visual element imitating Picasso’s own.
It’s also rather misleading in that the period covered here stretches from Picasso’s arrival in Paris from Spain in 1900, through his Blue Period, Rose Period then finally his African-influenced Period which ended in 1909.
The completion of ‘Les Demoiselles d’Avignon’ (1907) is a key moment kicking off that African-influenced period but otherwise you’re rarely given a glimpse of what Picasso’s painting, Cubism barely gets a mention bar a staggered Picasso receiving news that Georges Braque had invented it, and the cover’s much later Surrealist style of the late 1930s is obviously nowhere in sight.
Still, that’s marketing for you.
The climax / culmination is in fact Le Banquet Rousseau with Picasso threw with much mirth and excitement in 1908 for the elderly Henri Rousseau whose brilliance he recognised even those Rousseau had been the laughing stock of the Salon des Indépendants for two decades.
Still, that’s the art establishment for you. Picasso wouldn’t exhibit there, even though his friends did.
And that’s what this graphic novel is actually about: Picasso’s life, love and friendships. It boasts quite the stellar cast! Henri Matisse, much lauded as The Master, is the most establishment figure, André Derain pops by long enough to tantalise Pablo with an African mask, but other than that it’s the more boisterous or non-conformist likes of Gertrude Stein (so entertainingly scripted here!), Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob who apparently had the most almighty crush on Picasso and with whom Picasso moved in briefly. The apartment was so small that they even shared a bed, just not at the same time of day.
No, unlike the rest of the cast who seem to have been promiscuous bed-hoppers, Pablo had eyes only for artists’ model Fernande Olivier otherwise known as Madame De la Baume, née Amélie Lang. And it is an elderly, long-forgotten Fernande who is the narrator.
That Fernande ever escaped to Paris from her loveless marriage to a seedy, abusive reprobate who’d even steal away with her shoes to keep her at home is a minor miracle. Meanwhile Picasso’s wealthier, pretty-boy childhood friend Carlos Casagemar whose family funded their move to Paris falls too far in love with a woman with whom he has a tempestuous relationship exacerbated by drink and, after being rejected, attempts to shoot her before putting a bullet in his own brain at a public dinner.
This is a key moment in Picasso’s life and development as an artist because (I know I said he was relatively monogamous) he cheats on his own girlfriend with dead Carlos’ femme fatale and one big bust-up and a bucket of booze later one guilt catalyses an earlier, more deep-seated one also rooted in death. Et voila: the Blue Period which rendered him a commercial leper.
The other main character (!) and focal point of the narrative is the legendary dingy, dank and dirty Bateau-Lavoir mini-mansion in Montmatre where Pablo and Fernande spent most of their lives living during this period along with fifteen other tenants. There are moments of bed-bug-ridden squalor but Clément Oubrerie pulls out all the colourful stops when Picasso finally succeeds in courting a reluctant Fernande and first introduces her to his studio there.
Oubrerie’s occasional half-page interiors and Parisian exteriors are a space-filled marvel.
Same goes for the Catalan landscapes which provide a thrilling contrast to the city they spend most of their time in.
I learned loads and enjoyed myself thoroughly while doing so: I had no idea that they’d briefly (so briefly!) adopted a young girl.
It is, however, not what I was expecting so, to avoid the possibility of disappointment, I would remind you that this doesn’t do what it says on the tin – or in this case the cover. It does, however, leave you desperate for more as Max Jacob – in his role as part-time astrologer and tarot-card reader (an invention?) – warns Fernande of what lies ahead for them all post-1908.
SLH
Buy Pablo and read the Page 45 review here
Lazarus vol 3: Conclave s/c (£10-99, Image) by Greg Rucka & Michael Lark with Tyler Boss.
“The weather’s 
turning. It looks like a storm.”
“Is that why you’re nervous?”
“There’s talk that your Family will go back to Hock.”
“It will not happen.”
“…”
“I would very much like to kiss you. Would you permit me to kiss you, Forever?”
“Please.”
A rare moment of tenderness, that, for the Carlyle family’s youngest daughter, its military commander and pre-eminent soldier, assassin and bodyguard. That’s what being a Lazarus entails.
If Forever is formal it is because however effective she is in the field, her duties have deprived her of any emotional experience she might call her own. If she is nervous it is because she is finally allowing herself to have the first tentative steps of one with Joacquim Morray, Lazarus of the Morray family which may currently be allied to the Family Carlyle but which looks very likely to switch sides to the Carlyles’ most manipulative and bitter competition, Jakob Hock.
Then it won’t matter how respectful Joacquim is or how much Forever’s heart hurts: if their Families demand they fight, they will do so, if necessary to the death. That hasn’t happened yet but something so similar between others does, and it is heartbreaking.
It wouldn’t be half so affecting if GOTHAM CENTRAL’s Michael Lark couldn’t convey intimate and vulnerable affection as well as he commands the fluid balletics of hand-to-hand combat.
Lark is equally adept at an actual dance, the other rare moment of tenderness preceding this scene which Jakob Hock – with his flair for the dramatic, the cruel and humiliating – interrupts to devastating effect.
Oh, and the environment: Lark is one of my favourite landscape artists. His rain I rate up there with Eisner.
LAZARUS is set in the not-too-far future when the world has gone feudal again. Democracies have imploded, politicians no longer exist and the globe has been carved up between the sixteen wealthiest Families because money buys people, money buys technology and money buys guns. Money, technology and guns buy power and control.
The strategy Greg Rucka has employed to introduce this grave new world to its readers has been impeccable: LAZARUS VOL 1 showed us the focal-point Family Carlyle and two sharp-toothed vipers in its nest; LAZARUS VOL 2 broadened its scope to societal structure – the bottom-heavy pyramid of Family at the top, its wafer-thin secondary layer of privileged serfs useful to Family prosperity, then the vast majority deemed and so dismissed as “waste” underneath. This third volume widens its outlook to the geopolitical set-up as decrepit old Jakob Hock takes advantage of a schism within Family Carlyle by ransoming its one errant member while attempting to steal from his body the Longevity Code which has granted Family Carlyle and some of its serfs a vastly extended lifespan. See? Technology does buy power. You’d surely shift your allegiances for such a boon.
And that’s what this instalment’s about: loyalty and allegiances. During a Conclave hosted by the British Family Armitage on a luxury rig in the North Sea you’ll get to meet twelve of the sixteen Families – or at least their representatives – and by golly their current conflicts form a complex Cat’s Cradle!
But what I relished above all in this chapter was seeing the Lazari interact with each other in their downtime before, during and after a poker game while their heads of Family debate without their feared presence behind closed doors. For if this is a reversion to a feudal society, so the notion of Chivalry has returned too: specifically the etiquette of safe passage and the respect of knights for each other and conduct towards each other regardless of their masters’ aggravations.
This is evidently something that needs to be learned for there is a new Lazarus in their midst, one Captain Cristof Mueller who is arrogant and Aryan in a Teutonic way and he doesn’t care much for Li Jaolong, Lazarus of the Chinese Family Li, whose skills as a bodyguard he deems slim given that Li is – much like Professor Stephen Hawking – confined to a wheelchair and communicating via a speech synthesizer. Bristling from having been successfully played at poker, Mueller doesn’t mince his words which may include “genetic mistake”.
Yeah. Perhaps he should have considered that Jaolong wouldn’t have been selected as a Lazarus if he didn’t have certain compensatory skills. Cristof’s comeuppance is cathartic, I promise you!
Loyalties, then: Forever’s is to her family above and beyond all. LAZARUS VOL 2 ensured we understood both how and why. But is that loyalty reciprocated?
While we find out I return you to our opening feature and kiss:
“I hope… I hope that was all right.”
“Yes.”
“I was afraid…. I was afraid I would take of metal and oil.”
“That is not how you taste. Did I do it right?”
“Oh, yes. Very well indeed.
“You’re my first kiss.”
“And second. May I be your third?”
“Joacquim. I may not want to stop.”
“I may not want you to.”
SLH
Buy Lazarus vol 3: Conclave and read the Page 45 review here
Giant Days #1 (£2-99, Boom!) by John Allison & Lissa Treiman…
“Do you think,
if we hadn’t been given rooms next to each other, that we’d have ended up being friends?”
“Yes!”
“No.”
“Oh.”
That most incongruous trio of university chums Daisy Wooton, Esther De Groot and Susan Ptolemy return in this six-issue series! Just not quite as you remember them from their first three outings (all reviewed: GIANT DAYS, GIANT DAYS 2 and GIANT DAYS 3) simply because John has concentrated on the writing duties this time around and handed the pencils over to the talented Lissa Treiman.
I was, probably like a few people will be, puzzled by this passing of the artistic torch, so promptly went in search of answers. What I found was an excellent interview with John Allison that explains all: basically he wanted to cut down on his workload, and also the revelatory fact that John is 38!!?! Now I do think I’m looking reasonably well preserved for my beginnings-of-hoary old age of 42, but for those of you who have never seen John in the flesh, let me assure you that he does not look his years whatsoever. I met him for the first time late last year and I just assumed he was a whippersnapper in his mid-twenties, such was his fresh-faced demeanour. Granted, if I had thought about it, I would have realised that meant he started his comics career when we was about 5, but still, it does make me wonder if whilst researching the rum and uncanny antics that frequently beset the residents of Tackleford in his excellent BAD MACHINERY series, he hasn’t discovered the secret of eternal youth.
Anyway… I can’t imagine it was an easy decision to let someone else bring his creations to life, but John made a very wise selection in Lissa Triesman, for whilst she does have a decidedly different style to John’s – and that particular thought did arise a few times during the course of this first issue simply because I loved the his first three GIANT DAYS so much – she imbues the characters with just the same sense of madcap joy and energy, and crazy hair. It’s not an exact comparison, but I can see a distinct similarity in style between Lissa and Adrian Alphona, who has been doing such an excellent job pencilling MS. MARVEL. Actually, if John is going to continue his writing-and-not-illustrating career, now that is a title I would love to see him have a go at!
So, for those utterly unfamiliar with GIANT DAYS, who are Daisy Wooton, Esther De Groot and Susan Ptolemy? They are three students thrown together in the glorious chaos of Fresher’s Week who have already…
“…helped Esther fight off the head girls of four snooty private schools. Then we helped Esther get over a painful break-up and crushed the gross lad ruining her good name all over town. Then there was the whole incident where Esther joined Black Metal Society and accidentally got a weird mystical tattoo and…”
Yes, Esther De Groot is prone to the odd bit of drama. As Susan Ptolemy remarks, Esther radiates a ‘drama field’, which seemingly has sufficient gravitational mass to suck in all those around her. Not that Susan and Daisy haven’t got their own intriguing foibles and indeed… secrets, but there is no doubt who is their resident drama queen, despite her protestations to the contrary. In this opener, though, it’s a mysterious moustachioed and smouldering stranger called McGraw from Susan Ptolemy’s closely guarded past which reluctantly forces her centre-stage.
There’s a story there for sure, not that Susan’s sharing yet. And for those long-term GIANT DAYS readers wondering on the whereabouts of Esther De Groot’s doe-eyed devotee and most wishy-washy man on campus, Ed Gemmell, rest assured, he’s here. He’s just had the misfortune to be made roommates with McGraw…
Anyone who read the first three GIANT DAYS should definitely keep reading for this is a fantastic continuation, but I also suspect this six-issue series is going to win John legions of new fans, which is great news for him, because repeat prescriptions for the elixir of youth can’t be cheap.
JR
[Editor’s note: GIANT DAYS #1 has gone to second print after just one week on sale. But we have 20 copies left which you may avail yourselves of like so…]
Buy Giant Days #1 and read the Page 45 review here
United States Of Murder Inc. vol 1: Truth h/c (£18-99, Marvel) by Brian Michael Bendis & Michael Avon Oeming.
I don’t know 
about you but few things terrify me more than the mafia or its equivalents: the IRA and even the CIA etc. I don’t want to get sucked into worlds which leave me impotent and exposed yet from which there is no hope of escape. People with power who are way beyond accountability who can use you and abuse you and demand your submission.
From the creative team who brought you POWERS comes something equally dark but completely free from capes. In a power struggle between some very dangerous men it is so, so tense. I highly recommend it to readers of CRIMINAL.
Here the mafia were never subdued in America. Instead a considerable portion of the country was conceded to them to rule semi-surreptitiously and with impunity as long as they left the rest of the politicians alone.
Handsome young Valentine is sworn in as a Made Man long before his few years of service would generally merit it. But his father – and his father’s father before him – was of such stock that he was effectively fast-tracked. And Valentine is equally committed to the family.
His first duty is to deliver a message to a Senator in Washington DC. The message was in the form of a briefcase and that, however cryptic to others, would speak for itself. Valentine asked for his cousin to accompany him and reluctantly that was agreed. He didn’t ask for hitwoman Jagger Rose to accompany him but she was persuasive, effective, so reluctantly he agreed.
The message was seemingly delivered but another was sent in its place: the detonation of a bomb, blowing up said Senator. Nobody knows what it means. Or at least, no one will admit to knowing or to being its messenger.
The hunt for the truth behind the bomb blast is on and it’s a race against time because Valentine and Jagger Rose – although caught in its path – are the most obvious prime suspects. They’re wanted more dead than alive by the government, the families in general and their very own family in particular who claim to their faces that Valentine and Jagger have betrayed them.
Whom do they trust? Whom do you trust? Who has set whom up and why?
Oeming and Soma have delivered something dark, stark, brooding and sweaty: claustrophobic and unsettlingly lit. The colours are far from naturalistic and occasionally venomous – I’m thinking the intrusion of Valentine’s Ma on her son and Jagger Rose – while the first page’s flashback in chapter two was a wee bit Hernandez. Lots and lots of silhouettes. Quite a lot of crimson.
It’s jagged and nasty and grotesque. The faces are like masks when you can see them at all. So often all you get are the eyes, burning with bitterness or hatred. So much of this is instinctively delivered, expressionistic, like lines of reverse silhouettes or tiny side-panels offering background chatter, the rolling of dice and the cocking or firing of guns.
I haven’t told you everything. Valentine has been set up, I can assure you of that. But was it by his own don, another family, Rose herself or another party? Because in the very first chapter immediately after being sworn in to the mafia family and its innermost circle whom Valentine has been raised to love with all his heart, he is called to one side by his mother.
And she tells him a secret.
I’ve never known a series with so many reversals so early on then repeated throughout right to the very last page. I rate POWERS. I rate it very highly. I am big fan of Bendis to a degree that is almost unseemly. Pop him in our search engine and see for yourself!
But this is on another level completely.
SLH
Buy United States Of Murder Inc. vol 1: Truth h/c and read the Page 45 review here
Ms. Marvel vol 2: Generation Why s/c (£11-99, Marvel) by G. Willow Wilson & Jake Wyatt, Adrian Alphona…
“I see. Well,
if you’re not very good at it… helping people that is… perhaps you need a teacher.”
“A teacher? Wait… you’re not going to tell me to be a good girl, focus on my studies, and do istaghfar or something?”
“If I told you that, you’d ignore me. I know how headstrong you are. So instead I will tell you to do what you are doing with as much honour and skill as you can.”
“I can’t believe it. I thought you were going to warn me about Satan and boys.”
“I’ve been giving youth lectures at this mosque for ten years. If I still have to warn you about Satan and boys, I should lose my job. I am asking you for something more difficult. If you insist on pursuing this thing you will not tell me about, do it with the qualities befitting an upright young woman: courage, strength, honesty, compassion and self-respect. Do we have a deal?”
Ha, I am pretty sure that the sort of teacher the Imam had in mind wasn’t Wolverine or, indeed, Lockjaw. Yes, the Inhuman dog. But, those are exactly the first two teachers who appear to Karmala in her hour of superheroing need.
Also, despite the Imam’s words of wisdom, there’s no way of avoiding all the hard learning in Superhero 101 that needs to be done on the job, taking it quite literally on the chin. Much like real life, really. Still, having someone who’s the ‘best at what he does’ pro-offering a few tips can’t be too unhelpful, I suppose. And after their little team-up Logan obviously felt Karmala needed a watchful eye on an ongoing basis, so he dropped a hint to Captain America, who in turn then had a quiet word with Medusa, resulting in Karmala getting her very own teleporting watchdog!
Great to see this title sustaining the effortless sense of nonsensical fun that should be everyone’s teenage years which began in MS MARVEL VOL 1.
Meanwhile, battling the bad guys is only marginally less troublesome to Karmala than staying one secret-identity-in-perpetual-peril step ahead of her well meaning family, her strict, traditional dad in particular. He means well, but he’s clearly no idea what it’s like to be a teenage Muslim girl growing up in modern day America, much less a superhero. Karmala is in many ways a Peter Parker for her generation, an outsider looked down upon by the so-called cool kids.
It’s still very early days for this title obviously, but it’s perhaps not understating the quality of the writing to say it feels as wittily relevant to our time as the original puny Peter Parker, high school version, was back in the day. G. Willow Wilson certainly captures the whole “With great power comes inordinate personal danger and perpetual destruction of social standing” schtick perfectly.
JR
Buy Ms. Marvel vol 2: Generation Why s/c and read the Page 45 review here
I Kill Giants (£14-99, Image) by Joe Kelly & JM Ken Nimura.
Visually 
it’s Sam Kieth inked by Tim Sale.
There’s a little Sam Kieth in the script too as a feisty geek of a girl who insists on wearing bunny ears at home, in class and round at her friends’ house equally insists that she kills giants. Nor will she back down in the principal’s office. She thinks her kind, older sister patronises her, she hates her peers’ obsession with Britney Spears…
She’s an outsider, basically, hopelessly deluded and living in a fantasy world of her own.
Or is she?
SLH
Buy I Kill Giants and read the Page 45 review here
Oink: Heaven’s Butcher s/c (£13-50, Dark Horse) by John Mueller.
“Things are 
put in holes to be forgotten… The deeper the hole, the darker the truth… Until one day they realise the hole be not deep enough.”
I wish I could have found you that particular hellish hole online. Shot with such an acute perspective that it’s vertigo-inducing, a thick iron chain draws your eye down storey after storey of square, rusted-metal walkways into what seems like a bottomless industrial pit.
Thankfully I did light upon the vast and equally formidable exterior to Public Slaughterhouse 628 which used to be a school, it seems, complete with all the battlement barbed wire I remember so well from my own.
In case you haven’t gathered yet, you’re not here to have fun.
I can only assume that John “meat is murder” Mueller is a vegetarian. Originally published twenty years ago when we were still talking about factory farming, animals’ cramped conditions and the sheer horror of the slaughterhouse, this grotesque anthropomorphic horror story stars two distinct breeds of pig: those that have been bred to eat, so stuffed that their legs can no longer support their weight and so stuck in a truss on a trolley, and the slave race cross-bred with humans to breed those pigs which they’re then served up as dinner.
The consequent mad pig disease comes in the form of insubordination: questioning authority and the temerity of asking for answers. The punishment young Oink is dished out with in retribution is repulsive.
As the story opens he’s no longer young but locked in a cell about to confess his “sins”. The rest is all axe-flashing flashbacks.
Fleshed out with a great many extra story pages, pin-ups and process pieces (I’m not even trying to pun this one out), it is immediately evident how much hard work and painterly skill has been sunk into this. Admittedly you’re going to need to love the Simon Bisley school of painting (thick, muscular and positively oozing testosterone), but it’s as accomplished as any I’ve seen. Obviously the overall message I’d also agree with: can we not treat people like animals, please, and can we not treat animals the way we treat animals, either?
It is, however, somewhat blunt.
Also: I’m the first one to throw stones at organised religion’s mind-control and hate-mongering but I’m not quite sure how it’s a viable target in this instance!
I don’t think anyone really relishing horror will be disappointed, though. Includes mouths and eyes sewn shut.
SLH
Buy Oink: Heaven’s Butcher and read the Page 45 review here
Arrived, Online & Ready To Buy!
Reviews already up if they’re new formats of previous graphic novels. The best of the rest will be reviewed next week while others will retain their Diamond previews as reviews. Neat, huh?
The Swords Of Glass h/c (£25-99, Humanoids) by Sylviane Corgiat & Laura Zuccheri
Criminal vol 3: The Dead And The Dying s/c (£10-99, Image) by Ed Brubaker & Sean Phillips
Lost Property (£6-50, Nobrow) by Andy Poyiadgi
Low vol 1: The Delirium Of Hope (£7-50, Image) by Rick Remender & Greg Tocchini
BPRD Plague Of Frogs vol 3 s/c (£18-99, Dark Horse) by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi & Guy Davis
Reflections s/c (£18-99, Dark Horse) by David Mack
Big Hard Sex Criminals h/c (£29-99, Image) by Matt Fraction & Ziggy Chooch
Morning Glories vol 8 (£9-99, Image) by Nick Spencer & Joe Eisma
Wayward vol 1: String Theory (£7-50, Image) by Jim Zub & Steven Cummings
Superman Wonder Woman vol 1: Power Couple s/c (£12-99, DC) by Charles Soule & Tony S. Daniel
Inhuman vol 2: Axis s/c (£11-99, Marvel) by Charles Soule & Pepe Larraz, Ryan Stegman
Runaways: Complete Collection vol 3 s/c (£29-99, Marvel) by Brian K. Vaughan, others & Stefano Caselli, Mike Norton, Michael Ryan, Adrian Alphona, Takeshi Miyazawa
She-Hulk vol 2: Disorderly Conduct s/c (£9-99, Marvel) by Charles Soule & Javier Pulido
Wolverine: Origin II s/c (£14-99, Marvel) by Kieron Gillen & Adam Kubert
Neon Genesis Evangelion vol 14 (£6-99, Viz) by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto
The Heroic Legend Of Arslan vol 2 (£8-50, Kodansha) by Yoshiki Tanaka & Hiromu Arakawa
UQ Holder vol 4 (£8-50, Kodansha) by Ken Akamatsu
News!
ITEM! Colour in Comics: LIGHTEN UP by Ronald Wimberly – such a wittily rendered and cleverly constructed comic on colour. As in those of the spectrum and as pertaining to race. You’ll see, you’ll see!
ITEM! Funny! Artist Steve Pugh on getting so carried away with drawing that you forget what you’re drawing
ITEM! “When your lover may be dead, how long can you hold on to what remains? To whatever is left of you? A plane crash, a package, her dog, her voice. A notebook, his writer’s block, and heat-distorted summer memories of a search for Jumbo the Elephant and an absent father.”
That’s the synopsis for Kathryn & Stuart Immomen’s RUSSIAN OLIVE TO RED KING arriving in May. Please click on that link to pre-order. Because this also intrigued me: RUSSIAN OLIVE TO RED KING previewed. Then I saw this beautiful Border Collie and extraordinary quality of light…
– Stephen
