New Jason, Jeff Lemire, Hamish Steele, John Lennon (?!?) and more!
Secret Path (£23-99, Simon & Schuster) by Jeff Lemire, with songs by Gord Downie.
A tremendously powerful, album-sized book, silent save for the inclusion of Gord Downie’s lyrics from songs you can download using a unique code enclosed in a sealed insert, although such is Lemire’s exceptionally well wrought craft that you can hear the poor lad’s relentless chattering of teeth and his shivering rasps of exhausted breath, exhaled into the empty, freezing air.
And then it starts to rain.
Yes, then it starts to rain.
When he huddles at night alongside the long, rigidly straight and so exposed rail tracks, arms wrapped around his legs, there is no cover, and snot drips snorting from his nose.
There’s no cover, no company, no respite and very little hope save for his dwindling dreams of ever finding himself home.
To begin with these daydreams are more vivid and colourful, the starkest and coldest of blues and his black leather boots giving way to bear feet dangling idly above water and banks of soft, tufted green grass below an apricot-coloured sky. He pictures his family – mother, father, younger sister and baby sibling – welcoming him back from a bountiful fishing trip with beaming smiles and unbridled pride. Everything is as it should be.
Nothing has been that way for years.
If you’ve ever seen the Australian film ‘Rabbit-Proof Fence’ directed by Phillip Noyce, based on the book by Doris Pilkington Garimara, you will have a very clear picture of the appalling story being told here. I’m afraid it was all too true, as is this. On the book’s back cover we are told:
“Chanie Wenjack (misnamed Charlie by his teachers) was a young boy who died on October 22, 1966. He was trying to walk home, along the railroad tracks, trying to escape the Cecilia Jeffrey Indian Residential School.”
Several boys aged 7 to 12 attempted the same thing at my prep school, Packwood Haugh, such was its… environment… but always during much more clement nights, and with far fewer miles to travel.
“Chanie’s home was 400 miles away. He didn’t know that. He didn’t know where his home was, nor know how to find it. But like so many kids from residential schools – more than anyone will be able to imagine – he tried.”
Why would he do that? You know, apart from the not inconsiderable wrench of not actually being at home, in the arms of his loving family where he belonged?
Throughout the graphic novel we are given glimpses of incidents our runaway would rather forget. Not just his initiation into institutional “care”, either, though those scenes are repugnant enough: boys being stripped of their individuality with mandatory, ugly, perfunctory and identical haircuts; then stripped of all their clothes, privacy and dignity. They huddle, humiliated, naked and vulnerable under the communal showers, clutching their privates as the priest watches on.
We are never shown his face, then or late at night as he patrols the dormitories, pausing by bedsides. His disembodied hand flexes, and then reaches out. But we quite clearly see the awful fear in the young boy’s eyes, presumably not a one-off occurrence but a fear to be feared throughout each long hour of every successive day and then its subsequent night.
Predatory Russian Roulette.
Lemire’s recent ROUGHNECK was phenomenal, a real return to contemporary-fiction ESSEX COUNTY excellence where he all but began, with colouring as equally restrained and resplendent as this. There’s a starry-night splash page which had me agog. Here too Lemire packs a punch as emotionally charged as they were physically rendered in ROUGHNECK.
Not only that, but he has made maximum use of the size and shape of the format which was originally to have included a 12” vinyl album, wisely replaced (given international shipping) with a free digital download instead.
It begins, post-prologue, with the last vestiges of autumn – the few lingering, dried-up, senescent leaves – blowing over the open, exposed and austere rail tracks, the skeletal trees ranged like spiked railings on either wide side.
But it is its following page which I cannot find online uncut or at the right size which impresses me most. It shows four horizontal tiers of the same, unrelentingly straight (and so, by inference, infinite) railroad with no end in sight, as the lost lad approaches us, his eyes closed, his haunted thoughts inevitably elsewhere.
The combination of the vertically stacked, diagonally driven vanishing points creates a thoroughly unnerving, disconcerting, recurrent vista on which the eye cannot possibly rest, so inducing what I can only describe as a an involuntary flickering of vision in which you cannot help but skip alternate horizontal panels back and forth, up and down.
I’ve never seen anything like it in comics. The effect is akin to a stroboscope.
For my money this is best absorbed without the lyrics every dozen or so pages, but it’s far better to have something included to skip rather than something missing.
Proceeds go to the Canadian National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) which promises to publicise yet-to-be-revealed atrocities such as those alluded to within, and then preserve them in the public conscience alongside the Catholic Church’s systematic but consistently covered-up sexual abuse of young boys by priests who were sworn to celibacy, which is now thankfully well within the proven public domain so you cannot sue me for saying so.
In the interests of balance: I’ve not known the Protestant Church’s clergymen to be any less hands-on, nor British public-school masters, in my day at least. God save us from closed, cloistered cults.
SLH
Buy Secret Path and read the Page 45 review here
On The Camino (£21-99, Fantagraphics) by Jason.
“There’s a 
dead cat in the side of the road.
“A rainbow!
“I can see the sun, but where’s the rain?
Almost immediately:
“Ah! …”
The ups and downs and the truly unexpected: there’s nothing like a trek into parts unknown, and for the first time ever Norwegian-born Jason journeys into the realms of autobiographical comics, celebrating his 50th birthday by walking the Camino de Santiago.
I walked all 500 miles alongside Jason and relished every single second of his jaunty Spanish stroll, without having to endure his blisters or bed bugs. As much as I prayed for our pilgrim to reach his chosen destination, I wish he never had, for I didn’t want this ambulatory, countryside idyll to ever end.
I felt as if I had met each individual whom Jason encountered – as much as the adorably reticent and retiring Jason can bring himself to meet anyone. I dined alongside him, whether the meals be kitchen cook-ups which he had to cater and scavenge for himself, hostel-hosted group dinners, cheap Pilgrim’s Menu choices found around each town or the occasional, v. rare, solo self-indulgence on an à la carte menu!
Initially John finds it difficult to break the habits of a lifetime, preferring to walk in solitude anyway and make conversation in the evening, but until he grasps the easy way in – the routine of enquiring which nation each traveller is from and why they’ve chosen this special route, undertaken by many as a religious vocation – he can’t quite make that first move, and the first legs are full of actual silence or missed (and immediately mourned) opportunities to join in.
But as John wends his way, he gradually gets into his conversational stride and builds brief bonds with individuals whom he leaves behind in his pre-dawn departures or falls behind only to be reunited with them farther down the trail which is marked by handy yellow arrows which unfortunately don’t glow in the dark.
Top tip: take a torch for early morning starts, last late-night furlongs and extricating yourself from a hostel without disturbing anyone else. Packing in the dark becomes an art which John masters early on; choosing the right hostel, however, is one he never quite gets the knack of.
Oh yes, Jason’s real name is John. I think we’ll keep calling him Jason.
He finds plenty of time for imagining how conversations might unfold or events might play themselves out, before pulling back with “Nah! That didn’t happen”. I’ll leave those to surprise and make you chuckle.
He also finds time for self-reflection:
“Look at the view, you idiot! Try to be present for once in your life!”
Yes, nature’s eye-candy is one of the primary motivations for meandering around such spectacular countryside and the one thing I found odd is that, unlike Eleanor Davis’ recent YOU & A BIKE & THE ROAD, I didn’t experience quite the same sense of the changing environment. In one panel Jason exclaims simply “View!” but we’re looking at Jason instead!!! Funny!
The individuality and sanctity of some of the chapels he encounters is keenly evoked. Far from religious himself, Jason still appreciates the short church services with the passing of candles and exchange of hugs or their Gregorian chants, atmospherically interrupted by mobile phones. These services are sometimes part of a hostel’s lure and along some sections we discover selfless local devotees providing refreshments:
“It’s free. You’re a pilgrim.”
Such all-embracing, unquestioning generosity, also experienced in YOU & A BIKE & THE ROAD, is profoundly moving.
Jason, of course, has embarked on his endeavour not out of religious fervour but to celebrate his half-centenary, having only recently discovered nature. He’s beginning not to feel his age, exactly, but to acknowledge it with respect to others.
“I’m sunburned on my left ear. I say good-bye to all dignity and put a t-shirt under my hat.
“I meet Gorka and Minnie Driver again. We exchange experiences before they walk on.”
It’s not really Minnie Driver, but the similarity was noted on a previous evening.
“I can see myself through their eyes: an okay enough guy. But old enough to their dad, or uncle, let’s say.
“Or maybe they just didn’t want to walk next to someone wearing a t-shirt on his head.”
Ha! It may be Jason’s first foray into autobiography, but he’s retained his trademark bird and dog figures which seems perfectly natural, yet when each of the many statues popping up along the Camino is depicted similarly instead of as is, it brought a smile to my face. I don’t know why!
The big advantage, of course, in retaining the anthropomorphic aspect for Jason’s on / off acquaintances is that in his skilled hands one gleans a better sense of their demeanour and temperament, their essential character rather than a superficial likeness which serves no purpose in a comic like this at all.
As to Jason himself, there’s a tremendous panel in which he’s waiting outside the bathroom for a free shower after a 36km hike. Holding his wash bag in one hand, a towel draped over the other arm, he shows himself leaning back against the wall with an extraordinary sense of weight for such lean lines, and an expression which is quintessentially one of quiet composure, like a car idling in neutral.
Jason will be at The Lakes International Comic Arts Festival 2017 this October, so feel free to ask him how on earth he expresses so much so minimally, with what is the very opposite of exaggeration.
And it really is free if you catch him signing in our Georgian Room in the Kendal Clock Tower at 2pm that Saturday, which I’ve not been authorised to announce yet.
I’m ever so naughty!
SLH
Buy On The Camino and read the Page 45 review here
Pantheon : The True Story of the Egyptian Deities (£12-99, Nobrow) by Hamish Steele.
Oh 
dear gods, this is funny! I’m quite sure it shouldn’t be, but it is.
“Warning: PANTHEON contains incest, decapitation, suspicious salad, fighting hippos, lots of scorpions, and a golden willy.”
There’s something for everyone, then.
Always wise to read the back-cover blurb, and they’re not making it up. Believe it or not, the “suspicious salad” is the worst offender of the lot, tossed without any mind to Health & Safety; in fact, quite the opposite.
But believe it or not (reprise), Hamish Steele isn’t making this up, either. Although he’s mined the mythology for maximum mirth – lobbing in every anachronistic, artistic armament he can find – this is quite honestly how the Egyptian legends of creation and indeed procreation played themselves out without any heed to the niceties of familial decorum, marital boundaries, genetic wisdom or avuncular beneficence.
Prompted by the promise above I immediately searched the hand-dandy family tree of gods and goddesses arranged in such a way that they are linked as sibling, married to, child of, or even same guy. I wondered how many parallel lines I would find. The only way in which I was at all disappointed was in a narcissistic failure of the “same guy” to be married to himself. Otherwise…? All bets are off.
In particular Isis and Osiris really did keep it in the family, and their expressions in that timeline – one to-camera – are priceless.
The prologue’s punchline – the very act of creation – is equally iconoclastic, perfect in its pithiness, and its use of a very rude word sets the tone admirably for all that will follow; little of which is, in any shape-changing form, admirable.
Still, you can’t create an omelette without breaking eggs or cleaving heads and caving in the skulls of your followers, and the same goes for new worlds and new world orders, apparently. Transitionally the mortal Egyptians are to be presided over by a pantheon of four second-generation gods, Osiris being their first pharaoh married to his sister Isis, with their brother and sister, Set and Nephthys, equally entwined.
What one expects most from such tales of divine intervention and antiquity is solemnity, majesty, Dire Declarations in Capital Letters and Multisyllabic Words.
Instead you’ll be reminded, again and again, that Set is the most unbelievable cock.
Here’s Ra / Atum, sun-god supreme and the top-tabler in this celestial convention:
“Young Osiris.
“It is now up to you and your siblings to maintain the balance of Egypt during the transitional period between the Eras of God and Man. And one day you shall join us in Duat too.
“Now, don’t fuck it up.”
Young Set, to camera – immediately, gleefully and not for the last time:
“I’m gonna fuck it up.”
Set is the king of contradiction, his ambition for power limited by nothing whatsoever, certainly not Osiris’ oblivious gullibility. It doesn’t just end in tears; it begins in tears with Set dethroning Osiris almost immediately through blatant, see-through trickery and in spite of Isis’ repeated warnings.
Guys, please listen to your wives!
The problem, of course is that Isis is not only Osiris’ missus but his sister too, and no one listens to their sisters except sisters. Here are sisters Nephthys and Isis discussing their current conundrum:
“I’m sorry about my husband, Isis. I dunno what Set has against Osiris.”
“Maybe it’s to do with when Osiris kicked Set last week.”
“Maybe… Or maybe it’s because I’ve been sleeping with Osiris.”
“Eww, Nephy! He’s your brother!”
“So is Set!”
“He’s mine too!”
Meanwhile, as I said, Set’s seized power and Isis is deeply pissed off:
“That’s not your throne!”
“The pharaoh is gone and so his crown passes to his brother! Which is me!”
“You’d be a crap pharaoh!”
“I know! It’s hilarious! You can still be queen if you want, sis. You’re a solid eight.”
We’re nowhere near the suspicious salad yet, although it is fruit born of similarly inbred shenanigans which are so outrageous / extreme that I cannot possible write about them in public. So instead I’m going to roll out one of my favourite words: transgressive. If you’ve been enjoying the three MEGG & MOGG books, BOY’S CLUB or Joan Cornell’s MOX NOX and ZONZO, then I would humbly submit that this morass of family misfortune is right up your back alley.
I wonder if this is why Nobrow Publishing gave birth to its all-ages imprint Flying Eye? You certainly wouldn’t want this falling into the same tiny hands as HILDA.
Hamish Steele’s designs for these gods are exquisite (and perversely ever so attractive to children!), some of them sampling Matt Groenig’s penchant for wide-eyed, bulbous cartooning while others like uncle Set and nephew Horus lend themselves to equally expressive mischief with Horus’s head coming off like an innocent greetings-card blue tit in black; one which will certainly start singing more than the dawn chorus once Horus is on the receiving end of Set’s flamboyant flagrancy.
At which point I would just remind you that although this is a mesh of many mythologies from different localities, what’s here was there: Extraordinarily, Hamish is merely re-presenting these extant legends presented by and to the Egyptian populace in all seriousness (in fact, more than seriousness: with all the sacred weight which comes with the divinity they describe) in an irreverently off-hand and jocular fashion whose comedy lies in that very contrast, the startlingly sexual nature of what he’s disinterred, and the lightning-bolt timing and sometimes contemporary context with which he delivers it.
Additionally, some of the jokes are more subtle than others, Steele leaving this piece of minor genius until quite close to the end when Horus comes a cropper in a manner not so dissimilar to Anglo-Saxon King Harold, as made most comically famous by the late and indescribably great Stanley Holloway.
“Horus! Your eye!”
“What are you talking about? My eye is fine!”
Yup, looks fine to me.
“No! Your other eye!”
“My… My other eye?”
This ‘what other eye?’ joke is predicated upon the fact that Egyptian paintings universally presented all personages in profile when it came to their heads and that those thus characterised might be unaware that they even had a second, unseen eye.
That’s ever so deliciously meta.
Finally, thanks to Steele’s remarkable restraint in leaving this so long, it was only at this juncture – forgive me for being so slow! – that I realised I was reading what must surely be the first comic ever to be to be conducted throughout using profile-only faces.
Except for the very next page.
You are hearing a round of rattling, full-throttle and unequivocal applause.
SLH
Buy Pantheon: The True Story of the Egyptian Deities and read the Page 45 review here
I Killed Adolf Hitler h/c (£14-99, Fantagraphics) by Jason.
A luxurious new 
hardcover edition with a satisfyingly tactile debossed flag, released in time for the launch of Jason’s autobiographical perambulations ON THE CAMINO, this is far closer in tone and content to the likes of Jason’s LOW MOON, IF YOU STEAL and ATHOS IN AMERICA etc, all of which come highly recommended.
Calmly coloured by Hubert and told in a clean and relaxed, four-tiered, eight-panel grid, this ingenious, comedic dance is the last story you’d expect from a title like that, except that it does feature quite a lot of sudden deaths!
Set in a world where earning a License To Kill is as legal as a license to practice medicine, Jason clearly demonstrates why conspiracy to murder – to hire someone to kill someone else for you – is against the law here in the UK, Ireland and most American States. It’d be highly lucrative and the waiting list longer than the average builder’s. Everyone would be at it and for the most spurious reasons. But if you can hire someone to off your missus because you’re bored of your relationship, you’d better look out for tell-tale signs of ennui in your next lover’s eyes.
The star is one such hitman who – after a snappy succession of assignments, each with its own punchline – is paid to travel back in time and shoot Adolf Hitler.
He botches it.
Instead Adolf escapes in the same transtemporal globe and ends up back in the here and now. The delight of this, however, is that this isn’t really about Adolf at all, and wherever and whenever the various time-travellers end up, the majority of the action occurs in the present.
But how does everyone get here if the machine takes fifty years to power up after each two-way journey?
It’s actually a love story, told, deadpan, with the absurdist wit of Lewis Trondheim.
SLH
Buy I Killed Adolf Hitler and read the Page 45 review here
Lennon: The New York Years h/c (£17-99, IDW) by David Foenkinos, Eric Corbeyran & Horne.
“At first
I found it really strange to live at Mimi’s. My mother never explained anything to me, I didn’t dare ask any questions.
“I must have thought that it was going to be for two or three days like before.”
His tiny suitcase remains on the bed, packed and ready to go, or perhaps never unpacked in the first place.
“I lived my whole childhood with a sensation of everything being temporary. I was always on deposit somewhere.”
That’s a fine piece of writing, and the art throughout is faultless, especially in the quiet moments. Horne is an exceedingly fine portrait artist; moreover, this softly shaded art, dappled with light, boasts a suppleness and deftness of touch which eludes so many engaging in such photo-realistic comics, inevitably in this case relying heavily on reference material. Too often the desperation to achieve likeness causes each rendition to become rigid and their flow as a sequence to become heavy and static, but the lines and light here are as pliant as you like.
Occasionally there’s the same image repeated a little too often but I can happily put that down to snap-shot recollection which is something that flickers through my own mind, and is essentially what Lennon is supposed to be engaged in: offloading to his therapist in a series of sessions, the first of which takes place just before the birth of his second son, Sean, to Yoko Ono, on John’s 35th birthday, October 9th 1975.
And therein lies my problem with this book and its central conceit: if Lennon were writing an extended, contemplative article for publication, or even as a personal exercise, it might work, but here he is far too lucid and fluent to be talking off-the-cuff to a counsellor who doesn’t get a word in edgeways. There’s no prompting, he just goes off on one – a very long one – in a measured, highly structured fashion, at first relating the self-confessed absence of any paternal feelings towards his first son, Julian, to his own abandonment as a child by his father and then his mother.
It’s very well expressed by both artist and writers – too well expressed by the writers – as the father then returns to use Lennon as a lure to regain his wife, with no thought whatsoever as to the further destabilising effect (after so many) on their poor son.
There are four terrifically well chosen and delineated panels on Horne’s part which depict the young lad waiting for his mother to return in Aunt Mimi’s entryway, dressed in school uniform and cap as if he were waiting outside the headmaster’s office – for hours.
The door doesn’t open.
Amongst the other things that irk me, however, is that that this isn’t a reflection on Lennon’s New York Years as its title professes. It may be a reflection from his New York Years with occasional allusions to them, but they’re far from the focus which instead sprawls over his years as a Beatle, yet with but a two-page footnote about ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, John casually, lazily asserting (but not necessarily erroneously, for sure!) that it was “the most revolutionary album of all time” without any explanation as to why – a subject about which you could easily fill a five-hour documentary.
I did nod thoughtfully to the notion that Lennon’s uptake of spectacles – after years of enduring blurred vision for the sake of vanity – was a direct result of a film he agreed to take a part in, that character being one who wore glasses.
But to return to the credibility of the conceit, when one sits down to write something (editing out all the false starts etc), one hopefully comes up with something a lot more coherent than most of us manage in conversation, with a wider vocabulary to boot. But not only is this too considered for verbal therapy sessions which usually involve some degree of faltering then coaxing, it’s also too well phrased and the language didn’t seem like Lennon’s, as spoken, at all.
The overall effect is to leave this feeling false, contrived and untrustworthy so I stopped trusting its accuracy let alone engaging in it as entertainment and, in the end, this falls through the cracks of being neither one thing nor the other.
Wish I could have found the Lennon-as-a-lad art online for you, though: it truly is tremendous.
SLH
Buy Lennon: The New York Years h/c and read the Page 45 review here
Hawkeye vol 1: Kate Bishop s/c (£15-99, Marvel) by Kelly Thompson & Leonardo Romero, Michael Walsh.
“Five A.M. 
is my nightmare.
“It shouldn’t even be a time.”
This is a truth, for which I apologise to all our loyal postmen and postwomen (in a trade rather than evolutionary sense) while truly appreciating all your pre-dawn delivery diligence. Too many of us take our Royal Mail maestros for granted, including myself until I typed both those sentences which have no bearing whatsoever on this comic.
It is a bright and beautiful thing. It is refreshingly free from clutter and it clatters on at a right old clop with all the attention span that you’d expect from a teenage narrator who won’t be distracted from her singular mission by anything other than abs. Mmmm…. abs.
Kate Bishop is focussed. Kate Bishop can see what few others see. What she sees with her hawk-eyed, instantaneous intuition-vision is presented by Romero and Bellaire in shutter-speed, potential purple targets which Thompson wittily designates as ‘Innocent Bystander’, a car’s ‘Poorly Covered Plate’, ‘Security Alarm’, ‘Smoke Detector’, ‘Glass Jaw’ and ‘More Hot Abs’.
In righting wrongs, master-archer Kate Bishop will take care of business meticulously, efficiently and without warning whilst wearing purple and counting abs.
I am not at all obsessed with abs.
Speaking of business, YOUNG AVENGERS’ Kate Bishop is setting up shop as a private detective in California around Los Angeles’ Venice Beach. Where there are lots of… pecs. She has no license, she has dubious investigative skills, but what she does have on her side is a certain chutzpah and the ability to improvise swiftly.
Although living up to her previous appearances in Fraction’s and Aja’s HAWKEYE would be an impossible act, this still kept me mightily amused to start to finish. That series remains the only superhero comic which Page 45 has ever allowed into our window, largely because it wasn’t really a superhero comic but – in its true, theatrical sense – a comedy of manners so contemporarily designed by Aja.
This is equally contemporary, dealing as it does with the scum who harass women online, for more of which I would refer you to THE WICKED + THE DIVINE VOL 3. The art by Romero and coloured by Bellaire is a mischievous dream which is ever so light on extraneous clutter and ever so sharp on sequential-art subtlety which is perfectly apposite for a clue-based drama. I cannot believe it would be intentional but in one panel I even got whiffs of Jack Kirby romance comics (ask me).
Here’s a good joke. Kate Bishop walks into a bank.
“Excuse me, I’m here to make a deposit. Do you accept… sass?”
We do indeed. This sort of sass is acceptable.
SLH
Buy Hawkeye vol 1: Kate Bishop s/c 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 information we receive displayed as ‘Publisher Blurb’.
The Wicked + The Divine vol 5: Imperial Phase Part 1 s/c 
(£14-99, Image) by Kieron Gillen & Jamie McKelvie
Providence vol 2 h/c (£19-99, Avatar) by Alan Moore & Jacen Burrows
Spill Zone vol 1 h/c (£17-99, FirstSecond) by Scott Westerfeld & Alex Puvilland
The Adventures Of John Blake: Mystery Of The Ghost Ship h/c (£14-99, David Fickling Books) by Philip Pullman & Fred Fordham
Bone: Rose (£11-99, Scholastic) by Jeff Smith
Fantasy Sports vol 3: The Green King h/c (£12-95, Nobrow) by Sam Bosma
Nothing Lasts Forever (£13-99, Image) by Sina Grace
Parker: The Outfit s/c (£17-99, IDW) by Richard Stark & Darwyn Cooke
StarDrop vol 2: A Place To Hang My Space Suit (£8-99, I Box Publishing) by Mark Oakley
Abe Sapien vol 9: Lost Lives And Other Stories (£17-99, Dark Horse) by Mike Mignola, John Arcudi, Scott Allie & Michael Avon Oeming, Dave Stewart, various
Justice League Of America: The Road To Rebirth s/c (Rebirth) (£13-99, DC) by Steve Orlando, Jody Houser & various
Suicide Squad vol 2: Going Sane s/c (Rebirth) (£14-99, DC) by Rob Williams & Jim Lee, various
Mighty Thor vol 2: Lords Of Midgard (UK Edition) s/c (£14-99, Marvel) by Jason Aaron & Russell Dauterman, Rafa Garres, Frazer Irving
New Avengers By Bendis Complete Collection vol 5 s/c (£31-99, Marvel) by Brian Michael Bendis & Stuart Immonen, Jim Cheung, Joe Quesada, Mike McKone, Mike Mayhew, Marko Djurdjevic, Bryan Hitch
Spider-Man / Deadpool vol 2: Side Pieces s/c (£14-99, Marvel) by various
Mobile Suit Gundam Thunderbolt vol 3 (£9-99, Viz) by Yashuo Ohtagaki
Crossed + 100 vol 2 (£14-99, Avatar) by Simon Spurrier & Fernando Heinz, Rafael Ortiz
Crossed + 100 vol 3 (£17-99, Avatar) by Simon Spurrier & Rafael Ortiz, Martin Tunica
News!
ITEM! First-ever all-comics issue of The New York Times Magazine is online for you to devour!
Comics creators include Kevin Huizenga (above), Tillie Walden, Sammy Harkham, Tom Gauld, Franceso Frankavilla and ASTERIOS POLYP’s David Mazzucchelli.
ITEM! Comics creator Jason (see two books above) will be attending LICAF 2017 in October
So that’s a bit of a rarity!
I may made an exclusive, unauthorised announcement about this in my ON THE CAMINO review above. By which I mean, I did!
– Stephen
