Author: Greg McElhatton

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Mosquito

By Dan James
152 pages, red and white
Published by Top Shelf Productions

Horror is a tricky genre, one that I think the majority of people who attempt have yet to master. So much of horror is psychological, meant to stir the emotions of its audience into unease, fright, and absolute terror. Often, it’s hard to explain why something worked other than, “It just creeped me out.” Reading Dan James’s new comic Mosquito, it was somewhere around the halfway point that I realized my body was subconsciously tightening up more and more as I turned the pages. With horror, that’s a good thing.

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Sea of Red #1

Written by Rick Remender and Kieron Dwyer
Art by Salgood Sam
32 pages, two-color
Published by Image Comics

I’ll admit it, I was a little skeptical. Admit it, if you heard “vampire pirates” you’d raise your eyebrows too, right? It just sounded, well, a little silly. I owe Rick Remender, Kieron Dwyer, and Salgood Sam a big apology, though. Sea of Red is not only a distinctly non-silly book, it’s one of the better debuts of the year.

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Atheist #1

Written by Phil Hester
Art by John McCrea
32 pages, black and white
Published by Image Comics

Every time I turn around these days, there’s some new sort of “final days” media being released. The end of the world is a popular subject, and while the exact nature of how civilization is going to fall, one of the central ideas that pops up in most of these is the idea of the dead coming back among the living. That’s one of the main conceits of The Atheist, but Phil Hester and John McCrea’s take on the idea is just different enough that it almost immediately caught my attention.

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Process Recess: The Art of James Jean

By James Jean
224 pages, color & black and white
Published by AdHouse Books

If you’ve been to a comic book store lately, you’ve probably seen a cover by James Jean. Jean’s covers are some of the most striking in the industry, gracing books like Fables, Green Arrow, and Batgirl. When I heard that he had an art book about to be released by AdHouse Books, whose design sense is always a selling point on each and every book, I instantly knew that this book would be a winner.

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Vernacular Drawings

By Seth
208 pages, color
Published by Drawn & Quarterly

You have to be patient if you’re a fan of the cartoonist Seth. Seth’s comic Palookaville (collected into graphic novels as It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken and Clyde Fans) is published once, maybe twice a year… but it’s always clear that each issue is a labor of love. I think that’s why when Drawn & Quarterly first published Seth’s sketchbook compilation Vernacular Drawings I was so excited, and why I keep coming back to it years later—the amount of time and passion that went into each one is always apparent.

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Johnson Sketchbook Vol. 1

By Dave Johnson
56 pages, black and white
Published by Atomeka Press

Dave Johnson is an artist whose work primarily graces covers on comics like 100 Bullets and Detective Comics. Aside from his work on books like Superman: Red Son it’s been a very long time since I’ve seen him produce anything but some thoroughly striking covers. That was one of the most exciting things about The Johnson Sketchbook—seeing more pencils and inks from one of comics’s most accomplished cover artists.

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Art of Usagi Yojimbo

By Stan Sakai
200 pages, black and white, with color pages
Published by Dark Horse

One of the best comics being published at the moment is Stan Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo. Sakai’s stories of a ronin finding his way throughout the roads and paths of Japan are engrossing, and Sakai’s able to write his scripts pretty near-perfectly every month. With all of the attention paid to Sakai’s writing, though, it’s nice to see attention being paid to his art as well. That’s exactly what we get with The Art of Usagi Yojimbo, an oversized hardcover that looks at Sakai’s creation from an artistic standpoint. As enjoyable as Dark Horse’s earlier art books in this format were (The Art of Sin City, The Art of Hellboy, The Will Eisner Sketchbook), I have to say that I think this is my favorite one yet.

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Yotsuba&! Vol. 1

By Kiyohiko Azuma
232 pages, black and white
Published by ADV Manga

Every now and then, strange packages arrive at my home. They’ve usually got scrawled notes attached to reams of paper, and the notes say something like, “You’re going to love this!” or “Wow, check this out!” So often the end result is one of disappointment, as my secret sources let me down horribly. I keep hoping, though, because every now and then one of the mystery packages comes through with something that’s a lot of fun, and that’s exactly what happened with Kiyohiko Azuma’s new series Yotsuba&!.

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Shadow Star Vol. 6: What Can I Do For You Now?

By Mohiro Kitoh
224 pages, black and white
Published by Dark Horse

It’s been a while since the last collection of Shadow Star was published in English—almost a year, and it was a year before that we saw the previous volume—and it’s safe to say that any momentum of interest and word-of-mouth may have gotten killed as a result. Now that the series is (hopefully) back on track, what better time to remind people of Mohiro Kitoh’s puzzling and intriguing series?

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