Heaven’s War

Written by Micah Harris
Art by Michael Gaydos
120 pages, black and white
Published by Image Comics

When Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill debuted their series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the book took off like a shot. Take a bunch of literary characters and have them work together to try and save the world from certain destruction. In many ways, then, Heaven’s War is the flipside of that idea. Instead of taking literary characters, writer Micah Harris has taken several literary authors that were linked together in real life—J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams—and has them save the world. In concept alone, this seems to be a sure fire hit.

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Shangri-La

Written by Marc Bryant
Art by Shepherd Hendrix
64 pages, black and white
Published by Image Comics

The music industry is like almost any other art form these days: a prime example of how the business side of art threatens to keep the creative side under lock and key. With iron-clad contracts, lawsuits, and bankruptcies getting more press than actual songs, it’s easy to see where writer Marc Bryant came up with the idea for Shangri-La, a story about when music goes horribly wrong…

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Lex Talionis: A Jungle Tale

By Aneurin Wright
48 pages, color
Published by Image Comics

We’re seeing more and more comics printed landscape, these days. I’m referring to comics where instead of being taller than they are wide, the book’s been rotated 90 degrees so now it’s wider than it is tall. It certainly gets the reader’s attention, but once you’ve gotten past the initial “ooh, it’s sideways” the question remains: is the comic itself any good?

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Wanted #1

Written by Mark Millar
Art by J.G. Jones
32 pages, color
Published by Top Cow/Image Comics

I think it’s safe to say that Mark Millar started making his big break into American comics when he started seeing how many reader’s buttons he could push. That’s not to say it was his beginning, of course, but the writer of books like Swamp Thing and Superman Adventures just didn’t make a splash the way The Authority and The Ultimates did. Now Millar’s releasing four new books through a variety of publishers, and the first of them has hit the stands. With all the hype surrounding them, the question now becomes—are they any good?

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Vampire’s Christmas

Story by Joseph Michael Linsner
Art by Joseph Michael Linsner and Mike Dubisch
48 pages, color
Published by Image Comics

With the month of December comes a lot of different holidays, among them Christmas. When it comes to Christmas, you can probably find more stories about it than any other holiday (although Halloween certainly comes a close second), most of them cheerful and upbeat. Maybe that’s what Joseph Michael Linsner had in mind when he created The Vampire’s Christmas, a graphic novel that is ultimately anything but upbeat.

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Ruule: Ganglords of Chinatown #1

Written by Ivan Brandon
Penciled by Mike Hawthorne
Inked by Rick Remender
48 pages, color
Published by Beckett Comics

It’s tough in this market to launch a new comics company and make an instant impression. Beckett Comics is certainly giving it the old college try, so to speak. Their first releases, licensed Terminator 3 comics, brought to mind some of Dark Horse’s earliest licensed books that helped push the company into the spotlight. Now Beckett’s releasing Ruule, a five-issue prestige format full-color mini-series… at $2.99 an issue. Now that’s bound to get some people’s attention.

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Dawn: Three Tiers #1-2

By Joseph Michael Linsner
32 pages, color
Published by Image Comics

I have a confession to make. Despite it being one of the mainstays of alternative and independent comics, I’ve never read Joseph Michael Linsner’s Dawn before. I always knew it was out there, but for whatever reason I’d just never picked it up before. Now that Linsner has his new Dawn: Three Tiers mini-series, though, I figured it was as good a time as any to start.

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WildGuard: Casting Call #1

Written and penciled by Todd Nauck
Inked by Lary Stucker
32 pages, color
Published by Image ComicsLove them or hate them, it’s hard to escape the ever-growing sphere of reality television these days. One of the most popular forms is the “talent show” variety (American Idol, Pop Idol, Fame Academy, Star Search, Making the Band, etc.) where potentials competing for a final prize are whittled down through auditions and viewer polls. So it really makes perfect sense, then, that in a world of superheroes we’d get the exact same thing… just the contestants would be different in what they’re going to show off.

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Whiskey Dickel, International Cowgirl

Written by Mark Ricketts
Art by Mike Hawthorne
120 pages, black and white
Published by Image Comics

Yeehah! You might be hearing people shout that out a lot these days, and it’s probably because they’ve gotten their first glimpse of Whiskey Dickel, International Cowgirl. On the surface, this is a really attractive book, designed to look like a nice leatherbound volume with an attractive picture of Whiskey Dickel herself on the cover, a nice solid paper stock, and a great little notation that its genre is “cowgirl fiction”. Of course, once they actually open the book, expect a lot more “yeehah!”s coming from their direction.

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Feather #1

By Steve Uy
32 pages, color
Published by Image Comics

For better or for worse, I’d never encountered Steve Uy’s art before Feather. I know he’d worked on the series Eden’s Trail for Marvel, but I’d never really gotten a good look. With the rise of manga in today’s market, it’s easy to have a lot of the recent arrivals in the field fall to the wayside… but in the case of Feather #1, this is one you won’t want to miss.

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