Category: Other Publishers

Written by Damon Hurd
Art by Rick Smith
56 pages, black and white
Published by Origin Comics

“My co-workers are crazy,” is a pretty common phrase bandied about by people all over the world. It’s not surprising; in the stressful location of the workplace, you’re definitely going to see people at their worst, giving you a bad impression of them. Damon Hurd and Rick Smith took the familiar complaint and took it in an entirely different direction, though. In the world of Temporary, this is an office where complaint is more accurate than people would initially believe.

Continue reading “Temporary #1”

Written by Alan Moore, Steve Dillon, Ronald Shusett, Bob Burden, and Dave Gibbons
Art by Steve Parkhouse, Steve Dillon, Steve Pugh, Bob Burden, and Ted McKeever
48 pages, black and white
Published by Atomeka Press

Let there be no doubt about it: the original incarnation of the A1 comic anthology was nothing short of spectacular. With each new issue, the one certainty was that you’d get a lot of top-notch stories by some of the best writers and artists in the business. And then, after six issues and one special edition, that was it. (Well, there was the not-quite-as-good A1 anthology mini-series from Marvel’s Epic imprint but we’re willing to forget it.) Now Atomeka Press has brought A1 back from limbo… but is it the same?

Continue reading “A1: Big Issue #0”

Written by Gabriel Benson
Art by Jeff Amano
32 pages, color
Published by Beckett Comics

Beckett Comics opened its doors with low priced comics offering a wide variety of subject material; movie tie-ins (Terminator 3), post-apocalyptic gang warfare (Ruule), and western-meets-fairy tale (The Ballad of Sleeping Beauty). Now with their new book, Fade from Grace, it looks like they’ve got a superhero book. But is it just more of the same?

Continue reading “Fade from Grace #1”

By Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba
72 pages, black and white
Published by AiT/PlanetLar

Everyone’s familiar with the genre commonly known as the love story. Books, movies, comics, music… there isn’t a form of art that doesn’t have the love story. What that means, though, is that as a creator you’ve got to keep a love story fresh and original or you risk losing a jaded audience. I think that’s what grabbed my attention the most about Ursula—it takes the traditional love story and really tries to do something very different with it.

Continue reading “Ursula”

Written by Sean Stewart
Art by Steve Lieber
8 pages, black and white
Distributed by Small Beer Press

I’d heard of Sean Stewart’s novels before Family Reunion came across my desk, but I must admit that I’ve never actually read them. I’d heard rave reviews for Mockingbird and Galveston, but like so many other books they were in a little mental file I like to call “I really should get around to this one of these days.” But then Stewart wrote Family Reunion, an 8-page comic illustrated by Steve Lieber that ties into Stewart’s new novel Perfect Circle. And the result? Well, let’s just say that two weeks later I had a copy of Perfect Circle in my hot little hands.

Continue reading “Family Reunion”

Written by Aaron McGruder and Reginald Hudlin
Art by Kyle Baker
144 pages, color
Published by Crown Publishers

I absolutely love Aaron McGruder’s comic strip The Boondocks. When I heard that McGruder was co-writing a graphic novel with Reginald Hudlin (screenwriter for the movie House Party), I was excited. When I heard that Kyle Baker (Why I Hate Saturn, The Cowboy Wally Show) was illustrating it, I was ecstatic. And when I got my hands on the book, well… good times were definitely here. It’s tough for something to live up to high expectations, but it’s even harder for it to exceed them. And that is exactly what Birth of a Nation did.

Continue reading “Birth of a Nation”

By Neil Kleid
48 pages, black and white
Published by Rant Comics

A strong hook is always good for getting a reader’s attention. Something different, something experimental, something to make it stand out from the crowd. That’s certainly present in Neil Kleid’s Ninety Candles, a comic where each panel is the next year in his protagonist’s life. The question is, once Kleid has the reader’s attention, can he keep it?

Continue reading “Ninety Candles”

Written by Gabriel Benson
Art by Mike Hawthorne
32 pages, color
Published by Beckett Comics

The story of Sleeping Beauty is certainly a classic fairy tale—a baby girl is cursed to fall into eternal slumber on her 18th birthday, with only a handsome prince able to break the spell. What Gabriel Benson and Mike Hawthorne have done, though, is moved the story out of its traditional home of medieval Europe and into a slightly more contemporary setting: the Wild West. And you know? It fits really well.

Continue reading “Ballad of Sleeping Beauty #1”

Written by Phil and Kaja Foglio
Art by Phil Foglio
32 pages, color
Published by Airship Entertainment

It’s been a while (the book was going to be published by a company that got bought up and then lost its publishing division), but Phil and Kaja Foglio’s comic Girl Genius is back. Trust me when I say that comics are all the richer for it.

Continue reading “Girl Genius #11”