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Yossel: April 19, 1943

By Joe Kubert
144 pages, black and white
Published by iBooks, Inc.

The “road not taken” is an endless source of interest to the general public? What if you had taken that new job offer? What if you hadn’t gone to the party where you met your future spouse? Sometimes the “what if” can be a lot grimmer, though. Famed comic creator Joe Kubert’s family came to America from Poland in the 1920s, but the family almost was not allowed into the country. With that in mind, his new graphic novel Yossel: April 19, 1943 asks the question, “What if my family had still been in Poland when the Warsaw Ghetto was founded?”

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Jennifer Daydreamer: Oliver

By Jennifer Daydreamer
56 pages, black and white
Published by Top Shelf Productions

Years ago at SPX I picked up a bunch of minicomics with the name “Jennifer Daydreamer” on the cover. Soon afterwards, it was almost like she’d vanished off the face of the earth, and I found myself wondering if we’d ever see Daydreamer and her self-titled comics again. I was pleasantly surprised, then, when earlier this year Top Shelf released Jennifer Daydreamer: Oliver. The nicest surprise for me was probably the discovery that she’d spent her years away from comics getting even better.

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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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Faction Paradox #1

Written by Lawrence Miles
Pencilled by Jim Calafiore
Inked by Peter Palmiotti
32 pages, color
Published by Image Comics

Have you ever felt like you had an unfair advantage? That’s the impression I got when I picked up Faction Paradox #1 from Image Comics. Unlike most of the readers, I suspect, I’d actually read author Lawrence Miles’s novels that first introduced the time-travelling voodoo cultists of the Faction (Alien Bodies, Interference), so I had a good idea of what to expect. For anyone else, though… I’m not sure this is at all what they’d expect.

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Goon Vol. 1: Nothin’ But Misery

By Eric Powell
136 pages, color
Published by Dark Horse Comics

All right, I can admit when I’m wrong. Every now and then you hear about a book and people keep praising it to the heavens and you’re thinking, “Yeah, sure, whatever.” Because all it took was something small, something you may not even recognize, that has somehow pitted you against it. I cannot explain why I never picked up The Goon when it was self-published by Eric Powell’s Albatross Exploding Funny Books, but it took a collection from Dark Horse to finally push me into action. And now, of course, I’m really regretting it taking this long.

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Arrowsmith #1

Written by Kurt Busiek
Pencilled by Carlos Pacheco
Inked by Jesus Merino
32 pages, color
Published by WildStorm/DC Comics

It’s usually when I write something off that it comes back with a vengeance. Take, for example, the Cliffhanger! subimprint of Wildstorm. It had just gotten to the point where I’d decided the line (essentially a creator-owned branch of Wildstorm) was quietly retired when it decided to come back with a bunch of new project announcements—and the book I was really ready to see was Kurt Busiek and Carlos Pacheco’s Arrowsmith.

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Chaland Anthology Vol. 1-2: Freddy Lombard

Written by Yves Chaland with Yann Lepennetier
Art by Yves Chaland
136 pages, color
Published by Humanoids Publishing

About three years ago, my local comic store got a huge shipment of French comic albums in. As each box was unpacked, the owner told me about the different artists that I might not have heard of before placing the books on the shelf. When he got to one box, though, he merely handed me one of each album and said, “Just take a look.” The four books were Humanoids Publishing’s Chaland Intégrale collections, and in just a matter of moments I could see just why he’d ordered them. Hopefully, now that they’re in English, a lot of other people are about to discover the same thing.

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Losers #1-2

Written by Andy Diggle
Art by Jock
32 pages, color
Published by Vertigo/DC Comics

If you’d told me ten years ago that the Vertigo line would be publishing an action-adventure thriller, I’d have laughed. It’s amazing how much the Vertigo line has diversified in the last decade, moving from just dark fantasy/horror and skewed superheroes into a line whose commonality seems to be a mature sensibility… in other words, a perfect home for The Losers.

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Sweaterweather

By Sara Varon
88 pages, black and white, two-color, and full-color
Published by Alternative Comics

Sara Varon is probably not a familiar name to most comic book readers. I’d never encountered her work until last year’s anthology Rosetta, but I found myself already hoping to see more of her comics before too long. Sometimes it’s almost like Alternative Comics’s publisher Jeff Mason is hovering over my shoulder and taking notes at moments like that, because now we’ve got Varon’s first graphic novel, Sweaterweather, collecting a great deal of her works to date.

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Swamp Thing: Dark Genesis

Written by Len Wein
Art by Berni Wrightson
240 pages, color
Published by Vertigo/DC Comics

When DC Comics announced late last year that they’d be reprinting Swamp Thing: Dark Genesis I remember hearing a lot of surprise that it was chosen to be next on the schedule instead of the final Alan Moore Swamp Thing collection. (Which did, indeed, show up a couple of months later.) Now that I’ve sat down and read the collection, it seems blatantly obvious to me; this is a collection of classic comics that should definitely be kept in print.

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