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Paul Has A Summer Job

By Michel Rabagliati
144 pages, black and white
Published by Drawn & Quarterly

It’s always fascinating to watch someone come into comics at an older age than most others, because their approach is fueled by completely different things. Michel Rabagliati read French graphic albums as a child, but it wasn’t until much later in his life that he started first creating comics for Drawn & Quarterly. With each work the audience has gotten to watch Rabagliati refine his skills, and his newest graphic novel, Paul Has A Summer Job, is easily his most accomplished creation to date.

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Too Much Hopeless Savages #1

Written by Jennifer Van Meter
Art by Christine Norrie and Sophie Campbell
32 pages, black and white
Published by Oni Press

Does anyone else remember when every other ’80s sitcom would have a special television movie involving another country and a thief hiding stolen goods in a main character’s bag? I mean, who else didn’t love The Facts of Life Down Under when the stolen opal was hidden in Natalie’s backpack, but she was lost in the Australian Outback? Or in the Family Ties Vacation where Alex was attending Oxford for the summer (and the rest of the family inexplicably comes along) but spies had hidden secret information in Mallory’s brush? Well, I think Jennifer Van Meter remembers these perhaps a bit too well… although this could actually be to our advantage.

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Criminal Macabre: A Cal McDonald Mystery #1

Written by Steve Niles
Art by Ben Templesmith
32 pages, color
Published by Dark Horse

This book had to be one of the easiest sells in the universe. “Hi, we’re Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith; we did this little book called 30 Days of Night. Now we’d like to do a comic mini-series about Niles’s prose character Cal McDonald, you see he… you want it? Don’t you want to know the story, first?” I exaggerate, of course, but it’s easy to see why Dark Horse would want to scoop Criminal Macabre up for their horror line. So in some ways, the question is… will lightning strike twice?

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Alien Nine Vol. 1

By Hitoshi Tomizawa
224 pages, black and white
Published by CPM Manga

One gets the impression that Tomizawa has seen one too many “cute girls save the world” stories. That’s my reasoning for the thought process behind Alien Nine, at any rate. At a casual glance, it looks like your typical entry in that genre, with 6th graders and matching outfits and evil aliens. It’s when you start adding in the revulsion factor, though, that one first gets the hint that this is not quite what you were expecting, here…

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B.P.R.D.: The Soul of Venice

Written by Miles Gunter and Michael Avon Oeming, with Mike Mignola
Art by Michael Avon Oeming
32 pages, color
Published by Dark Horse

What happens when you’ve got more cool characters and ideas than you know what to do with? In the case of Mike Mignola, it seems, you let some other talented creators play with them. That’s what goes on with the Hellboy supporting cast when the lead character isn’t around, in Dark Horse’s recent B.P.R.D. mini-series and one-shots. And when you see who’s on board for the one-shots, well, you’ll see why any Hellboy fan still needs to get these.

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Strangehaven #15

By Gary Spencer Millidge
32 pages, black and white
Published by Abiogenesis Press

Good things come to those who wait. There are some books for which a new issue is reason to celebrate, like Jason Lutes’s Berlin or Daniel Clowes’s Eightball. Another book that’s definitely on that list is Gary Spencer Millidge’s Strangehaven; if a trade-off for a speedy frequency is intensely high quality, I don’t mind that one bit. It just makes the payoff all the sweeter.

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Ranma 1/2 Vol. 1

By Rumiko Takahashi
312 pages, black and white
Published by Viz

If you had to pick Japanese comic book superstar Rumiko Takahashi’s greatest success, I think most would agree that it’s Ranma 1/2. With 34 collected volumes of comics, to say nothing of the 7-season/143-episode animated series, and multiple theatrical and direct-to-video stories, there’s a whole lot of Ranma 1/2 material out there. It’s best to start at the beginning, though, and with Viz’s new edition of Ranma 1/2 having just hit stores, there’s never been a better time to take a look at what started it all.

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Private Beach #7

By David Hahn
24 pages, black and white
Published by Slave Labor Graphics

If you try and compare something to the television show “Twin Peaks”, all most people seem to remember was the over-the-top aspects of the show and that it became incomprehensibly strange and sputtered out into oblivion. What most people don’t remember is that the first season of “Twin Peaks” was a tightly-written show where character interactions kept audiences glued to their television sets, while a slight air of strangeness and mystery permeated the show. So when I say that Private Beach in many ways reminds me of “Twin Peaks”, I’m talking about the first season… and yes, it’s very much a compliment.

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Sleeper #5

Written by Ed Brubaker
Art by Sean Phillips
32 pages, color
Published by WildStorm/DC Comics

Super-powered beings are really like different nations. That seems to have been one of the sparks of an idea that triggered the creation of Sleeper, a relatively new series from WildStorm/DC Comics. It makes sense if you think about it, really. Beings band together, form alliances, confederations, and unions. So really, it would just be a matter of time until one of these nations would send a spy in to infiltrate one of the enemies. And that’s when things get interesting.

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Fushigi Yûgi Vol. 8

By Yû Watase
200 pages, black and white
Published by Viz

When is a book not a book? When it’s a living, breathing world in its own right. It’s rather apt that in Yû Watase’s series Fushigi Yûgi (aka The Mysterious Play) the characters have just that sort of object in the form of The Universe of the Four Gods, because one could make the case for Fushigi Yûgi itself being another such item.

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