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Wandering Son Vol. 2

By Shimura Takako
200 pages, black and white
Published by Fantagraphics

The first volume of Wandering Son, published in the middle of last year, was an intriguing look at two teenagers who both are trying to figure out their own gender identity and their place in the world around them. Fantagraphics released the second volume at the end of the year, and with a lot of the set-up completed, Shimura Takako’s story takes a stronger step forward here. Everything I liked about the first volume is still present, but any issues I’d had with it feel like they’ve been erased as her story progresses.

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Dark Horse Presents #7

By Mike Mignola, Andi Watson, Neal Adams, Howard Chaykin, M.J. Butler & Mark Wheatley, Stan Sakai, Tony Puryear, Brandon Graham, Filipe Melo & Juan Cavia, Carla Speed McNeil
80 pages, color
Published by Dark Horse Comics

Here’s a New Year’s Resolution for all you comic readers out there: support titles that reflect what you want the industry to look like.

One of the most common wishes I’ve heard about the North American comics industry is for there to be more anthology titles out there. A regularly published, ongoing series that runs a number of one-offs and serials that gives you a lot of bang for your buck. (Japan’s ongoing anthologies like Shonen Jump are often held up by way of comparison.) To that, I’d like to hold up Dark Horse Presents, the revitalization of Dark Horse Comics’ premiere title. Every month it’s offering up 80 pages of creator-owned comics, and while not every story in it is perfect (it’s hard to find an anthology where that is the case), there’s enough bang for your buck that this is a series that more people should be reading.

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Rust: Visitor in the Field

By Royden Lepp
192 pages, two-color
Published by Archaia

One of the things I like about comics these days is that the idea of launching a series of graphic novels isn’t as outlandish as it was a decade ago. Normally you’d have to go for the 32-page comic serialization route, even if the story didn’t necessarily fit that structure. Royden Lepp’s Rust: Visitor in the Field is a prime example of a book that wouldn’t have worked quite so well as a series of single comics. A lot of the book’s power is its slow build and spooling out its future history to the reader; at 192 pages, it’s just the right length for an opening installment.

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Snarked! #3

By Roger Langridge
24 pages, color
Published by Boom! Studios

Roger Langridge is one of those comic creators that I’ve come to think of as "dependably good." It doesn’t matter what title he’s working on, from The Muppet Show to Thor, you automatically know that it’s going to be a great mix of drama and humor that is entertaining from start to finish. I think that’s why I had such high hopes for Snarked!, his new creator-owned series for Boom! Studios that provides his own particular spin on some the ancillary characters from Lewis Carroll’s works. And so far? It’s as excellent as I’d hoped it to be.

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Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes

By Carl Barks
240 pages, color
Published by Fantagraphics

Carl Barks is one of those comic creators that, up until now, I’d never read anything by. And as a long-time comic reader, that’s been a secret shame. Barks is, after all, one of the original three inductees into the Comic Book Hall of Fame (along with Will Eisner and Jack Kirby), and his comics for Disney made him a superstar across the world. Well, everywhere except for America, it seems. Here, his creations have been occasionally collected, but also quickly falling out of print and never making a huge splash. Fantagraphics is now giving Barks’ Duck comics a whirl, and based off this first volume alone if there’s any justice in the comics world, fame should finally (belatedly) be coming for the late, great Barks.

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A Waste of Time

By Rick Worley
136 pages, black and white
Published by Northwest Press

Rick Worley’s A Waste of Time is another in a long line of web comics that has made the leap to a collected print edition. In doing so, I think that A Waste of Time has shown both the strength and weakness of the online delivery system; this is a collection that weaves all over the place (figuratively and literally), and even as some stories improve by being collected together, others fall a tiny bit short.

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Criminal: The Last of the Innocent

Written by Ed Brubaker
Art by Sean Phillips
112 pages, color
Published by Marvel

One the most dependably good comic series being published is Ed Brubaker’s and Sean Phillips’s Criminal. A series of crime comic mini-series, whenever a new Criminal comes down the pike you know you’re in for something good. With their new collection, Criminal: The Last of the Innocent, Brubaker and Phillips not only keep their comic well-rooted in the dark and slightly depressing real world, but also give us flashbacks to a slightly more idyllic setting, one that comic-book readers might be especially familiar with.

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Punisher #1-6

Written by Greg Rucka
Penciled by Marco Checchetto (#1-5) and Matthew Southworth (#6)
Inked by Marco Checchetto (#1-5) and Matthew Clark (#6)
32 pages each, color
Published by Marvel

When it comes to characters who have had an extremely varied range of depictions at Marvel, the Punisher is probably somewhere near (if not at) the top of the list. Some takes have had him fighting cheesy super-villains like Stilt-Man, punching a polar bear, or getting turned into a Frankenstein’s monster. Others were grim and serious, going up against human-trafficking and a distinct absence of super-heroes in a "for mature readers" title. Greg Rucka’s new take on the character is on the more serious side of things (having replaced the admittedly-fun monsters of Marvel title), and in many ways it distills a lot of the different takes into a unified front.

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Taroch #1

Written by Clint Green
Art by Luke Orrin
24 pages, color
Published by Bad Imprint

Every now and then a random comic makes it across my desk, and to that list I get to add Taroch #1 by Clint Green and Luke Orrin. It’s funny because if you look at its contents on a clinical level, it’s a comic with two standard, by-the-numbers stories (one an ongoing story, the other a self-contained short). When you read it, though, it’s the execution of those stories that makes it ultimately stand out.

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The Sigh

By Marjane Satrapi
56 pages, color
Published by Archaia

It would be a reasonable assumption to feel that Marjane Satrapi’s new book, The Sigh, is a comic. After all, she’s best known for her comic Persepolis (which was created into an excellent animated film), and has continued to work in that medium since then. The Sigh is an illustrated story book, though, showcasing her drawings but pairing it with prose instead of panels and sequential art storytelling. It’s a charming book, though, one that mixes elements from several different familiar fairy tales and turns them into a greater whole. The Sigh borrows the most from Beauty and the Beast, with the merchant promising to bring back presents for his daughter, and the mysterious castle with the secretive person inside. Almost immediately things change, though; Satrapi gives Rose (the Belle stand-in) an interest in botany as part of her request for a gift, and one gets the impression that this is going to be a smarter and slightly more daring take on the story.

As the book progresses, Satrapi throws in several curveballs that will no doubt surprise readers. In particular, there’s a casual attitude to slavery that might throw Western audiences for a loop, even as subtly reminds them that this is a book born not only out of fairy tales that we grew up with, but ones that Satrapi did as well. The Sigh becomes episodic in nature for the second half, but it’s to Satrapi’s credit that she also keeps it from going on for too long; by the time you see the pattern forming, she’s cut it off at the knees and moved on to the conclusion. Readers might be a little disappointed to not get a full graphic novel from Satrapi, but her art is still soft and charming—at times it looks almost like it was (expertly) drawn in crayons, which helps the fairy tale nature of the book—and in the end it’s satisfying in its own right. Satrapi takes the familiar and makes it just unfamiliar enough that it will have your attention from start to finish.

Purchase Links: Amazon.com | Powell’s Books