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R.E.B.E.L.S. #1

Written by Tony Bedard
Art by Andy Clarke
32 pages, color
Published by DC Comics

One of the very first "DC Universe" books I ever started reading was L.E.G.I.O.N. ’89, DC’s "present day" precursor to the Legion of Super-Heroes, spinning out of their Invasion! mini-series event. It was a lot of fun, a mixture of space opera, manipulative bastards you love to hate, and out-and-out silliness. Most people probably remember L.E.G.I.O.N. as the book that made Lobo an insanely popular character, but for me it’s got to be the founder of the organization, Vril Dox. Clearly I’m not the only one who feels this way, since he’s back and the lead of the new R.E.B.E.L.S. series—but will anyone else notice?

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Why I Killed Peter

Written by Olivier Ka
Art by Alfred
112 pages, color
Published by NBM

I suspect that people who pick up Why I Killed Peter based solely on the name might be a little disappointed. They might be expecting a thriller, probably about a murderer, perhaps with some action and suspense built into it. It’s certainly an evocative title for a book, which is no doubt why Olivier Ka and Alfred chose it. What you’ll actually get with Why I Killed Peter, though, is a disturbing autobiographical story that shows just how hard it can be to truly let go of childhood traumas.

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Tsubasa Vol. 20

By CLAMP
192 pages, black and white
Published by Del Rey Manga

I will admit that for the past few volumes of Tsubasa, I’ve been less than thrilled with CLAMP’s dimension-hopping series. I’d always liked the original conceit of the book—traveling across the universes to reclaim the scattered fragments of Princess Sakura’s soul—and CLAMP has certainly proven that they’re not afraid to mix things up a great deal. Any book which thousands of pages in suddenly reveals the main character to be a traitorous clone of the real, imprisoned hero automatically gets a second look, after all. But with the latest volume of Tsubasa, things seem finally back on track, in no small part by tackling what I’d always thought was an odd omission: the history and back story of the supporting cast characters.

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Incognito #1-2

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

I’m an unabashed fan of Ed Brubaker’s and Sean Phillips’s Criminal, their crime-centric from Marvel. And so, I’ll admit that for a split-second, I was a little disappointed when I heard they were temporarily setting Criminal aside so they could create Incognito, a mini-series about a former super-villain living in a witness protection program. Then I remembered that before Criminal, Brubaker and Phillips had last collaborated on Sleeper, a series about an agent in deep cover in a super-villain organization. So that’s why that disappointment only lasted a split-second, because I knew how good Sleeper was. And surprise, surprise, Incognito is well worth its delaying the next Criminal storyline.

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Miss Don’t Touch Me

Written by Hubert
Art by Kerascoet
96 pages, color
Published by NBM

One of the nice things about NBM’s program of translating foreign comics into English is that often they will combine two 48-page albums into one 96-page volume. That’s definitely to the advantage of Miss Don’t Touch Me, because it means that you get the entire story in one fell swoop instead of having to track down two separate books. In the case of Miss Don’t Touch Me, the second half is just different enough from the first that it’s an interesting experience having the two combined into one omnibus.

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Bad Dog #1

Written by Joe Kelly
Art by Diego Greco
40 pages, color
Published by Image Comics

Everyone knows the old "they fight crime" game; you take two radically different professions and adjectives, attach them to people, and announce that they fight crime. Just like that, you’ve got a movie or television pitch just waiting to happen. In the case of Bad Dog, I can’t help but think that Joe Kelly did just that but changed the ending to, "They’re bounty hunters." It would certainly explain a lot towards the genesis of this strange little comic.

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Garfield Minus Garfield

By Jim Davis, with Dan Walsh
128 pages, color
Published by Ballantine Books

When I was in elementary school, my mother made me and my younger sister take piano lessons every week. We’d both be dropped off at our piano teacher’s house, and for the half-hour that my sister had her lessons, I would read the books that our teacher had in the waiting area. Most of those books were the original Garfield collections from the late ’70s, and I remember liking those early, sarcastic strips. Over the years, as Garfield has become its own media empire, the comic strip lost its edge and I figured it would be completely off my radar. That is, until Dan Walsh came up with his Garfield Minus Garfield website.

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I Saw You…: Comics Inspired By Real-Life Missed Connections

Edited by Julia Wertz
192 pages, black and white
Published by Three Rivers Press

I freely admit, I love reading the "missed connections" listings on Craigslist. I used to read them religiously in my local alternative papers, but these days it seems to be the internet where you hit the missed connections pay dirt. Clearly I’m not the only person who finds these snippets of other people’s lives fascinating, because with I Saw You…: Comics Inspired By Real-Life Missed Connections, Julia Wertz has assembled an all-start collection of indy and alternative cartoonists to illustrate various missed connections postings. Just like the missed connections themselves, the results are variable but overall entertaining.

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My Mommy is in America and She Met Buffalo Bill

Written by Jean Regnaud
Art by Émile Bravo
128 pages, color
Published by Fanfare/Ponent Mon

One thing I’ve always been impressed by is when a book can really depict what it’s like to be a child. So often, authors write children as nothing more than very short adults, using the same mental patterns and words that the author would use as well. So while that’s not the only thing that immediately struck me with Jean Regnaud and Émile Bravo’s My Mommy is in America and She Met Buffalo Bill, the fact that Regnaud (and translators Vanessa Champion and Elizabeth Tierman) nailed it so perfect is alone reason to celebrate.

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Soul Kiss #1

Written by Steven T. Seagle
Art by Marco Cinello
28 pages, color
Published by Image Comics

I’ve been reading Steven T. Seagle’s comics for a really long time, and the one thing that has connected them all is an apparent willingness to keep from being pigeon-holed into a single genre or style. So while Soul Kiss may not have any specific hook or twist that you’re used to seeing in lots of other Seagle books, I somehow couldn’t help but feel that it was recognizably written by him. I guess when the closest you can get to a writing trait is, "Anything can happen," that’s not really a bad thing at all.

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