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Mister I

By Lewis Trondheim
32 pages, color
Published by NBM

A couple of years ago, NBM published a North American edition of Lewis Trondheim’s Mister O, detailing the continual attempts (and deaths) of a little O-shaped man desperately trying to get across a chasm. Now we’re presented with its thematic sequel, Mister I, in a new cycle of attempt-and-death by a character shaped like the letter he’s named after. The big difference, here, is that everyone will be cheering Mister I on to his inevitable death.

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Breaking Up

Written by Aimee Friedman
Art by Christine Norrie
192 pages, black and white
Published by Graphix/Scholastic Books

“Wouldn’t it be fun to go back and do it all again?” It’s a phrase that’s often aimed at the teenage/high school experience, and to be honest it’s a little mind-boggling. To me, high school life was punctuated with four years of confusing hormones, cruel teenagers (myself included), and generally immature behavior. Friendships were made and broken at the drop of a hat, no one had the answers they were looking for, and the rest of life was still one big question mark. Reading Aimee Friedman and Christine Norrie’s Breaking Up drove home two points along those lines for me. First, that high school really was exactly as I remembered it. Second, while I may be over twice as old as the characters in Breaking Up, some things in life really never do change.

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Immortal Iron Fist #1-2

Written by Ed Brubaker and Matt Fraction
Art by David Aja
Additional art by Travel Foreman, Derek Fridolfs, and John Severin
32 pages, color
Published by Marvel Comics

The longer you’ve been familiar with the world of super-hero comics, the more you know some things to be true. Sooner or later, all characters will come back from the dead. Sooner or later, all characters who once starred in their own book that was since cancelled will get another headlining book. And sooner or later, you’ll get a real apathy towards the endless recycling and rehashing of the same characters over and over again. It’s because of this last one that I almost missed out on one of the latest revamps at Marvel, The Immortal Iron Fist. And now I feel stupid for doing so, because the reality is that it’s actually quite good.

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Negative Burn #7

Written by Michael Cho, Shannon Eric Denton, Jim Dougan, Alexander Grecian, Ron Kasman, Ron McCain, Shane White, C. Willow Wilson
Art by Michael Cho, Georges Jeanty, Ron Kasman, Eric Kim, Pav Kovacic, Ron McCain, Rily Rossmo, Curtis Square-Briggs
64 pages, black and white
Published by Image Comics

With a long and prestigious 50-issue run at Caliber Comics, Negative Burn was one of the few modern ongoing anthologies a little over a decade ago that’s worth remembering. Now with the title back as a regular title, it seemed like as good a time as any to dip in and see how well it’s delivering up selections of short stories.

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Maintenance #1

Written by Jim Massey
Art by Robbi Rodriguez
32 pages, black and white
Published by Oni Press

Part of the problem with trying to create a humor comic, when you think about it, is that both the writing and the art need to be equally funny. Each half of the equation normally has to support each other in a comic to begin with, but it’s doubly true with comedy; the potential difference in humor levels between the writing and the art can ruin a joke with only half of the punch line really being delivered. Fortunately that doesn’t seem to be the case with Jim Massey and Robbi Rodriguez’s Maintenance, where the two creators are in sync with each other’s funny bones.

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Old Boy Vol. 1-2

Written by Goaron Tsuchiya
Art by Nobuaki Minegishi
208 pages, black and white
Published by Dark Horse

When director Park Chan-wook’s film Oldboy won the Grand Prix at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival, I was amused and impressed to hear that it was based off of Goaron Tsuchiya and Nobuaki Minegishi’s eight-volume Old Boy series. I figured the chances of me seeing the movie before ever getting to read the manga were higher—but it’s two years later and while I still haven’t seen Oldboy, I have read the first two English translations thanks to Dark Horse. The big question is if I can be patient enough to keep from running out and renting the movie just to find out how it all ends.

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Delphine #1

By Richard Sala
32 pages, two-color
Published by Fantagraphics Books

Richard Sala is the sort of creator whose works straddle all sorts of genres and classifications, but is always unmistakable. While his style has been refined and continues to evolve over the years, its off-beat, slightly-tilted-from-reality sensibility continues to remain as Sala’s hallmark. Delphine, Sala’s new series for the international Ignatz comic line, is no exception to that rule.

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xxxHOLiC Vol. 8

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

In an ongoing serial comic, it’s easy for creators to take the easy route, keeping the status quo from one installment to the next and no real lasting effects shaking out. In some ways that’s part of what helps xxxHOLiC stand out so much for me; not only are the individual stories that make up the book interesting, but the book’s characters continue to grow and change in interesting ways.

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Killer #1

Written by Matz
Art by Luc Jacamon
32 pages, color
Published by Archaia Studios Press

Anti-heroes are a popular character in fiction these days. You know the type—not really a “good” person, but not the villain either. They often operate under their own set of rules and ethics, and in the end bring about the resolution in a way that isn’t necessarily socially acceptable. You cheer them on even as a voice in the back of your head should be saying, “Should I be this gleeful?” Matz and Luc Jacamon’s The Killer seems to take a slightly different tactic. Their main character isn’t an anti-hero at all, he’s a thoroughly bad person. The only thing is, his story is remarkably enthralling.

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StormWatch: Post Human Division #1

Written by Christos Gage
Art by Doug Mahnke
32 pages, color
Published by WildStorm/DC Comics

WildStorm’s StormWatch has in some ways always been a troubled title. Early on the series’s history it released an issue #25 almost eighteen months early to let readers play the “how would they get there?” game. Later the book got heavily revamped by Warren Ellis and Tom Raney, then restarted with a new #1 before being cancelled to lead into The Authority. A new book called StormWatch: Team Achilles survived for two years before getting cancelled amid low sales and creative team scandals. Now the book is back again under the new moniker StormWatch: Post Human Division. And while the subtitle may not be the most riveting, Christos Gage and Doug Mahnke’s stab at the book might just have a chance of surviving.

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