Written by Steve Gerber
Art by Brian Hurtt
48 pages, color
Published by DC Comics
The conceit of DC’s new “DC Focus” line is simple enough. Stand-alone books where there are no superheroes, no villains, just average people who find themselves in extraordinary circumstances. Hard Time is the first of the four titles out of the gate, but as I read it I found myself wondering: is Hard Time really the title they should use to kick off this line of books?
Written by Lisa Wheeler
Art by Mark Siegel
40 pages, color
Published by Atheneum
I’m noticing more and more of a fine line between children’s books and comics these days. Some, like Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly’s Little Lit, don’t surprise me at all, considering the editors’s work within the comics world. But then you turn around and see a book like Seadogs: An Epic Ocean Operetta by non-comics creators Lisa Wheeler and Mark Siegel and the only real difference between it and a comic is, quite frankly, how the publisher chose to market it.
By Scott McCloud
two-color
Published at scottmccloud.com
Growing, I always tried to find patterns in numbers. Telephone numbers, addresses, the numbers on the odometer of my parents’s car… you name it, I’d be staring at the numbers carefully, flipping them around in my head to find their secret code. Is this normal? Not terribly, no. But I feel positively mundane when compared to the protagonist of Scott McCloud’s webcomic The Right Number.
By Andy Seto
144 pages, color
Published by ComicsOne
Go to a large-scale arcade and chances are you’ll see them—the dozens of teenagers clustered around the games where you literally dance on top of a series of pads to score points. While Dance Dance Revolution is the most popular brand of these games in the United States, it’s hardly the only one. For instance, there’s Para Para, a variant where sensors also track your hand gestures and award points for style. Even then, who would have guessed that Andy Seto would create a comic about it, revealing it to be the true expression of love? Not me, that’s for sure.
Written by Micah Harris
Art by Michael Gaydos
120 pages, black and white
Published by Image Comics
When Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill debuted their series The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the book took off like a shot. Take a bunch of literary characters and have them work together to try and save the world from certain destruction. In many ways, then, Heaven’s War is the flipside of that idea. Instead of taking literary characters, writer Micah Harris has taken several literary authors that were linked together in real life—J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Charles Williams—and has them save the world. In concept alone, this seems to be a sure fire hit.
Edited by Patrick Godfrey and Jesse Bauch
168 pages, black and white
Published by Oddgod Press
It’s rare to find an anthology in which you like every single story. To have your tastes match up exactly with the editor’s is pretty difficult, after all, making you really just hope to enjoy the majority. When I opened up Big Dumb Fun I wasn’t at all sure who half of the names connected were, but I figured that if a majority of them turned out to be good, well, I was definitely ahead.
Written by Tony Bedard
Penciled by Mike Perkins
Inked by Andrew Hennessy
32 pages, color
Published by CrossGen
In terms of successful film franchises, James Bond is certainly near the top of the list. Spawning twenty movies with no sign of stopping, their influence is almost too high to count. Adding to that list, now, is CrossGen’s new series Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. Named after the Japanese title for James Bond, will Kiss Kiss Bang Bang be able to capture more than just the name?
Written by Marc Bryant
Art by Shepherd Hendrix
64 pages, black and white
Published by Image Comics
The music industry is like almost any other art form these days: a prime example of how the business side of art threatens to keep the creative side under lock and key. With iron-clad contracts, lawsuits, and bankruptcies getting more press than actual songs, it’s easy to see where writer Marc Bryant came up with the idea for Shangri-La, a story about when music goes horribly wrong…
By Marc-Antoine Mathieu
64 pages, black and white
Published by Dark Horse
Have you ever read something and was convinced it was written by a completely different author? That’s what kept happening with me when I read the graphic novel Dead Memory. The cover said it was by Marc-Antoine Mathieu. Mathieu’s biography said nothing about a pen name. But if I didn’t know better, I’d have thought this was a new Cities of the Fantastic volume by comics superstars Benoit Peeters and Francois Schuiten.
By Rick Smith
128 pages, two-color
Published by Alternative Comics
When told properly, I adore reading travelogues. There’s something fascinating about reading other people’s experiences in far-off places that I may never experience for myself. Through their eyes, I’m able to better get an idea of just what this part of the world is truly like. That’s probably why I was instantly intrigued by Rick Smith’s upcoming graphic novel Baraka and Black Magic in Morocco; I knew from Shuck Comics that Smith can tell a story, and I suspect the closest I’m getting to Morocco in the near future is the EPCOT Center at Disneyworld, so this seemed like a perfect book for me.
