The question most often asked of the ComicsAlliance staff is a variation of, "Which comic books should I be reading?" or, "I'm new to comics, what's a good place to start?" The Wednesday deluge of new comic books, graphic novels and collected editions can be daunting even for the longtime reader, much less for those totally unfamiliar with creators, characters and publishers, and the dark mysteries of comic book shopping like variants, pre-ordering, and formats.
It's with these challenges in mind that we've created Best Comic Books Ever (This Week), an ongoing guide curated by the ComicsAlliance staff. This is where new comics readers and seasoned Wednesday shoppers alike can find our picks of the best books the medium has to offer.
You don't have to look too hard to see the prevalence of difficult father-son relationships in the work of Jason Aaron. In Scalped with R.M. Guera, Dashiell Bad Horse was adrift in a sea of father figures, unable to choose his own path and incapable of avoiding the same fates that befell the father who left him. In 2014, Aaron launched Southern Bastards with Jason Latour, about a conflicted man who returns to the home of his dead father, a legendary lawman; and Men of Wrath with Ron Garney, is about a father-to-be on the run from his own dad, a hired killer.
Despite the prevalence of the topic in comics, Aaron has carved out his own niche when it comes to father-son relationships, with an unflinching perspective that rings truer than most.
Few comic book writers are as hot right now as the wife-and-husband team of Kelly Sue DeConnick and Matt Fraction, so it’s not all that surprising that the couple has signed a deal with Universal to develop their work into television shows. What is a little surprising is that this duo found their success creating deeply personal and wildly experimental comics, which means that some of the best comic book writers working today are going to adapt some of the best comics currently being published. This could be something special.
'Thumbnail' is a new recurring feature on ComicsAlliance in which we invite our writers to reflect on comic book details that deserve a little extra attention, whether it's a favorite character, and artistic choice, or a striking page. For this installment, John Parker looks at Criminal artist Sean Phillips' unusual affinity for beautiful and realistically rendered cars.
The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman has enough to do, between managing the AMC horror smash and shepherding its still-untitled spinoff, but what’s a few more bodies on the pile? Cinemax has officially granted Kirkman his second comic-adapted TV series, conjuring a formal series order for exorcism drama Outcast.
Landry Q. Walker and Eric Jones's Danger Club was one of the most promising new comics of 2013. A brutally violent story about the sidekicks left on Earth after the world's superheroes died fighting a cosmic threat in space, it was astonishingly bloody and phenomenally clever -- and absolutely nothing like their previous work, the cheery, all-ages Supergirl's Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade. Unfortunately, after the fifth of eight issues, the series vanished from the stands, and I just sort of assumed it had an exceptionally down ending.
In January, however, Danger Club returned with the long-awaited 6th issue, setting a schedule to finish the series in its entirety in March, so I took the opportunity to talk to Walker and Jones about the unexpected hiatus, the influence of Teen Titans, and what it was like to build a universe that felt like it had been there for 50 years in only a few pages.
Hollywood just can't keep its grubby little hands off of our stuff. Last week it was announced that Sony Pictures snapped up the rights to Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen's Descender well before the book's March publication, a practice becoming more common. This type of announcement may cause consternation among some, but you have to take it on a case-by-case basis: If anything Mark Millar writes gets a deal before publication, please, be offended; in all other circumstances, reserve judgment until a "professional" receives an advance copy and dictates your opinion to you. (This is my new persona: hated.)
Descender, on its way from Image in March, is epic, intelligent, and full of heart, and it looks like Sony was right on the money for once.
A great comic book cover is an advertisement, a work of art, a statement, and an invitation. A great comic book cover is a glimpse of another world through a canvas no bigger than a window pane. In Best Comic Book Covers Ever (This Month), we look back over some of the most eye-catching, original and exceptional covers of the past month.
2015 got off to an impressive start with stunning compositions from Riley Rossmo, James Harren, and Ken Niimura; wonderful character portraits from Marko Djurdjevic, Becky Cloonan, and Kaare Andrews; amazing colors from Darwyn Cooke and Artyom Trakhanov; and a really fun He-Man piece from Stjepan Sejic.
It's been a few months since we heard anything about Chrononauts, Image Comics' forthcoming time travel adventure series from Sean Gordon Murphy and Mark Millar. The pair gave an interview to Entertainment Weekly last November in which they described the series as a buddy time travel comedy, where mankind's exploration of time yields amusingly disastrous results. Since then both creators have had other work land on ComicsAlliance's Best Comics of 2014 -- the startlingly epic The Wake for Murphy, and the return-to-form Starlight for Millar -- so it's quite happily that we received these very appealing first glimpses at the pair's auspicious inaugural collaboration.
GLAAD, the media monitoring group for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender representation, has announced the nominees for its annual Media Awards celebrating positive LGBT representation in mainstream media, including the five comic book series that it believes provided outstanding examples of fair, inclusive, original and impactful LGBT characters in 2014.
This year's awards include first-time nominations for two publishers, Image Comics and Boom Studios. DC Comics is conspicuously absent this year, despite being nominated at least once every year seemingly for as long as GLAAD has recognized comics. Archie Comics is also absent for the first time since the debut of Kevin Keller in 2010.
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