A&A

With all apologies to our readers in the Sunshine State --- and let's be real here, you know this better than the rest of us --- every headline that comes out of Florida paints a picture of a sunny, tourist-friendly peninsula that also seems to exist in a combination of Mad Max times and The Purge. So really, it was only a matter of time before those terrifying yet intriguing headlines made their way into comics. Now, fresh off their adventures in "Welcome To Clowntown," Valiant's mismatched Archer and Armstrong are coming face to face with... well, pretty much everything, from bath salts on down, as they take a trip to Florida. Check out a preview below!

If you're a fan of Valiant's Faith --- and you should be, she's great --- then you're in for a pretty good time next Wednesday. Not only does July 20 see the release of the all-new Faith ongoing series from Jody Houser, Pere Perez, Marguerite Sauvage and Colleen Doran, which picks up where the fantastic "Hollywood and Vine" miniseries left off and introduces an all-new supervillain, but we're also going to see her in a pretty significant guest appearance. In A&A: The Adventures of Archer & Armstrong #5, by Rafer Roberts, Mike Norton, and Allen Passalaqua, Faith and Archer are finally going on their first date, and if you thought seeing Archer trying to use emojis was cute, wait'll you see the conversation they have over dinner. Of course, given their night jobs --- and the fact that there's a shady dude watching them over mozzarella sticks --- I'm going to guess that the night might not go as smoothly as they'd like. Check out a preview!

Here's the thing about unlettered preview pages: They are, by their nature, incomplete, so you're only really getting half of the story. Still, since comics are first and foremost a visual medium, you can still sort of follow along with sequential art. Unless, of course, you're reading a book like A&A: The Adventures of Archer & Armstrong. If that's the case, well, your guess is as good as mine. Don't get me wrong, it's not that the storytelling is bad. Far from it, in fact --- the art by Mike Norton is great. It's just that this book gets so weird, so fast that one second you're reading about jogging in the park, and the next you're seeing a monkey in a top hat, a frog with a crown made of fire, and a bunch of circus strongmen who may or may not be failed clones of Armstrong. That's just how it goes in Clowntown.

Ever since their return in 2012, Archer and Armstrong have had a series of adventures that I think it's fair to describe as "increasingly weird." They've fought a cult made up of the super-rich, they've fought a different cult that worships the number zero, they've followed a treasure map that was tattooed on a hobo's rear end, and --- most recently --- they've been journeying to the bottom of Armstrong's magic bottomless bag, which was otherwise full of a thousand years' worth of pocket litter. With all that, I have to imagine that it's pretty weird to come up with new situations that are somehow even weirder. But that is a challenge that Rafer Roberts and Mike Norton have decided to tackle head on in the next arc of A&A. In "Welcome To Clowntown," Valiant's second-favorite mismatched pair find themselves trapped in a carnival staffed entirely with clones of Armstrong.

If you carry around a bag in your day-to-day life --- or heck, even a wallet --- then you already know how cluttered those things can get. You just dump things in there, and when it's time to clear it all out, you wind up buried under a torrent of movie tickets, dead pens and receipts. If, however, your bag was a magically expansive satchel that you'd been carrying around for about five thousand years, you'd probably have a whole lot more to deal with. For Archer & Armstrong, that is definitely the case --- and instead of half-punched loyalty cards for the local coffee shop, they're dealing with garbage monsters, giant robots, and fish men as they're dropped into the depths of Armstrong's bottomless bag. It's all happening in Rafer Roberts and David Lafuente's A&A #2, and you can read a preview below!

When Valiant relaunched a few years back, Archer & Armstrong was the breakout hit of the line. The blend of intense action, quirky comedy and over-the-top villains like the One Percent, and a cult that literally worshiped the concept of nothing, made it one of the most memorable comics of the past few years, and made Fred Van Lente and Clayton Henry a pretty hard act to follow. But as Valiant announced today at New York Comic Con, there's a team that's up to the task. Next March, the series will relaunch as A&A, with the new team of writer Rafer Roberts and artist David Lafuente, with a variant cover by Kano.