Nobrow

It’s the end of the year! We’ve made it through 2016, a year of departures, returns, arrivals, civil wars, and young animals. Valiant was building up Faith, Top Shelf completed its March, and Mike Mignola wrapped up Hellboy’s grand journey. Mildred Louis sent the Agents of the Realm off on further adventures, Wonder Woman celebrated her 75th anniversary, and Bleach reached its final chapter. It’s been another staggering year for comics everywhere. So where does that leave us for 2017? As we hit the end of the year, so we reach the ComicsAlliance Yearender once more. Read on; there are so, so many great comics waiting for us all next year!

Odds are, you're one of the millions worldwide who binged all of Luke Cage when it premiered on Netflix last weekend. With its sterling cast, gripping story & standout score, Marvel's newest original TV series for the streaming giant is the best one they've made yet. If you loved the NYC authenticity & hip-hop/R&B-infused aesthetic of the series --- and you've read all the Luke Cage comics you can get your hands on --- we've got five of the best creator-owned comics that capture that same feeling. Love that? Try this!

Nobrow has released cartoonist Jen Lee's comic Vacancy, and like her currently-running animated webcomic Thunderpaw: In The Ashes of Fire Mountain, it's about animals left behind. Also like Thunderpaw, Vacancy is adorable but sad, with masterful and compelling storytelling, although it lacks some of the surreal and truly impressive moments of the former. Both are worth a read, although for different reasons.

The comic book, animation, illustration, pinup, mashup, fan art and design communities are generating amazing artwork of myriad styles and tastes, all of which ends up on the Internet and filtered into ComicsAlliance’s Best Art Ever (This Week). These images convey senses of mood and character — not to mention artistic skill — but comic books are specifically a medium of sequential narratives, and great sequential art has to be both beautiful (totally subjective!) and clear in its storytelling (not so subjective!). The words and the pictures need to work together to tell the story and create whatever tone, emotion and indeed world the story requires. The contributions of every person on a creative team, from the writer to the artist(s) to the letterers, are necessary to achieving a great page of sequential storytelling. It is the special nature of comic books that we’re celebrating in this recurring feature: Best Sequential Art Ever (This Week).

TV: Arrow will be hunting down Shrapnel when season 2 of the CW series resumes on January 15 with "Blast Radius".   Upcoming: Rob Davis' The Motherless Oven is on the way from SelfMadeHero.   TV: A new poster teasing the return of AMC's The Walking Dead series says "Don't Look Back". We assum...

The comic book, animation, illustration, pinup, mashup, fan art and design communities are generating amazing artwork of myriad styles and tastes, all of which ends up on the Internet and filtered into ComicsAlliance’s Best Art Ever (This Week). These images convey senses of mood and character — not to mention artistic skill — but comic books are specifically a medium of sequential narratives, an