michael garland

Maybe I'm biased as a comics fan of a certain age, but I often feel like everyone is nostalgic for corner box art on comics covers, even those who weren't necessarily buying comics when those little boxes were a staple. For the uninitiated, I'm talking about the little rectangle in the upper left corner of a comics cover, which would feature some manner of portrait of the book's main characters. While many comics companies had corner boxes, they're most associated with Marvel (probably because DC never really got into them).

Jonathan Hickman’s creator owned work is known for tackling big, often metaphysical concepts such as the nature of media as propaganda, the transcendence of humanity beyond the limitations of the human form and the death and destruction of the entire world at the hands of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse. His new series The Black Monday Murders with Tomm Coker, Michael Garland and Rus Wooton, announced today at Image Expo, takes things a bit simpler and is all about rival schools of magic, but instead of magic they are financial institutions battling for supremacy following the global stock market crash of the late eighties.

In Curt Pires and David Rubin's The Fiction for Boom Studios, a magical book makes the imaginary real, and two lifelong friends re-enter the fantastic world it contains in search of two more of their group who disappeared into The Fiction. The "Step Into a Good Book" library program might want to work out a new campaign.

Debuting later this month from Image Comics, The Dying & The Dead is the latest collaboration between Jonathan Hickman and Ryan Bodenheim, following A Red Mass For Mars and Secret. I was able to read issue #1 in advance, in the form of a lettered "first draft," and it is immediately notable for three reasons in particular: The Dying & The Dead takes a decidedly more personal approach to the theme of mortality that Hickman's been exploring in epic fashion in his New Avengers and East of West projects; the artwork by Bodenheim is his career best, not just in terms of technical drawing ability, but in the sense of pure graphic storytelling; and the huge page count makes a compelling case for big first issues.