HOT PICKS EXTRA: Feiffer, Ellis and Books With Buzz

… like Harrow County, Panty & Stocking and three first issues from Image!

By MENACHEM LUCHINS, owner, Escape Pod Comics, Huntington, L.I.

Kids have two amazing options: Katie Cook’s Gronk (Action Lab) has it’s second volume out and Noelle Stevenson’s Nimona (Harper Teen). My 8-year-old daughter couldn’t stop laughing when she read the first volume of Gronk, and then instantly read the whole book out loud to her sister (6) who was also in stitches. Nimona, on the other hand, is the reconfigured webcomic by the creator of the Lumberjanes, another of my daughter’s favorites! You know what? Just get both!

Nimona_CVR

Grown-ups, meanwhile, also have some awesome choices. Marvel has the first Bucky Barnes: Winter Soldier collection out this week. Ales Kot and Marco Rudy are both top-flight creators and while this series starts off rocky it goes wonderful places. Give it a shot.

Ghetto Brother (NBM) is a much more straight-forward tale. A true story from my hometown, the Bronx, about a young Puerto-Rican man whose gang, the Ghetto Brothers, helped reignite the arts and community activities in a bad part of town. Powerful and compelling stuff, people.

Speaking of powerful, Abrams has Out of Line, a retrospective of artist, playwright, and genius Jules Feiffer whose dramatic line and keen insight into humanity, society and life make him one of comics’ greats.

OutofLine

For you manga fans, Dark Horse is finally releasing the acclaimed series Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt in one giant volume (for only 10 bucks!). This tale of cute but dangerous angels expelled from heaven has inspired thousands and delighted millions, so you should definitely give it a shot!

Panty

I know you’re waiting for all those #1s, so let’s do a brief run-down of the other stuff before we get there: DC rushed a 2nd printing of Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s Batman #40, the epic end to their Endgame story, so if you missed it two weeks ago, now’s you’re chance.

Terry Moore continues his Strangers in Paradise/Peanuts mash-up with SiP Kids #3 (Abstract). If you were ever a fan of the original or just like silly kids acting like dorks, this book is for you.

Lastly, due to shipping errors, some stores (such as mine) will only be receiving the Valkyries Kate Leth variant to Swords of Sorrow (Dynamite) this week — a gorgeous cover to an ambitious series!

Alright, on to the first issues!

Oni is bringing back Rick Spears’ sicko, freaky Auteur series with the second installment, Sister Bambi. If this miniseries is as f**ked up and bizarre as the first, we’re all in for a treat.

Meanwhile, Boom! and Paul Jenkins are creating a whole new steampunk world with the maxi-series Lantern City, which looks like a fiercely plotted and fully realized tale about a man struggling to do right by his family in a world brutalized by class differences.

We’ve got Harrow County, Cullen Bunn and Tyler Cook’s new dark horror series from Dark Horse. If the buzz on this book is half-true, this is the sort of story that will keep you up long after you finish reading it.

Harrow

 

The Mantle (Image), meanwhile, gives us Ed Brisson’s take on a classic super-hero trope: A great cosmic force chooses an average man to help him help the world. The previews of this book looked dark and twisted, which isn’t always good with superhero stuff… but I’m willing to give Brisson and artist Brian Level a shot, based on their past work.

Mantle

 

Mythic (Image), on the other hand, is something different. Phil Hester and John McCrea are both creators who know how to craft a tale and keep you coming back issue to issue, so their story of a world in which magic is the real power behind everything is the sort of thing I want to read. Add in the price ($1.99 for a full-size first issue) and you’ve got an “off the wall” pick-up that can’t hurt to try!

Mythic

 

Lastly, of course, is the reason we had six wonderful issues of Moon Knight last year. Injection (Image) is Warren Ellis and Declan Shalvey’s REAL work. Ellis, as he often does, propels us into a world much like our own, but with a dark secret: Five people poisoned the world, and now they need to fix it. Proposed as a “serialized sequence of graphic novels” the idea seems ambitious, to say the least, but if anyone can pull it off, it’s this team!

Injection_01

Author: 13th Dimension

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