WHAT I’M READING: Mark Waid

Mark‘s the man of the moment this week, so we’re trotting out an extra WHAT I’M READING:

The Superior Foes of Spider-Man, Marvel. The ongoing story of a band of secondary Spider-Man villains trying to make one last big score. I thought this kind of story had been done to death — sad-sack, also-ran villains played for laughs — but writer Nick Spencer treads the line between comedy and tragedy brilliantly.

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Trillium, Vertigo. Writer/artist Jeff Lemire has been on my radar for some time, but his creator-owned work never seemed stronger to me than what he’s doing in this science-fiction tale spanning centuries in a dual-narrative, multi-layered approach to storytelling that’s deceptively sophisticated.

Hawkeye, Marvel. Were I a smarter man, I’d be trying to bury coverage of this title now that it’s surpassed Daredevil on so many critics’ lists, but I’m dumb that way. I never thought this series would work — hey, look, Hawkeye in his fourth attempt at an ongoing! — but writer Matt Fraction and artist David Aja own the material with a voice unlike any other out there. Part “Rockford Files,” part Donald Westlake, part superhero, this is a must-read every month.

Masks & Mobsters. Viva digital comics! Monkeybrain, through Comixology, publishes this noir ongoing by Joshua Williamson and a rotating band of artists. Williamson imagines a world in which organized crime had to radically rethink how it did business once superheroes started appearing, and it’s darkly clever.

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The Private Eye. Another digital comic, this one from Brian K. Vaughan (Saga) and Marcos Martin (Spider-Man) — both dear friends of mine, but it’s an objective favorite. Speculative fiction set in a not-too-distant future but dealing with the issues of privacy that are tearing up the headlines today.

What else? If you didn’t stop me, I could write paragraphs and paragraphs about Aw Yeah Comics!, Satellite Sam, Fantagraphics’ Carl Barks Library, Batman ’66 and more. It’s a great time to be a comics fan.

 

Author: Dan Greenfield

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