I’ll admit it. I have something against superhero annuals. One-shots, FCBD special editions, back-up features that aren’t meant to be humorous, digital exclusives… All by and large crap, and I typically disregard them as such. Could be because I grew up in the 80’s and my formative years of four-color superheroics were filled with gawdawful annuals that usually had nothing to do with contemporaneous storylines; featured shitty art and even shittier writing (and attempted to make up for that fact with a gimmick, like a “first appearance” trading card of some hero or villain that never had a chance at making a second appearance); or worst yet, were part of some annual-only arc that forced me to buy overpriced issues of series I’d never cared about (“Citizen Kang” comes to mind).
But I love capes-and-tights comics and I do like short stories. Self-contained issues are fantastic when done well! And I really do want to see more sterling efforts from talented creators, especially if allowed to tackle premier characters and properties.
So I flipped through DC’s special 80-page Halloween anthology, Cursed Comics Cavalcade before adding it to my weekly stack. Ten eight-page stories by first-rate writers and exciting artists. No reprints, and nothing that felt like a Wal-Mart special. Swamp Thing looking extra ominous. Professor Pyg behaving appropriately dreadful. Ghosts, space zombies, demons, and possessed kids. Hell yes, Halloween, let’s go home and read this by candlelight.
This month Fantagraphics is publishing the collected English edition of Belgian cartoonist Max de Radiguès’s Bastard. Originally serialized in a zine format, Bastard tells the story of May and her young son Eugene, accomplices in a series of recent robberies, who are desperately traveling across the U.S. while avoiding both the law as well as their double-crossing cohorts.
Uh oh. DC is getting grim again. Tom King and Clay Mann’s Heroes in Crisis #1, out this week, is a powerful opener to an intense murder mystery. The scene of the crime is a secluded rural safehouse, Sanctuary, that had been set up as a kind of therapeutic retreat for superheroes dealing with the kind of trauma that, well, comes with the job. The crime scene is a grisly litter of bodies, with several heroes — some of note, even — victims of a mass murder. And the two suspects appear to be, at least at the onset, Harley Quinn and Booster Gold.
I, probably like many casual comic book fans, was compelled to read Batman: Damned #1 for one reason: the Bat-dong. News surrounding Batman’s bare, ink-rendered member kept my group chat buzzing through the day of its release. Sadly, when I finally got around to reading the story, the X-rated panel was censored, and I had to rely on Google images to fill in the blanks. However, what’s really sad is how this dong-reveal, and the following redaction of said dong by DC comics, seems like a publishing gimmick to boost sales (albeit a more fun one than just restarting a series and slapping a “#1” on the cover). What is actually awesome about this book is: it’s good. It’s great to look at and fun to read, and adds up to more than one money shot panel.
This month Lion Forge is releasing the first printed edition of Ezra Claytan Daniels’s Upgrade Soul, a startling work of science fiction that had been originally developed as an semi-immersive digital experience. The work, begun in 2012, was built using Eric Loyer’s 
At the onset of Marvel’s current Fresh Start, the publisher made a predictably uniform push to give its marquee characters renewed rack appeal. The whole initiative kicked off with Jason Aaron and Ed McGuinness’s new volume of 
The revolution may not be televised, but nothing has stopped it from being splashed and sequenced, stapled and folded, colored and squarebound. It’s marvelous credit to the medium that comics of a revolutionary bent have evolved from the field of underground pamphlets and zines into thoughtful, well-written, mass-produced monthlies and graphic novels. It’s also a little frightening to realize how much our contemporary social consciousness has fueled this surge of four-color rebellion. Superheroes, who, like it or not, have become synonymous with the medium, achieved their Golden Age ascension at the height of World War II, when the enemy was without (interestingly, subsequent to the War, those selfsame heroes dwindled in popularity, losing ground to crime, romance, and western rags). But the enemy within, particularly in the last decade, has never felt more menacing. For a mainstream publisher like Marvel to unveil a summer-long event like 
I’m honestly surprised it took this long. With the whirlwind international acclaim that Marvel’s film universe has brought to this brand, making The Avengers the kind of household name a teenage me hadn’t ever even imagined, why have we waited until 2018 for the return of the title’s first spinoff? We’ve had Initiative, Academy, Young, Solo, and Spotlight. World and Secret, New and Mighty, Assemble and A.I. And most of that was just in the last decade. Hell, even the 
It can be mildly frustrating being on the dividing line between generations. I am on the younger end of 
Oh, baby X-Men, we hardly knew ye. Since the time-displaced original five debuted in 2012 as part of Brian Michael Bendis’s mutant master plan, many of us have been more or less waiting for the eventual reversal — whatever method of time-traveling chicanery would be necessary to send them back to their proper when and clear the decks once again. The plot development that brought the young X-Men into the present-day Marvel universe seemed, from the outset, to be very temporary. Have kid Cyclops show crazy old Cyclops that he was acting a right dick, and move on. Send the younguns home. Instead, these “All-New X-Men” settled in for a spell and opened new doors (closet doors among them) all over the mansion.
