Another week, another mess of first issues — even if one of ’em is from last week. What can I say? My LCS got shorted on the title in question and so I didn’t get a copy until this past Wednesday. But we’ll get to that in due course. First we’ve got —

Second Coming #1, by Mark Russell and Richard Pace, was originally slated to be a Vertigo title until the suits at DC got cold feet, and I’d say it’s all worked out pretty well for the creators in question given that Vertigo is being shuttered and its “new” publisher, Ahoy Comics, appears to be on something of an upward trajectory. The premise here is that bored Jesus gets sent back to Earth by an even-more-bored God and takes up residence with a painfully obvious Superman analogue for reasons that I guess will become more clear in the…

By turns charming, mysterious, and existentially dreadful (albeit in an understated fashion), cartoonist Lis Valasco’s newest (as far as I know) mini, The Adventures Of Moon Pie, relates the tale of her title character and his nameless (again, as far as I know) robot companion, who apparently debuted in an earlier comic, going about the admittedly laborious business of completing some sort of unexplained — perhaps even inexplicable? — mission, and finding little by way of living beings to interact with in the lush forest in which they’ve landed. Apparently, then, having a job sucks just as much for “people” from other planets as it does for those of us here.

Collecting and cataloging mushrooms for some purportedly “higher” purpose is the ostensible goal of our duo, but the long lifespan of our moon-headed protagonist (I refer to him as a “boy” in the title of this review due…

It’s no secret that I’ve always considered Tom Van Deusen to be one of the funniest cartoonists working today, but that’s selling him a bit short, I suppose, considering that he’s also one of the most interesting. Hiding under the modern iteration of fairly classic comic-strip style illustration that he employs is something that’s almost post-postmodern, an exploration of identity and the perception thereof that see-saws back and forth between making Van Deusen look as outrageously asinine as possible in one book (Scorched Earth), gluttonous as hell in another (EatEatEat), and good-natured-bordering-on-bemused in the next (I Wish I Was Joking). All of which leads this critic to ask the questions : Will the real Tom Van Deusen please step up? And does it even matter if he does?

His latest collection from Kilgore Books, Expelling My Truth, seems as though it…

For awhile there, it seemed like all we covered in this column was first issues. Then we got back into looking at minis and other self-published stuff. And now we’re whiplashing back to looking at a whole bunch of first issues again. Because I really do have this over-arching need to keep you folks off-balance, I guess. Anyway, we’ve got for of ’em to check out this week, so here we go :

Sea Of Stars #1 comes to us courtesy of Image Comics, writers Jason Aaron and Dennis (Hopeless) Hallum, and artist Stephen Green. Anybody with half a brain probably steers clear of Aaron’s creator-owned stuff at this point (what happened to Southern Bastards? Or The Goddamned?), but I have a full  brain, and so I picked this up — and walked away from it pretty glad that I did. An “all-ages” sort of thing about a…

Billed by its creator and publisher, cartoonist Meghan Turbitt, as “the definitive guide to Star Wars by someone who has only seen the movies once for the first time last year,” the 2018 full-color mini Galactic Friends is pretty much exactly what it claims to be — which makes it the most authoritative shorthand examination of George Lucas’ non-stop license to print money that has likely ever seen the light of day.

There are blessed few outside observers to the entire Star Wars phenomenon left on the planet, of course — they’ve heard of this shit in even the most remote Mongolian steppes — so to find one is something of a rarity in and of itself; to find one possessed of a sharp wit, zero by way of preconceptions, and the ability to draw? Well, heck, that fits the dictionary definition of a “miracle” right there. Or at least…

We’ve certainly spent a lot of time dissecting Josh and Samuel Bayer’s All-Time Comics series on this site lately, and while I’m tempted to say something along the lines of “the beatings will continue until you buy this shit,” in truth I was doing some catch-up work in order to set the stage for the second “season” of this ever-evolving concept. The “zero issue” put out last month by Floating World Comics set the table, but now that All-Time Comics : Zerosis Deathscape #1 has arrived, it’s time for the main course. So — just how tasty is it?

The first few pages — a flashback sequence illustrated by the always-sublime Gabrielle Bell that ties the events of the “prequel” comic in with the series “proper” — are one visually-delicious appetizer, that’s for sure, but for old-time readers, it’s the main 1980s-set portion of the story, drawn by trailblazing “Big…

With the recent — and, I must say, not too terribly surprising, all things considered — announcement that DC will be shit-canning (excuse me, “sunsetting”) their venerable “mature readers” Vertigo imprint after 26 years, I figured now might be a good time to take a look at what Vertigo alum Shelly Bond was doing with her not-exactly-new-anymore Black Crown line over at IDW —

Say good-bye to Feargal “Fergie” Feguson and the ghost who isn’t really Sid Vicious with Punks Not Dead : London Calling #5, which wraps up the second (and, I presume, final) run of writer David Barnett and artist extraordinaire Martin Simmonds’ decidedly fun little slice of occult/supernatural hijinks with plenty of “fuck you” attitude mixed in. I’m gonna miss this book, but each and every storyline comes to a thoroughly satisfying conclusion here, except perhaps for Fergie’s would-be “romance” with his high school sweetie, and they…

Prince straddling his iconic Purple Rain motorcycle brandishing a pistol. Robin Williams in full Mrs. Doubtfire drag putting out a dude’s eye with a broomstick. A distinctly Asian-looking Michael Jordan with a basketball in one hand, a gun in the other as he prepares to Space Jam the living shit out of any interstellar baddies. Charles Bronson’s legendary vigilante Paul Kersey taking aim at axe-wielding zombies in Death Wish 4. If these images all sound infinitely more bizarre — to say nothing of more interesting — than the films to which they tie-in by the very thinnest of threads, that’s because they are.

Welcome to the sheer, balls-out insanity of Ghanaian movie posters.

When American popular culture is exported, something is always lost in translation, and thank goodness for that, because markets abroad tend to take the pablum we spew out way too literally and end up turning the…

After giving you, dear readers — and myself! — a bit of a breather from all things “All-Time,” we’re back for one more round, this time putting the not-quite-first installment of “Season Two” of Josh and Samuel Bayer’s ongoing post-modern take on super-heroics under our metaphorical microscope, that being All -Time Comics : Zerosis Deathscape #0.

Direct “Bronze Age” call-backs are still here to be found, but you’ve gotta do a lot more digging for them as the brothers Bayer, along with new collaborator Josh Simmons and returning “usual suspects” Ken Landgraf and cover artist Das Patoras, have widened the scope of the project considerably, with the art and story this time most clearly hearkening back to the EC “hosted” horror comics of the 1950s, while the “zero issue” hustle is something straight outta the 1990s “speculator bubble” playbook.

The question, of course, is — are all of these changes for…