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All-New, All-Different Marvel – a book-by-book break-down

September 24, 2015 by krisis

ANAD-Marvel-Comics-2 It’s upon us! Even though Marvel’s mega-event Secret Wars won’t quite be over until December, they’re pressing ahead with a line-wide All New, All Different Marvel relaunch starting in October with over sixty new books debuting into the spring, and more announced each week. That’s a lot of comics, many of them with completely fresh directions and creative teams – how can you wade through to find the most-interesting titles?

As always, I took care of the sifting for you! Here’s a list of every book Marvel has announced to date, the amount of hype I’m feeling on it, a one-sentence summary of the concept and creative team, and the elevator pitch on why you should care.

Ready? Here we go! Updated November 2!

A-Force
Hype Factor:
What is it? An all-female team of Marvel heroes
Who’s creating it? Written by G. Willow Wilson (Ms Marvel) with art by Jorge Molina, one of Marvel’s most consistent artists

Why read it? Even for someone like me who lives for the women of Marvel, this assemblage of female heroes seems like a bit of a hodgepodge. At least Marvel Now’s Fearless Defenders had a cleverer central trope, but, it began with a pair of B-list players. Here, Marvel is pulling out all of the stops short of Storm and it’s probably going to pay off. Plus, Wilson was ace on her brief run on X-Men Vol. 4 – she clearly did the homework on the character’s rich histories, and they never sounded so good.

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Hype Factor:
What is it? Marvel’s comic version of the TV team
Who’s creating it? Original Green Arrow showrunner Marc Guggenheim

Why read it? It’s Agent Colson and friends mashing up with/against Hydra, which should be very palatable to Marvel’s TV fans. However, it’s going to take a lot for this to top both the prior Coulson-starring books, Ales Kot’s Secret Avengers and Mark Waid’s Agents of SHIELD. Plus, Guggenheim was weak on his X-Men arc in Marvel Now – the history was there, but the voices were off. Is that because a TV writer writes for actors and not pictures on a page? Either way, I’ll believe it when I read it.

All-New, All-Different Avengers
Hype Factor:
What is it? A team of second-generation heroes takes the Avengers mantle (but not the budget)
Who’s creating it? Writer Mark Waid with artists Adam Kubert and Mahmud Asrar

Why read it? Take four of Marvel’s hottest properties of the past few years – Falcon as Captain America, the black and hispanic teen Spider-Man, a female Thor, and the new Afgani-American teen Ms. Marvel. Add a pubescent Nova and cinematic smashes Iron Man and Vision. Oh, and Waid will write it hot off of one of the best (and most playful) Daredevil runs of all time. Yeah: everybody’s going to buy this comic book. I’m slightly less excited by the artists – Kubert is wildly uneven and Marvel has yet to find the right colorist for Asrar. Still, this book will be a smash.

my first custom-bound comics project

September 20, 2015 by krisis

Top to bottom: Marvel’s B&W Essential She-Hulk Collection, my bind of the same issues, my Sub-Mariner bind, a color Spider-Man Epic collection of about the same length as my bind, and a color Marvel Masterworks collection of about half the length without its dust jacket.

Just a quick one today to share a project I completed earlier this year.

Even with my primary focus being on graphic novel collections of individual comic books, I have a ton of single “floppy” comics boxed up in my house. Some of them are from my original 1990s collection, which I’ve bought others to fill gaps between official collected editions. The rub is I am completely disinterested in reading single comic book. So much picking up and putting down, plus those annoying bags and boards to keep them safe. I love a book I can bring with me to bed or on my commute.

As a result, I took a spare low-grade run of The Savage She-Hulk plus some cheap Saga of The Sub-Mariner recap comics and sent them off to be custom bound per my exact specifications. Some people carefully clip out unnecessary pages and back covers, but I wanted to begin by just getting some whole comics bound.

Here are the results – the only difference between the two books is that the She-Hulk bind is oversewn (stitches pass through all pages a short distance in from the spine) and Sub-Mariner is sewn through the fold (each comic is effectively one signature of the book, with stitches through the fold of the book).

What I loved about learning about book-binding was that it wasn’t just about comic books. I didn’t get to work on anything with a hardcover in my years of print production, and this really opened my eyes to the types of binding methods used in the books we encounter every day.

Review: Red One, Vol. 1 – Welcome To America by Dorison, Dodson, & Dodson

September 19, 2015 by krisis

Terry Dodson’s art occupies a space between cartoon and cheesecake. His men are muscled and smirking, his woman curvy with cheshire smiles. With his inking wife Rachel adding a slick, bold line on all of his figures his work is positively animated. That makes him a tremendous artist for a prior gig on Wonder Woman, but strange fit for some of the more grounded Marvel titles he’s graced, like Uncanny X-Men and portions of last year’s event flop Axis.

What Dodson hasn’t done much of is creator-owned work – and, why would he with the time restrictions of an artist who is in demand for Marvel’s highest-paying projects!

Yet, here his is, collaborating with French author Xavier Dorison. Together they’re penning a Communist superhero invading America in the late 70s to preserve its hedonism, a take surely inspired by The Americans.

How did it hold up?

Red One, Vol. 1 – Welcome To America

Written by Xavier Dorison with art by Terry and Rachel Dodson

#140char review: Red One is a misguided mis-mash of 70s-worship and Cold War fetishizing, supposing the commies would win if we stayed Hedonists. Disjointed.

CK Says: Skip It

There’s a very interesting premise here: The Cold War served the ruling class of Russia as much as that of America, and the best way to extend that was to make sure America was a land of increasingly liberal hedonists. What if America was suddenly gripped by an evangelical vigilantism that threatened to plunge the country into a conservative movement bordering on Neo-Fascism? What if Russia was willing to send in their best agent – Black Widow under another name – to disrupt the trend? [Read more…] about Review: Red One, Vol. 1 – Welcome To America by Dorison, Dodson, & Dodson

Marvel Now In Hindsight: Every Comic Book Series, Ranked

September 17, 2015 by krisis

After Avengers vs. X-Men at the end of 2012, Marvel reloaded their entire line save for a handful of just-launched books and dubbed the era of titles “Marvel Now.” There have been a few incremental waves of additional launches since then, but the main spine of Marvel has been telling consistent stories since then – the Avengers and X-Men flagships, their big three Avengers heroes, and Spider-Man.

The stories haven’t only been consistent – they’ve been really good. Unlike the 2011 DC New 52 launch, Now hit the stands with nothing bad in the bunch. Even as some books declined as the period wore on, we got other amazing winners in the intermediate waves.

Now that we’re only weeks away from the next major period of Marvel where every book will be refreshed, I thought it was the right time to look back about what was so awesome about Marvel Now by ranking every book we got along the way – over 70 ongoing titles!

As with my Writer-Rankings last week, being low on the list doesn’t mean a book was bad – just that it’s not my top pick for you to spend your hard-earned dollars on.

The criteria: I’m a trade-waiter, so books had to release at least one trade by this week. Books from before Now only count if they made it through 2014. No series that were explicitly disclaimed as limited (short series that got cut off by Secret Wars do count). Two volumes of a book by the same author or with continuous story count as one entry – like Daredevil Volume 3 and Volume 4, both by Waid, or Iron Man and Superior Iron Man.

The final trades for these series were too late-breaking for me to evaluate them fairly: All-New Captain America, Amazing Spider-Man Vol. 3, Bucky Barnes: The Winter Soldier, Deathlok, Savage Hulk, Spider-Gwen, Spider-Woman, Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Uncanny Avengers Vol. 2, Wolverines.

Let’s get to it! [Read more…] about Marvel Now In Hindsight: Every Comic Book Series, Ranked

Newly Released Graphic Novels & Collected Comics – Sept. 15, 2015 Edition

September 15, 2015 by krisis

Sometimes being a comics fan is about branching out.

As I have documented in the past, I started reading comics with Marvel’s X-Men #3 in 1991. At the time I had no aspirations of reading other titles or publishers – I just wanted to know what these mutants were all about. However, once I visited a comic store, the purchase pattern started expanding. All the X-Men. Then a bit of Image. Oh, and Wonder Woman of course. Hey, these new Dark Horse superheroes look cool!

That’s part of why I like putting together this list. I’m a complete Marvel Zombie, a phrase historically indicating someone who reads the entire Marvel line. However, I’m not just a Marvel fan – I’m a fan of the comic medium. That means sometimes I need to just see what’s out there to break out of my normal fan comfort zone.

Hopefully this list helps you with that, too!

Crush of the Week: Heart In a Box OGN

Buy this comic. Buy it. Buy it!

Kelly Thompson is the brilliant author of the CBR “She Has No Head” column and the books The Girl Who Would Be King and Storykiller who finally exploded as a comic author in 2015 with Jem from IDW and Captain Marvel and the Carole Corps from Marvel. She is the real deal when it comes to amazing characters, and she also weaves in a thick vein of feminism (i.e., everyone has an equal opportunity) into all of her work. This is her first original graphic novel, paired with artist Meredith McClaren, about a girl who needs to literally put her heart back together after a breakup. You need it.

Interesting Unknown: Universal War One

From writer/artist Denis Bajram, the solicit: The whole world is at war. And it’s about to get worse. 2058. Humanity has colonized our entire solar system. In the middle of a civil war between the core planets and distant outlying planetary settlements, an immense black wall appears, cutting our solar system in two.”

This is a French comic translated and released by a Marvel imprint. The confusing thing is that it’s hit hardcover before – once for the original series, and once for the follow-up Revelations. This is longer than each of those , but not long enough to be both of them in one book(the original series were 64pg issues, the follow-up 48 – we’d have to assume 20% ads to fit into this sub-300pg book, which is high). I’m not sure what to tell you, but it looks cool!

Now, on to Marvel and the rest of the publishers! [Read more…] about Newly Released Graphic Novels & Collected Comics – Sept. 15, 2015 Edition