In an effort to keep you up to date with all the latest comics news, we here at Sequart.com have managed to obtain several solicitations from Previews… from the future! Ah…yeah.
In the year 2017…
Peepshow #72
Joe Matt
Fantagraphics
More autobiographical brilliance from Joe Matt. Following the outlaw of pornography in 2015, during which time Matt completed issues 19 to 71, Joe Matt has been drawing pictures of boobs in the dirt with a stick, a heartfelt true story that becomes fodder for his newest Peepshow arc.
In the year 2009…
Spawn #189
Todd McFarlane
Neil Gaiman Publishing, Inc.
McFarlane continues his return to comics with this action packed issue in which Spawn, Lord of the Underworld and State Representative of California, narrowly escapes attack from several angry constituents in a crowded courtroom shortly before battling several overly detailed action figures.
In the year 2019…
The Comics Journal #712
Various
Fantagraphics
The Comics Journal looks back at the works of B. Kriegstein and Gilbert Hernandez. Again. Several Fantagraphics books are given prestigious awards. Also featuring yet more interviews with James Kochalka. And, yeah, another one with Craig Thompson.
In the year 2008…
Ministry of Space (3 of 3) (Res.)
Warren Ellis / Chris Weston
Image
Frankly, we’ve forgotten.
In the year 2029…
Bullitude
Brian Michael Bendis / Avatar Studios
Avatar
The latest in technology comes to comics as Avatar presents the first ever holographic comic book. Open the pages and beams of brilliant light spill from their surface to form the images that make up Brian Bendis’ latest gritty crime thriller. All holographic images rendered in overinked, unintelligible, two dimensional black and white.
In the year 2006…
McFarlane Bust
Dynamic Forces
An artfully rendered bust of notable comics creator and personality Todd McFarlane. This gorgeous bust depicts the moment in which McFarlane realized his million dollar baseball was worth $4.95. (Bust comes with separate mini-baseball and, if you would like, actual baseball.)
In the year 2034…
[solicitation written on brick wall with charred bone fragment]
Spider-Man / Batman: Dead Letter Office (1 of 3)
Written, drawn, colored, LETTERED, published, stapled, distributed and read by Augie DeBlieck, Jr.
AugiVerse Comics
This is what you’ve been waiting for, Mutated Comics Fan! Following last month’s nuclear holocaust, I, the last man alive on the planet Earth have created that greatest of all comicbook universes, AugiVerse! No character is too corporate or too obscure to be included in this, the best of all possible worlds.
In the stunning mini-series that kicks off AugiVerse, Spider-Man and Batman team up to fight Nazi’s while sharing their thoughts on the finer points of comic book lettering. Can the Caped Crusader and ol’ Webhead find a meeting of the minds when it comes to clear fonts and stylized punctuation within the letter balloons?
Coming next month from AugiVerse:
Superman: Letters from Krypton (one-shot)
Naked Pictures of Wonder Woman (ongoing)
Metabarons: Letter of the Law (1 of 5)
How To Make Love The Augie DeBlieck Way (hardcover)
And now, for the nostalgia fan, some reviews of comics from today…
Planetary #16 and #17
Warren Ellis’ Planetary finally started up again a couple of months ago. It took him god knows how many months to put out a new issue, so I wasn’t gonna fall all over myself to read it. I was almost tempted not to buy the book at all (reads better as a trade anyway), but the lure of Cassaday’s art was too great.
Planetary seems to have lost some of its luster. I remember being enthralled with the first ten issues or so, and the last few were damn good in their own right, if not a little predictable (the whole Fourth Man non-mystery wasn’t as captivating as Ellis seemed to want it to be). Still, it’s a solid book that likes to think it’s not a superhero book, which, of course, it is, but it’s much more. Planetary gives Ellis free reign to play with every pulp fiction genre imaginable and give them a majestic spin that, when brought to fruition by Cassaday’s gorgeous art, can often be awe-inspiring. Ellis takes old, tired ideas like giant bugs, Godzilla and avenging ghost killers and polishes them to a high sheen.
In the two latest issues Ellis tackles Kung Fu and Tarzan. Elijah Snow, the head of Planetary, has a meeting with the daughter of the slain Hark who is also working behind the scenes much like Snow, only doing so in ways he deems unfit. He finds out about this and tells her to stop.
So that’s #16.
After his chat in Hark’s conference room, Ellis takes us back to the ’30s to tell a story of a younger Elijah traveling to a lost jungle city. The city is a mystical place advanced far beyond that of what we believe to be modern society, and it’s also visited by a certain vine-swinging man raised by jungle creatures. Where the previous issue felt thin, Ellis packs a lot more in here, giving us an interesting love story with a great final twist that compels one to re-read the book immediately.
Despite #16 opening with a pretty but seemingly unimportant fight sequence, then going pretty much nowhere from there, Planetary is still pretty damn good. Cassaday is one of the few artists whose work I’m happy to pay three bucks for irregardless of the story and dialogue. And the last four or five issues don’t feel quite up to par with those collected in the first set of trades, Ellis is still writing interesting stories that manage to be clever AND have big monsters, which is always a plus. Fuck the Authority. Planetary feels bigger and more like what “widescreen” ought to be. I can’t think of a book on the stands today in which a single page can seem like more than you can possibly see without setting the thing down and backing up a few feet.
In the last couple of years, Ellis has been a lot of bluster without much production behind it. The Pop Comics thing didn’t exactly pan out, and his OGNs failed to set the industry on fire. Planetary doesn’t quite compensate for Ellis’ oversized ego and grand proclamations, but certainly does remind one how his profile got to be so high in the first place.
Spider-Man and Doctor Octopus: Negative Exposure #1
You can almost feel Spider-Man 2 looming, imminent. The posters are up at the multiplex. The trailers are on the way. The press machine is starting to hum. And the first wave of lousy comic book tie-ins are here.
Brian Vaughan’s Y: The Last Man is one of my favorite books. It’s not the most innovative or the most artfully drawn, but it’s the only book being published today that I get antsy to read every month right before it is released. Vaughan writes amazing cliffhangers that never fail to drag me back, but the book isn’t a long tease, either — he’s not stingy with payoffs and resolutions, either.
Spider-Man is the one character I’m predisposed to like even if the story is a little on the mediocre side, so it seemed like a Vaughan penned Spider-Man book featuring Doc Ock would have to be big fun.
Yep, sure seemed that way.
But Negative Exposure is extremely underwhelming. I’m not particularly annoyed by Doctor Octopus suddenly looking like Alfred Molina and wearing that Matrix jacket like he does in the new movie. I don’t even completely mind that Staz Johnson’s art, while passable, is a little flat and his characters look sort of indescribably odd.
What I do mind is the story being incredibly dull. How does Parker get all those great photographs of Spider-Man? Not a very interesting question, and one that’s already been played out through the Eddie Brock character. Introducing a new jealous photographer (and a pretty uninteresting one at that) doesn’t do the book any favors. Vaughan’s dialogue is clunky, especially when he feels the need to throw in extraneous technical details about photography to make the narrator more believable as a photographer. Who cares? Vaughan would be much better off making sure the character is interesting and whose personality extends beyond “Dam that Parker and his seemingly impossible access to Spider-Man!”
I guess it’s a damn good thing that not too many people are actually going to pick up these Spider-Man spinoffs (a new Doc Ock mini is due out soon) after seeing the movie. When people came into my LCS looking for Spider-Man books after the first movie (it happened once ever now and then), we could foist Ultimate Spider-Man on them and be pretty satisfied with ourselves. They were rarely disappointed. Bendis is still doing a fine job on that book, which makes this one pretty needless.
An unnecessary mini-series featuring the centerpiece of an attempted corporate synergy? Who would have guessed?
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