For DC, this was a real hit or miss week. The issues that worked really worked, and the issues that didn’t just kind of felt there. A lot of the best stuff this week took more time to read than usual, because they were so packed with things to pick apart. It was honestly hard…
Adventure Time Issue #68: Dealing with Ageism
Adventure Time #68 August 31, 2017 KaBOOM! Written by Delilah Dawson Drawn by Ian McGinty
Rulebreakers: Billy Johnson and His Duck Explore Lettering
Billy Johnson and His Duck are Explorers is a comic by cartoonist Mathew New, running here and there online and in print since about 2011. The premise is simple; it’s exactly as the title suggests. Billy and Barrace explore your classic pulp fiction ruins, chatting together as they go. It’s simple, but not emotionally simplistic. Map…
Variant Covers 101
Variant covers! Those exciting, colourful often “rare” comic book covers that we all love (to hate). But what are variant covers? Why do they exist? Why does your local comic shop not have the one by your absolute favourite artist? And what does their existence mean in the greater comic book landscape? Here’s my primer…
Direct Currents: DC Discussion for August
Welcome to Direct Currents, where Annie Blitzen and Cori McCreery will talk about the month that was for DC Comics. Since this is our first column, we thought we’d let you get to know us first. Cori has been reading DC Comics since Superman died in 1992. Her favorite characters are Supergirl and the various…
Quick and Talky With Rick and Morty: Tini Howard on PokeJokes
It’s almost impossible to exist on planet Earth and not have at least heard about Rick and Morty. The cartoon follows the obscure adventures of Morty, your average 14 year old dude, and his alcoholic, genius scientist grandfather Rick as they go on weird, wonderful, and sometimes morally challenging adventures through the universe–and many of…
Thanks To Bill & Ted Save The Universe, Comics Are Fun Again
Claire & Rosie’s Excellent Experience Bill & Ted Save the Universe #3 Boom! Studios Brian Joines (Writer), Bachan (Artist), Alex Guimaraes (Colorist), Jim Campbell (Letterer) August 16, 2017 Rosie Comics can be fucking depressing. Whether it’s the fact that the same six men each have 30 books in Previews every month and yet you can’t…
Alien Bounty Hunter
After my experience with Failsafe, I was not inclined to give Vault Comics a fair shake. It seems silly to let my read of one book affect another, but when a book like that sees print, it can cast doubt over the standards of the entire line—I feel the same way about Marvel’s continued employment…
Image 25: Top Cow’s Matt Hawkins’ Full Trajectory
From some guy in a line to COO of a 25-year-old publishing imprint, Matt Hawkins saw the glory days of Image, and stayed around for the aftermath. There are plenty of interviews covering the Founding Fathers of Image’s early days as masters of their new domain. The twentieth anniversary interviews Jason Sacks carried out for…
Failsafe: One to Keep in the Vault
I threw out an entire draft before this one. It was about 500 words and it was picking, bit by bit, at my thoughts about these comics, without ever really digging into the meat of them. The meat is this: Failsafe is a bad comic book. It’s a bad enough comic book that it angers…
Sing a Song of Spiritus
Spiritus Tim Daniel (words & design), Michael Kennedy (art), Lauren Norby (letterer) The Vault, 2017 “This comic is like a song.” That’s something I say sometimes. I say it to mean I read this with my brain out of focus, like I saw the main strength of it with the part of my brain that processes…
Triangulating Looks: Introducing Fashion
Because we live life on hard mode, we naturally decided to use column #2 to dig into the most difficult to define point on our triangle: fashion. In simplest terms, we’re defining fashion as building designs from the ground up rather than duplicating or reworking real world outfits. That doesn’t mean runway versus rack, though!…