Some new comics, roughly best-to-worst:

Insufferable is technically a webcomic, but it’s written by Mark Waid (Irredeemable/Incorruptable/the current run on Daredevil, etc), has professional superhero-style art, and releases a ~10 page issue every week. It’s more of Waid’s “superheroes who are kinda dicks” thing, but not in a Boys kinda way. But he does nifty stuff with the digital format. You can use the right and left arrow keys to navigate pages, and they do things that are impractical in print but make perfect sense in digital, like using 4 pages to slowly reveal a 4 panel layout. It’s only 2 issues in, but I’m enjoying it so far. (the site itself is a work in progress, the RSS feed works, but as of yet, blogposts don’t actually link to the comics… but I see on Waid’s twitter that someone’s already suggested that fix)
Fury Max is Garth Ennis’ second take no Nick Fury, after the one from a while back that supposedly single-handedly killed a planned Nick Fury movie starring George Clooney. The first issue is all exposition, set in, I guess French Indochina, but Fury’s serving as an American liason of sorts to the French still trying to hold Vietnam. And it’s what you’d expect from Garth Ennis. Fury’s a tough guy, the politicians are smiling bastards who are going to get people killed, that sorta thing. And I like that sorta thing.
World’s Finest is the New 52 introduction of Huntress and Power Girl. Power Girl finally gets a decent costume that will make her something other a pair of boobs (or a source for boob jokes, even though some are pretty good). Huntress gets something similar to the Jim Lee (I think) designed slutty costume from around the time of Hush, but without the slutty parts. Yet despite the improvement on the pointless revealing of skin, both costumes look kinda goofy. Anyway, it’s a rather bland intro that ties into the beginning of the New 52 Earth 2 (see below), but I have always wanted to see more done with the Huntress character (I just think a sorta hot girl version of Batman who’s a little bit more of an anti-hero is a solid concept), so I’m going to stick around for a bit.
Epic Kill sounded like it had the potential to be a great piece of trash. It’s about a hot girl who kills shit, and promises at least one “epic kill” per issue. But it kinda reminds me of Sucker Punch. So Geebs might still like it, but I thought it was stupid. And how come badass killer girls always have to be horribly damaged people who can barely relate to others? Badass killer guys can be like “fuck yeah, killing people is awesome!” But badass killer girls have to be like “I barely ever speak and I can’t form human relationships.”
Mind the Gap is about a girl who looks to be in her early 20s, but written by a guy who’s probably my age or older. Which explains why she makes references to Lionel Richie, Pink Floyd, and Blind Melon. This bugged me. I guess, if she made references to the music of her generation and I just didn’t get them, that’d be ok. But it seems more like writer wish fulfillment by imagining a girl that is young and hot but also into the same stuff he is. I dunno. The story’s about the girl going into a coma and having an out of body experience where she can hang out with the spirits of other people in comas or something. It’s not bad, but clearly not a book for me.
Earth 2‘s cover features Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman. Much of my dislike for this book probably stems from me not reading much of the pre-release publicity for comics. But, Spoiler alert: those characters on the cover all die, and this book will be about the JSA with old school heroes like the Flash with the helmet and Alan Scott as the Green Lantern. So if I’d known that, I may have only read it to flip through for the bits about Power Girl and Huntress’ new origins. Instead, I went in thinking it might be something I’d want to read, and it wasn’t. (also, why would Wonder Woman call the messenger of the gods “Mercury” when she’s Greek?)
I went into Dial H totally blind, except that people seemed to be excited about it. It’s about Boy Chimney (a hero who takes over the body of whoever dials “H-E-R-O” on a magic phone booth and shoots clouds of black smoke at people) and Captain Lachrymose (who seems to just make people cry). It was weird and I didn’t like it.

Three new comics and one old, roughly from best to worst:

The Massive is some kind of environmental catastrophe comic by Brian Wood. They released an Earth Day digital preview thing for free, which didn’t give a tremendous idea of what the series was about, but it did show Kristian Donaldson’s artwork, which is excellent, and give the general idea that it has something to do with a group of environmentalists in a world more polluted than our own (I hope).
AvX: Versus is a miniseries that stretches out the fight scenes from Avengers vs. X-Men. This sounds like a terrible idea, but the first issue was actually entertaining as hell. It’s just jokes and fight scenes and nothing else. Which I’m ok with.
Secret Service is another new Mark Millar comic, this one drawn by Dave Gibbons of Watchmen fame and co-plotted by Kick-Ass director Matthew Vaughn. The introductory sequence is absolutely great. Everything after that, the actual plot going forward, is pretty dull. The concept seems to be a chav punk joining the Secret Service (as in Her Majesty’s, not the guys that protect the President). I’m hoping it picks up.
The Incal is a French SciFi comic by Alejandro Jodorowsky and the recently deceased Moebius. Almost all the attention to Moebius’ death I saw was from Bleeding Cool, which has images removed from his RSS feed, and I never bothered to click through. So I mistakenly had the impression that the one Silver Surfer image from the Joe Satriani cover and this image were all I knew of his work. But it turns out it’s just the Silver Surfer image, the other one was another French guy named François Schuiten. Anyway, Moebius’ work is quite impressive. Lots of the city and spaceship designs were genuinely awe-inspiring. But I hated the comic. It was like David Lynch did an adaptation of Mickey Spillane doing an adaptation of The Fifth Element. Just a weird tone, no rhythm to the storytelling, and lots of general bizarreness. Maybe something was lost in translation, or maybe it’s just not for me.

New comics, roughly from best to worst:

Secret is another new Jonathan Hickman creator-owned thing from Image (apparently, a third one, with him drawing, is on the horizon, too). This one doesn’t get off to a super strong start, but there are hints of something better to come. It’s basically about corporate security and corporate espionage, but there’s likely something bigger at work, which is where my interest lies. This being Hickman, I have faith that it’ll go somewhere interesting. (also, what’s with comics and the word secret? Secret Six, Secret Wars, Secret War, Secret Invasion, Secret Warriors, Secret Avengers?)
America’s Got Powers has a pretty great concept: that if people developed superpowers today, we’d use them for entertainment as much as we would to improve the world. Hence the reality show at the center of this comic. It doesn’t do much in the first issue beyond the concept, unfortunately. Bryan Hitch (The Ultimates) provides the art, so this will look nice and might experience delays. And it’s written by British talk show host Jonathan Ross, the second of his comics I’ve tried (after Turf). It’s just barely good enough to stick around for more.
Daredevil Season One is a graphic novel telling a fairly straightforward Daredevil tale from early in his career (as evidenced by him still with the yellow costume). Not anything special, just a solid combination of swashbuckling superheroics and lawyering.
The Shadow is Garth Ennis’ take on the pulp hero. Which sounds like something I’d like a lot, but aside from one cool panel with a bit of the old ultraviolence, it’s quite dull. Oh well.

While on my break between Stargate seasons, I decided to check out the Iron Man: Extremis motion comic, despite having already read the comic (which is good). My past experience with motion comics is fairly crappy, and this is really no different. They go quite a bit beyond what I’d seen before, though. The Spider-Woman one was basically just comic panels with maybe one moving-but-not-animated element. This has real animation integrated into the scenes. Lip sync, facial expressions, etc. But that actually makes it worse. Spider-Woman looked like a comic book with mediocre voice acting and a soundtrack, Extremis looks like a really badly animated cartoon.

New-ish comics, roughly from best to worst:

Avengers vs. X-Men is the latest big Marvel crossover. And in typical Marvel fashion, it’s a pretty simple concept. The Phoenix Force is coming back, the X-Men want to let it possess Hope, the Avengers don’t, so they fight. It’s plotted by all the big writers at Marvel at the moment: Bendis, Brubaker, Hickman, Aaron, and Fraction, with Bendis doing the actual scripting. And so far it’s pretty good. My opinion of it may sour over the coming months as it infects nearly every Marvel series I read (I think Daredevil might be safe, but DD is doing its own crossover with Spider-Man and the Punisher, I think?). Also, the cover I included here sorta makes it look like Hope is coming out of a giant vagina.
Danger Club is a superhero comic from Image, set in a world where the Justice League equivalent went to space to fight something and lost, leaving only sidekicks behind. It’s a pretty straightforward story with nice artwork, but were it not for one character I’d have found the whole thing very bland. The one character is a girl named Yoshimi who pilots a giant robot and also has goggles and a jetpack, which is just cool. Presumably, she is also a black belt in karate and takes lots of vitamins. But yeah, I will follow it for another issue or two to see if either Yoshimi becomes the main character or the rest of the book becomes interesting.
Ferals is a new David Laphan series from Avatar Press, so I expected it to be gory, and it is. But it’s also kinda boring, there’s just some monster dismembering people, and I don’t care. So I didn’t really feel a need to read past the first one.

Some new-ish comics, roughly from best to worst:

The New Deadwardians seems to be a strange high concept of Downton Abbey meets Underworld or something. It’s set in early 1900s London, where they’ve walled off sections of the city to try to keep the zombies out. And it seems like the aristocracy have all infected themselves with vampirism because the zombies have no interest in eating other dead stuff, but the plebs are still alive and potentially in danger of zombie attacks. It wasn’t exactly a wildly entertaining first issue, and it’s definitely not going to be action packed like The Walking Dead or anything, but it’s a hell of an interesting concept. I’m kinda pleased, too, because with Scalped and Northlanders both about to end, I was in danger of following no Vertigo series at all. Their new series of late seem to be extra literary/hipstery, so it’s nice to see one that might be just plain entertaining.
Supercrooks is the newest Mark Millar series which he has promoted as the best thing since the invention of things, but it looks to be hyperbole again. The concept is a pretty generic superhero one, a bunch of supervillains figure since all the superheroes are in New York, they should rob something in Spain, because it’s not like there’s a Captain Spain (which, I think might be an in-joke, because I think there was a Captain Spain in the Ultimates 2). The first issue was pretty bland, though. It’s a generic team building thing. A bad thing happens to an old guy, so then his protoge assembles a team of people who he’s helped over the years to right the wrong. In this case, supervillains teaming up to steal something, but it could be the beginning of… at least one of the Ocean’s movies. Given that I do like stories about stealing things, it’s worth a couple more issues to see if it becomes entertaining. But at least it was a Mark Millar book that didn’t have anything about rape, forced abortions, or oddly racist stuff.
Hoax Hunters is a great concept that had a bad first issue. The premise is that the crew of a Mythbusters-like show goes and investigates rumored supernatural occurrences, defeats the real supernatural threat, and then goes on TV with fake evidence to explain how the “hoax” was perpetrated. I didn’t care at all for the particular hoax they investigated in the first issue, but I’m in for one more issue to see if they can turn it around.
The Secret History of D.B. Cooper is a fantastic title. But the actual content doesn’t do it for me. The premise is that before the hijacking, Cooper was an American agent who fought monsters during acid trips that corresponded to actual enemies. Like defeating the monster analog of Khrushchev would actually result in the unexplainable death of Khrushchev. Which is kinda too ridiculous for me.

Two new comics this week:

Saga is a new comic from Brian K. Vaughan, who has basically been on a hiatus from comics since Y the Last Man ended (I think his only comics work since 2008 was finishing up Ex Machina). And disappointingly, all we got during his hiatus was a couple of writing credits for Lost and three movie projects in development hell. Anyway, Saga is a new ongoing, which seems to be Romeo and Juliet meets Star Wars but decidedly R-rated. Or something. I’ve been seeing reviews kissing its ass like this is the next Watchmen, which is bullshit, but it’s very, very good.

I read just about any new #1 Vertigo puts out, so I didn’t really pay attention and I thought I was going to read something Saucer County about local politics. But it’s Saucer Country with an “r” in there, and there’s even aliens I didn’t notice on the cover. But it is kinda about politics, too. I found the middle section of the book somewhat confusing, with a whole dream sequence that I don’t really know what to make of, but the hook of the series that comes at the end is intriguing enough to hook me for at least another couple issues.

Several new-ish comics, in roughly best-to-worst order:

Manhattan Projects is a creator owned thing by Jonathan Hickman that had the best comic preview I’ve ever seen. So, in that spirit, I will just say that it has a very promising science fiction premise and the first issue is highly entertaining.
Since I am enjoying the hell out of Locke and Key, I grabbed a couple other things by Joe Hill, including The Cape (which it turns out it someone else adapting Joe Hill’s short prose story). It’s short, just 4 issues, but it’s a really solid story about a broken guy with superpowers being a dick. And doing things like dropping bears on people.
Fairest is a Fables spinoff that, in theory, stars the ladies of Fables: Cindy, Rose Red, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, etc. Which got me excited, because they tend to be the most interesting characters. The cover seems to promise exactly that, but until the last page, every bit of dialog is spoken by men. Which is weird. But, I’ve read all of Fables and all of its spinoffs, and despite the false advertising, this was a fairly interesting first issue.
Supurbia is a superhero soap opera along the lines of Noble Causes, but more Desperate Housewives than Dallas. Members of a Justice League-like organization (including analogues of Superman, Batman & Robin, Wonder Woman, Cap & Bucky, and someone who might be the Martian Manhunter all, unbeknownst to the public, live together in an ordinary looking suburban neighborhood with their families. It’s a solid first issue, with promises of sex and drugs and scandal and underhandedness and probably some cat fights at some point. Oddly, it’s written by Grace Randolph who I sorta know from doing a bunch of youtube stuff. And my impression of her is generally that she seems totally likable and also totally wrong for the kind of stuff she does on youtube, so I’m not a regular viewer at all. But I will be reading her comic!
Hell Yeah close to being something I’d like. But I dunno, either I missed something, or the plot moved too slow, or who knows. It’s about a kid with superpowers, about 20 years after people randomly started developing superpowers. He’s kind of a piece of shit and they briefly teased some mystery about his parents. But the first issue is basically entirely exposition, leading up to an explosion and a vague cliffhanger. I couldn’t tell you what the premise of the series is, which is kind of why I’m bailing. You get twenty-something pages to show me why I should read your comic, and at the end I couldn’t even really tell you what it’s about.
No Place Like Home is a modernization of The Wizard of Oz which has a lot of people excited. Maybe I just don’t remember the story well enough, but I didn’t pick up all that many references to the original story, and I didn’t find it a very interesting otherwise, even with the shameless cleavage cover.
Road Rage is another adaptation of a Joe Hill story, this one co-written with Stephen King. But I didn’t get it in the least. It’s about a biker gang who find themselves pursued on the highway by a truck. I think other people find big trucks intimidating on the road, but other than having a healthy respect for their size and mass, I don’t really give a shit, so I didn’t get a sense of suspense from the story at all. It’s possible it reads much better in prose.

Some mostly new comics:

Thief of Thives is a comic I was looking forward to. Thievery, Robert Kirkman and Nick Spencer, and a cool Saul Bass-style thing on the cover, it seemed like it would be a fun, slick, sexy crime comic. A lighter version of Criminal. But the first issue is actually a little boring. I’m going to try out the second, but prospects at this point are not good.
Winter Soldier is about grown up badass Bucky Barnes, the Black Widow, and features a communist gorilla with a machine gun. It’d have to be pretty terrible to have a machine gun toting Marxist ape and not leave me wanting more. It is not pretty terrible.
Alpha Girl is something I checked out almost entirely because it was a new series from Image and didn’t immediately look terrible. Image is putting out a lot of really good series at the moment. Alpha Girl is not one of them. It’s about a zombie apocalypse caused by a cosmetics company. Given the goofy concept, along with the cartoonish art, one would expect it to be funny or satirical, but if it is, it’s lost on me.
Ninjettes is a spinoff of Jennifer Blood about the eponymous schoolgirl ninja assassins. I wish I could say I had some other motivation for reading it, but honestly, schoolgirl ninja assassins sounds like something I might enjoy. But the first issue, other than the cover, features no schoolgirl ninja assassins whatsoever. Which is pretty disappointing.
Conan the Barbarian is the first thing Conan-related I’ve ever read. Apparently, he has black hair, which makes me wonder why Arnold didn’t die his hair (or, use a darker colored wig if that was a wig). Anyway, I’m mostly in this for Brian Wood, who’s similarly-themed Northlanders is ending soon. I have to admit I was a little disappointed that there were no on-panel beheadings in the first issue, or any sword fighting of any kind. But it’s an interesting set up to a story, an adaptation of apparently one of the most popular original Conan stories, and I liked it enough to keep going. But there better be beheadings at some point.
Jack Staff is an older (started in 2000) title, apparently based on a rejected Captain Britain pitch. Jack Staff in his Union Jack costume hangs around with “Sgt. States,” an obvious Captain America stand-in. I’m barely into it, stupidly picking it up despite still not being done with Starman or Hitman, but it’s pretty enjoyable so far. It has several stories going at once, which at first seemed like a main story and a backup, because it’s presented like an anthology of sorts, but then the stories have started to become intertwined, and that’s when it’s starting to get interesting.

I’m a little behind on these new comics, with Defenders #3 having just come out, but whatever:

The Defenders is Matt Fraction/Terry Dodson’s relaunch of the other Marvel team. This time, it’s Dr. Strange, Iron Fist, Red She Hulk, Namor, and the Silver Surfer. So basically Iron Fist and some people I know nothing about. But so far it’s been pretty good. Fraction’s writing is very hit-or-miss for me, but he was at his best on Immortal Iron Fist, and his writing of Danny Rand is the strong point of the book so far. Plus, I don’t completely hate Red She Hulk, which is surprising. The take on her is basically “I have superpowers? This is awesome!” which is obviously easy to relate to. An odd thing the book does is have these little messages at the bottom of some pages. Sometimes they’re just plugs for other Marvel comics, sometimes they’re commentary on the book itself (“hey that tiger is flying a spaceship”), sometimes cryptic messages indicating something for the future of the book or that something subtly important is on the page. It’s a cool device so far, but one that might turn out to get really annoying.
Sacrifice is the newest self-published thing by Sam Humphries, who wrote the distubring/clever Our Love is Real (the one where people who have sex with dogs were disgusted by those filthy perverts who have sex with plants). Sacrifice is a different kind of weird, with trippy artwork and a guy hallucinating or time travelling or something to the Aztec Empire. I don’t think I’ll be following it, because I’m just not much of a trippy artwork kinda guy. Or hallucination stories.
Wolverine and the X-Men: Alpha and Omega is a terribly titled miniseries that goes along with Jason Aaron’s so far excellent Wolverine and the X-Men. I’m hesitant to pick up anything X-Men related because of the stupidly complicated backstories, but with Brian Wood writing and the tie-in to one of the few X-titles I read, I thought it might be both good and accessible. The story focuses on Quentin “Kid Omega” Quire, a teenage psychic villain that Wolverine is trying to reform at his school, trapping Wolverine in a mental prison. Which sounda kinda eh, but the mental prison is this awesome Blade Runner-ish alternate universe, and just really cool looking stuff like this. So I’m totally on board.
Whispers is about a germophobe who discovers he can travel around outside his body while he sleeps. Not normally my kind of comic. But it has a quality opening joke and is written/drawn by one half of the Luna Brothers, whose previous work I’ve enjoyed (Ultra, Girls, The Sword, and a Spider-Woman mini). Oddly, it’s Joshua Luna, who doesn’t normally draw, who does this solo. His art’s a little bit… not great. But it’s ok. And I’m willing to be patient with the story to really grab me.
Fatale is another Brubaker/Phillips thing (after Sleeper, Criminal, Incognito, and probably some other stuff I’m forgetting), which pretty much guarantees I’ll be reading it. It’s kind of a horror/noir thing, which is quite cool. I mean, just look at that cover: hot girl with a gun, spooky demon thing in the background. Hard to go wrong there.