Comics

For the most part, Tom King does a fantastic job delving deeper into the mystery of HEROES IN CRISIS, leaving us with more clues but coming no closer to the truth of who massacred all the heroes (and villains) who were being treated at Sanctuary, the pscyho-therapy institute created by Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman for super-people to come to deal with their post-traumatic stress.

A crucial clue to the mystery is discovered during an autopsy conducted on Commander Steel by the Trinity. Batman extracts an object (that apparently Superman couldn't detect with his x-ray vision) that would almost clearly indicate Harley Quinn commited the crime. But when they close in on her, she maintains her claim that it was actually fellow patient Booster Gold who did the deed -- and she gets away after casting serious suspicion on Batman that the other two cannot ignore.

MIDNIGHT MYSTERY combines elements of some of the more understatedly cool detective and supernatural series that have come over the years. The tone is very Raymond Chandler, the art is reminescent of early Darwyn Cooke, and the story is evocative of the best of KOLCHAK, THE NIGHT STALKER and THE X FILES.

Ezekiel "Zeke" King is a private detective of the hard-boiled, no-nonsense variety. He records his cases and thoughts on old-fashioned reel-to-reel tapes, leaving an archive of musings of the greater questions of the universe. As this premiere issue opens, Zeke has been hired by the estate of a former horror movie host to find his long-lost heir. The bulk of the issue is then devoted to who Roland Blackwood -- the actor behind the creepy Count Karloff persona -- truly is and how his life came to be what it was. After that, Zeke does the legwork to find the young man who is Blackwood's illegitimate son, bringing him to the estate to claim that which is now lawfully his.

No matter how fastidious you are in maintaining your comic shop pull list in your never-ending battle to make sure you don't miss anything good (or accidentally waste your money on something not so much), it never hurts to do a last minute check on what's coming out this week so you can make those fine-tuned adjustments.

Here are our looks at this week's upcoming comics, and our hot takes on whether they're a pick or a pan. Your mileage may vary.

I'm late to the party with the VAMPIRONICA series -- another reimagining of the Archie universe with a horror filter. I'm late on purpose, because I'm still nursing the wounds of having become addicted to AFTERLIFE WITH ARCHIE and CHILLING ADVENTURES OF SABRINA, only to have both of those rugs yanked out from under me, with no hope in hell of ever seeing either of those stories reach anything resembling a satisfying conclusion. I didn't want it to happen again, so I've not invested myself in any more Archie horror titles -- which, yes, means I have not read any of THE HUNGER, either.

But, it was a Halloween event at my local comics store, and I wasn't taken this week with any of the usual superhero fare, which has been becoming less and less appealing over the last few years. So, feeling generous and in the holiday spirit, I gave the latest VAMPIRONICA a shot.

We've reported in the past on the civil war brewing in the comics community, with the lines being drawn between what is termed "Comicsgate" and "everyone else."

One of the biggest touchstones of the ongoing friction, and one that has all eyes in the comics community watching, is the lawsuit filed by Richard C. Meyer against Mark Waid for tortious interference in regards to Meyer's contract with Antarctic Press to publish his independent graphic novel, JAWBREAKERS: LOST SOULS. The allegation is that, after Waid publicly admitted to reaching out to the publisher, AP summarily reversed their decision to publish the book, prompting Meyer to sue for damages.

Of all the comics creators who have been in the industry, we can never overstate the debt we owe to the great Dave Stevens, gone ten years now, for his lasting contribution to the comic books. Yes, we'll remember his Rocketeer and I for one will never forget his pinup covers for DNAGENTS and CROSSFIRE & RAINBOW.

But it's largely because of Dave Stevens work that the community remains aware of a real life character, Bettie Page, a stag film model with a look that transcended time. She was the girlfriend of his Rocketeer, but has since gone on to become a heroine in her own right, thanks to Dynamite Entertainment.

Case in point: BETTIE PAGE HALLOWEEN SPECIAL ONE-SHOT 2018.

They're the world's most iconic rockers. With their black-and-white facepaint and their over-the-top stage presence, KISS is on top of the world.

And then they were dead. Killed through the machinations of the mother of demons, all so that she could recruit them to fight a greater evil that existed beyond her grasp.

It seems there's another rock star on the rise in the mortal plane, and he's anything but mortal. He's a vampire, and he's got the protection of a group of occultists keeping him safe from Lillith. In exchange, they tell him who he needs to kill. And Lillith wants him dead, even though she created him.

It seems there are a ton of Halloween specials hitting the comics shops this time of year -- more than one would normally expect. But what you would alwaye expect is for Vampirella to have such a special. The Daring Dresser of Drakulon prowls the rooftops this Halloween night, dressed more like DC's Spoiler than the typical barely-there crimson swimsuit that has become her trademark. That's because she's dressed for business, expecting the entirety of Hell to break through and walk the world once more.

No matter how fastidious you are in maintaining your comic shop pull list in your never-ending battle to make sure you don't miss anything good (or accidentally waste your money on something not so much), it never hurts to do a last minute check on what's coming out this week so you can make those fine-tuned adjustments.

Here are our looks at this week's upcoming comics, and our hot takes on whether they're a pick or a pan. Your mileage may vary.

It's been half a year since Archie and the gang graduated from Riverdale High, which puts the date of this issue in mid-December of 1941. The Japenese forces have already bombed Pearl Harbor, and we see an empty theater playing the newsreel of Roosevelt's famous declaration of war, which means we're probably several days past December 7, allowing for time for the filmreels to be cut and delivered to theaters.

Which also means we've nearly run out of days for the titular 1941.

No matter how fastidious you are in maintaining your comic shop pull list in your never-ending battle to make sure you don't miss anything good (or accidentally waste your money on something not so much), it never hurts to do a last minute check on what's coming out this week so you can make those fine-tuned adjustments.

Here are our looks at this week's upcoming comics, and our hot takes on whether they're a pick or a pan. Your mileage may vary.

"Fear is the path to the Dark Side.

Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering."

If Master Yoda hadn't lived a long time ago, and in a galaxy far, far away, he might have said that it also leads to termination. That's what Star Wars writer Chuck Wendig discovered when he took to Twitter in the aftermath of the confirmation of Brett Kavenaugh to the Supreme Court.

The Kavenaugh hearings were a hotly contested subject of conversation in social media, with both sides absolutely convinced the other side was sheer evil, and had to be defeated. So it should come as no surprise that there were many less-than-civil discussions to be had.

But one would think that someone who was as versed in Star Wars lore and Chuck Wendig should be would have recognized the roadsigns, and heeded them rather than plowed over them. Here's how it played out.

Indiegogo. For months now it's been the go-to site for aspiring comic book creators to fund their dreams. Some have been failures. Some have been moderately successful. And some have simply exploded.

But a chilling effect went through the creative community yesterday when, suddenly, Indiegogo took down the Arkhaven Comics account, citing "unusual activity," and refunded all pledges for a $100,000 project being penned by Chuck Dixon. This happened on the same day that Bleeding Cool ran an article with Arkhaven's controversial publisher, Vox Day, an article the site took down that night, bowing to pressure.

We spoke with Arkhaven creator Jon Del Arroz about the event and what impact it could have on other Arkhaven projects -- and non-Arkhaven projects.

No matter how fastidious you are in maintaining your comic shop pull list in your never-ending battle to make sure you don't miss anything good (or accidentally waste your money on something not so much), it never hurts to do a last minute check on what's coming out this week so you can make those fine-tuned adjustments.

Here are our looks at this week's upcoming comics, and our hot takes on whether they're a pick or a pan. Your mileage may vary.

What this comics market needs is a really good, strong Western comic book. When I was younger, I'd heard tales of how the comic book market used to produce for every imaginable genre, until it began to shrink. I couldn't understand it then, as I had every genre I could imagine: there were superheroes, space adventures, horror comics, funny comics, war comics and western comics. I ate up Jonah Hex, Scalphunter and Bat Lash with as much eagerness as I did Superman, Adam Strange, Cain & Abel, Archie and Richie Rich, and Sgt Rock.

Now that I'm older, I can see how the market has expanded, and yet shrunk further. We have so many more titles, but not as many genre adventures. Which is why THE LONE RANGER is such a welcome book. And it helps that it has some fantastic cover art to sell it, packaging an intriguing and relevant story by Mark Russell with panels as gritty as trail dust from Bob Q.

Rainbow Brite is one of those pop culture icons of nostalgia that was quite the big deal back in the day, a part of the zeitgeist of the times just as much as Atari arcade games and Rubik's cubes. Where Strawberry Shortcake relied on scents as the selling point, Rainbow Brite was (rather obviously) more color-oriented.

When I saw the Paulina Ganucheau cover, and read the advance promotional material, I hoped this would be a brilliant reboot of the character that would still retain the appeal to an all-ages audience. What I got on the inside was not what I expected, and yet still lives up to my hopes.

DC's latest crisis has just kicked off, and the first repercussions of it are felt in the pages of GREEN ARROW #45, as Oliver Queen and the various members of the Justice League, Titans, and Birds of Prey attend the funeral of Roy Harper -- aka Arsenal and former sidekick and ward to the Green Arrow.

The ceremony takes place on a remote butte, where friends and family give their eulogies while Oliver continues to blame himself -- and the Justice League -- for everything that happened to Roy, from his addiction problems to his ultimate murder at the Justice League's so-called Sanctuary where heroes go to get help and support for their personal problems. Ollie's upset enough to throw a punch at Clark, and threaten to use his ultimate trump card against the Justice League.

Imagine if Lex Luthor was about a million times smarter, and his avowed enemy wasn't Superman, but the reality that created Superman in the first place.

That's (maybe) the plot of REX ROYD, a disjointed collection of mind-f*cks from the mind of Frankie Boyle and Jim Muir. 

Rex is a businessman, CEO of Rexcorp. What the company does is hard to say, There's an indestructible superbeing who helps him, an unnamed British agent with a license to kill, and Eve -- the biblical Eve

The ostensible target is Proteoman -- the book's analog for Superman. Thing is, seems he dies a couple of different times in the book. And as for truth and justice, he seems to just fight because he exists.

You're a comics fan. You've probably got a local comics shop, and a local comics shop guy who looks out for your interests. You've left him with a pull list, so you know when you get to the store the things you want to read will be already picked off the shelves for you.

But that doesn't mean you didn't miss something. Here are our looks at this week's upcoming comics, and our hot takes on whether they're a pick or a pan. Your mileage may vary.

Okay, this is not going to sit well with my readers, but I have never watched a single episode of STRANGER THINGS.

I know, I know. Me and some guy in Alaska without electricity, we're the only ones.

So I thought I could at least get a flavor of the show through this new comic book debut from Dark Horse, penned by Jody Houser and illustrated by Stefano Martino and Keith Champagne. And after having read it, I can at least admit that the story is properly titled: STRANGER THINGS than this I've not seen.

The story follows young Will Byers, who has gone missing from his hometown of Hawkins, Indiana. But he's still in Hawkins -- or rather a mirror version of it, in a dark place called the Upside Down, where he's all alone except for some monstrous creatures.