Kudos to DC for following through on their commitment to complete the Spirit Archives series, even if most of the books are now out of print. Still, most collectors bought them on release — spreading out purchases is the only way to afford the whole thing! This last volume, released last summer, is particularly odd, and of interest mostly to completists, since it has very few actual comics in it. It collects lots of Will Eisner art featuring the character […]

High Moon, written by David Gallaher and illustrated by Steve Ellis, was the winner of the first month’s competition at DC Comics’ Zuda site, back in 2007. Now, it’s the second volume they’ve brought to print (after Jeremy Love’s Bayou). Both are in a horizontal format, where each of the online “screens” becomes one page. It’s cowboys and werewolves in the Old West, but instead of a historical approach, this story’s all about the shock and action. Macgregor is the […]

Global Frequency was a group of 1001 individuals (“freaks, geeks, and security risks”) from around the world. Each was an expert in some technology or ability, and each was given a special cellphone. When it rang, they’d be called into action to save the world from a bleeding-edge threat that normal people didn’t even understand. Writer Warren Ellis used this premise to explore various science fiction concepts. Each of the 12 issues was a standalone story illustrated by a different […]

With the movie opening tomorrow (although the reviews are in already, and it’s not looking good), I figured now was a great time to get caught up on my reading of the classic reprint series The Spirit Archives. Volumes 23-25 are the three most recent. Volume 26, the last in the series, is due out next week. It features Eisner’s Spirit material from after 1952, when the original series ended, including work originally published by Harvey and Kitchen Sink. Volume […]

Token, last of the Minx line, is also the best. Alisa Kwitney writes a story about a fifteen-year-old Jewish girl in Miami in 1987. Shira’s best friends are her grandmother and her buddy, a former movie star. They feed her nostalgic dreams of glamour, which don’t help when her father gets seriously involved with his secretary. She feels like she’s losing his love, with no one’s support to replace it. Some of the elements are standard — mean blonde classmates, […]

I wasn’t looking for another series to read, but I tried the first issue of this new-style anthology, and I was hooked. House of Mystery: Room and Boredom collects the first five issues of the series. Cain and Abel, the DC horror comic hosts from the 70s who lived in the Houses of Mystery and Secrets, respectively, make a two-page cameo at the beginning, but after that, it’s all new. The House of Mystery is now a bar outside dimensions. […]

Blue Beetle: Road Trip is the second book in the series about the young superhero, and it’s where the stories really start clicking. Jaime Reyes has an alien scarab bonded to him, and it gives him the power to fly, to create armor, to fire blasts… and to get in over his head fighting intergalactic threats. Jaime’s got a background different from most teen superheroes: he lives in El Paso, and he’s Hispanic. The art (especially the colors by Guy […]

Back in the 90s, Kyle Baker’s The Cowboy Wally Show was one of the great lost graphic novels, a legitimate cult classic. People would pay hundreds of dollars for a copy due to its impressive reputation and rarity. (It was originally released by a book publisher in 1988 before being brought back into print in 1996, then picked up by Vertigo in 2003.) There are two lessons to be learned from this: 1. Today, when comics with a spine are […]