Queen & Country: Declassified is a stand-alone spinoff of Greg Rucka’s popular spy series. This is a flashback story about Paul Crocker, the boss of Tara Chace, heroine of the regular Queen & Country. It’s 1986, and a younger Paul is doing the kind of job Tara does now. He’s a field agent, previously sent to get a defector through the Berlin Wall, but that effort was a failure. Newly married, he’s sent out again to Prague on a similar […]

In Skinwalker, an FBI agent, just promoted to the profiling unit, investigates the disappearance of his first partner after a panicked phone call. Ann Adakai, a Navajo Tribal Police officer struggling with the conflict between respected tradition and law enforcement methods, finds herself aiding him. This graphic novel was written by Nunzio DeFilippis and Christina Weir with pencils by Brian Hurtt and digital inking by Arthur Dela Cruz. Skinwalking is a term for Navajo witchcraft, but someone’s been taking it […]

The Tomb, a mystical action movie on paper, is ably executed by artist Christopher Mitten and writers Nunzio DeFilippis and Christina Weir. Jessica Parrish is a hard-charging archaeologist who lost her Harvard job after a political incident in Baghdad. She was trying to stop looters from robbing the museum, but soldiers arrested her to prevent her embarrassing them by doing the job they should have been doing. She’s the kind of “damn the consequences” bulldog fighter who’s sometimes envied but […]

There’s been a murder in Antarctica, and U.S. Marshal Carrie Stetko has to find out what happened, who did it, and why before 90% of the base personnel ship out for the winter. In Whiteout, acclaimed writer Greg Rucka has set up a unique mystery situation with gripping characters while artist Steve Lieber does an amazing job of capturing the personalities, the setting, and especially the weather (a character in itself). The sense of movement in the drifting snow is […]

Love Fights is an everyday romance set in a superhero universe. Jack is an artist, illustrating The Flamer’s superhero comic, put out for public relations purposes. He meets Nora on the subway, but he’s too shy to ask her out. Jack feels inferior compared to the superheroes, you see. He’s convinced girls want them, and he’ll never measure up. He thinks their expectations are unrealistic, although so are his — he wants women to see how neat he is without […]

I love romantic comedies. There are too few of them in comics (which is one reason I’ve been reading more manga, where the genre is more firmly established). When I saw the publicity for this screwball story, I was eager to try it, but I was disappointed. It’s not that Three Days in Europe is a bad story, although it’s got some problems (of which more later). The problem is all the false advertising, from the cover quotes to the […]

Doonald Feeney wants to be tough, but he’s a selfish loser. He’s never known his dad, until one day, Father Feeney reappears in Armageddon & Son. It turns out that Dad is a supervillain out to destroy the world, only he’s not as good at it as he portrays himself to be. As a result, some of his cohorts have stolen his plan, so he enlists Doonald to help him save the world (because if he can’t destroy it, no […]

Banana Sunday, written by Root Nibot (aka Paul Tobin) and drawn by Colleen Coover, is the kind of imaginative work that’s perfect for comics. It’s got a creative premise — a girl named Kirby starts at a new school while taking care of three apes — that would be too expensive or ludicrous to do anywhere else, yet it emphasizes internal conflict with sympathetic characters. The emotions are universal, such as young love on a first date or a reporter’s […]