I look to comics to show me experiences I haven’t had and get me thinking about new perspectives, with bonus points for unusual, interesting settings. Cairo has all of the above. It’s written by G. Willow Wilson, a journalist who lived and worked in the area, which gives the fantastic events verisimilitude. It starts with a drug smuggler, but it quickly sprawls out through his connections and those he meets through chance (or more likely, destiny). His sister is friendly […]

Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang reinvent the superhero team book in Doctor 13: Architecture & Mortality. They use a set of forgotten characters to not only launch an imaginative adventure in which anything is possible, but they also comment coyly on the current trend of anti-history, of the tendency to ignore or attack bits that don’t slot perfectly into all-too-serious superhero continuity. Doctor 13, paranormal investigator and professional skeptic, finds himself thrown together with the following goofy characters: Captain Fear, […]

Darwyn Cooke (with the aid of J. Bone’s inks) is responsible for the most exciting re-imagining of a character this decade: Will Eisner’s Spirit. Book One is a handsome hardcover collecting the first six issues of the series plus the Batman/Spirit crossover written by Jeph Loeb. The book itself stands apart from the usual collection. The hardcover binding consists of images instead of plain color boards, and the dust jacket has the Spirit letters cut out to show the art […]

Aaron Alexovich both writes and draws Kimmie66 (the first Minx book that has allowed a writer-artist to do both), a near-future tale of a world lived in virtual reality. Telly, the goth teen girl lead, has received a suicide note from her best friend, a person she never knew in real life, which leads her to ponder the nature of existence and how you really know a person. Her conclusion: It’s such a pain in the butt when you don’t […]