Writer: Siena Cherson Siegel
Artist: Mark Siegel
Company: Aladdin Paperbacks

As a comic book reviewer, I’m not exactly the paragon of machismo anyway, but I’m going to confess something in this review that’ll kill even the little bit of respect I might have had: I studied dance in college. Minored in it, actually. Now, true, partly it was because the department was 90% cute college girls, but also, I had an interest in dance, and that only grew as I studied it. So maybe it’s just that I’m the audience for this memoir of a young girl training for ballet that made me love it so much. But I think it’s more likely that the reason I liked it so much is because it’s just that damned good.
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Writer: Mike Carey
Pencils: Chris Bachalo
Company: Marvel Comics

I wasn’t terribly excited about the first two issues of Carey’s (Ultimate Fantastic Four, Lucifer) run on Adjectiveless X-Men, but I’m a helluva X-Geek, and I couldn’t totally pass judgement without at least reading the entire first arc. I’m glad I didn’t. Carey’s third issue of X-Men still isn’t comic greatness or anything, but it has raised the much beleaguered title from bad to passable. Now, if the book’s art was something I could get excited about, I might even call the book good.

Carey has really upped his game on issue #190. Carey’s plotting on the first two Continue Reading »

Writer/Artist: Chester Brown
Company: Drawn & Quarterly

Canadian frontier history. Not what you’d expect to inspire some of the best comics of the last few years, but there’re at least two bookend works I count among my favorites. First is Northwest Passage, a two-fisted actioneer from Oni that uses history as its launching point, then filters it through the same lens of myth we Americans view our “Old West.” Notably more grounded in history, Chester Brown’s Louis Riel recounts the revolutionary doings of a charismatic 19th century Canadian of Métis (mixed Indian and white) ancestry. Bold but flawed, and even possessed of delusions of religious Continue Reading »

Writer: Allan Heinberg
Artist: Terry Dodson
Company: DC Comics

Despite having such a long gap in between issues one and two, Allan Heinberg (Young Avengers) and Terry Dodson’s (Marvel Knights: Spider-Man/Generation X) Wonder Woman still manages to be fun, while at the same time making the step-sister of the DC Universe seem cool and a character to take seriously.

I myself have never really been a huge fan of the woman in the star underwear and princess-like tiara. She wasn’t the type of hero I cared for or wanted to read about. She didn’t have any cool batarangs to Continue Reading »

Writer: Brian K. Vaughan
Artists: Philip Bond, Eduardo Barreto, Steve Rolston & Jason Alexander
Company: Dark Horse Comics

New York may be where the superhero was born… but in The Escapists, Vaughan makes a pretty good case for Cleveland being the birthplace of comics as we know them today. More to the point, he effectively sets the stage for Cleveland as the rebirth of a little known Golden Age hero known as The Escapist. Not in a literal, superhero battling evil kind of way, but in terms of a dormant character beloved in the fictional universe of Michael Chabon being reborn at the hands of a few talented and dedicated comic book creators.

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Wednesday Number Ones is a weekly feature here at Comic Pants. We take the books that are premiering a first issue from that week and give a quick opinion on them. From time to time we may also include more than issue number ones in this feature. If a noteworthy one-shot or the first issue of a new story arc is released, we may talk about it in this feature.

This week we will cover Athena Voltaire: Flight of the Falcon #1 of 4, Snakes on a Plane #1 of 2, Mythos: Hulk #1, CSI: Dying in the Gutters #1 of 5, Battlestar Galactica #1, and The Trials of Shazam #1 of 12

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Hello and welcome to Comic Pants, the newest review blog in the Internet! As of today, at least… the Internet moves fast, and there’s probably another one opening in five… four… three… two…

At any rate, the four contributors of Comic Pants (Randy Lander, Dave Farabee, David Martindale and Nick Budd) bid you welcome and hope you like what you see. We’ll be adding content on a regular basis, including weekly rundowns of number one issues for the week (Wednesday Number Ones), group favorite picks (Hot Pants picks), Previews reviews (Down the Line) and of course, regular reviews. Our hope is that if you stop by on any given day, you’ll probably find something new. Of course, if you don’t want to keep checking back in, you can always use our handy-dandy RSS feeds.

The personality of the site will become clear over time, but the basics are this: We hope to provide solid, thoughtful review content with a sense of humor to back it up. Two of our contributors have been at this for 10 years and 5 years, respectively, while the other two are fresh voices, and we hope that mix of experience and enthusiasm will offer something you all want to hear.

Please feel free to chime in on the comments on reviews, as we’d love feedback on anything and everything, and thanks for checking in!

Writer: Matt Wagner
Artist: Matt Wagner
Company: DC Comics

One of the most compelling things to me about the Batman “mythos” is the fact that he is just a man dressed up in a bat suit, swinging from buildings and fighting bad guys. He isn’t an alien like Superman or an Amazonian Princess molded from clay like Wonder Woman. He is just a man. During Infinite Crisis and a bit before, Batman was the dominant animal and Bruce Wayne (an interesting character in his own right) was left in the dust. Sure, Grant Morrison and Paul Dini are trying to bring that idea back to the forefront, adding their own unique flairs and allowing Bruce Wayne the scene a little Continue Reading »

Writer: Brian Wood
Artist: Kristian
Company: IDW

Believe it or not, I had never read anything by Brian Wood before Local. After reading, and really enjoying Local, I picked up several trades and two new books written by Wood, DMZ and Supermarket. I’m enjoying them both, but right now I’m going to give you the lowdown on the lesser known, but really very good, Supermarket. Seriously, it has machine gun toting Swedish porno chicks; it has to be good, right?

Pella, our protagonist, is the teenage daughter of a high ranking Japanese Yakuza and a high ranking member of a Continue Reading »

Writer: Brad Meltzer
Artist: Ed Benes
Company: DC Comics

I’m about to say some nice things about this book, and I do so knowing full well I may end up wanting to axe-murder it halfway through the run. Because that’s how things went down with Brad Meltzer’s last contribution to the DC Universe, Identity Crisis. Meltzer opened strong with a tightly-plotted mystery that got inside the heads of DC’s heroes and villains better than any new writer in ages. He showed deep knowledge of DC’s rich history, and had a dramatic, confident authorial voice. He THEN spiraled off into a subversion of DC’s heroes, bad plot twists Continue Reading »