Writer: Stuart Moore
Artist: Ryan Kelly
Company: AIT/Planet Lar

Giant robots and political satire. Not exactly the first two things you think of blending together, but happily, Stuart Moore did, and the result is a story with several fun characters, more than a few laugh-out-loud moments and some really interesting commentary on the modern day state of politics. Using giant robots as a metaphor. Moore is joined in this endeavor by a Ryan Kelly, whose work here shows signs of the amazing style he would show off two years later on Local, but also reminded me at the time of some of the best work of John McCrea… in other words, art that is right at home with over-the-top satire tinged with science-fiction elements.
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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 BPRD: Garden Of Souls #1 of 6, Buffy The Vampire Slayer #1, Civil War The Confession #1, Grifter & Midnighter #1 of 6, and Hack/Slash Vs Chucky #1 of 4.

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What is a Short Pants Review? While we’d love to give full reviews to everything, there just isn’t enough time in the day. So we’ve come up with Short Pants as a way of providing capsule reviews from our varied review writers, giving quick hits and short capsule thoughts about various comics we’ve read recently.

This time out, Nick and D3 (David Martindale) cover Iron Man #15, Justice League of America #6, 52 Week 44 of 52 The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born #2 of 7, and The Killer #3.

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Some of you may have noticed on the sidebar, we have our “Top Five of the Moment” listed. These are the five books that are most clicking with each Pants writer. It may or may not represent the best books we’ve read all month, year, or just what we’re digging that week. We generally try to update it with books from that week, but there are no hard and fast rules. Inspired by an email from one of our readers, we’re going to post every Friday with the most recent Top Five from each member of the Panteon, and hope for your comments on our lists, or maybe even your own “Top Five of the Moment.”
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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 Captain America #25, Civil War: The Initiative #1, Marvel Zombies/Army of Darkness #1 of 5, Strongarm #1, Hulk and Power Pack #1 of 4, Transformers Official Movie Prequel #1 of 4, Fall of Cthulhu #0, Sheena, Queen of the Jungle 99¢ Special, The Mighty Avengers #1 and Dynamo 5 #1.

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Writer: Paul Benjamin
Artists: Steven and Megumi Cummings
Company: Tokyopop

One of the things Tokyopop has done in the past couple years to advance manga readership in the West, in addition to publishing an amazing number of quality imported titles, is to start its own line of Original English Language manga. These are manga created by Westerners, and some of them have been very good indeed. Books like The Abandoned, Steady Beat, Dramacon, Mark of the Succubus, Psy-Comm, and The Dreaming have gone a long way toward showing that manga need not be produced in Japan to be good. Pantheon High steps up to the bar right alongside those others in quality and excellence. (And, no, I don’t believe manga has to be produced in Japan to be ‘real’ manga.)
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D3 (David Martindale), Nick Budd, Randy Lander, Dave Farabee and Dan Grendell are back, and they’re talking about licensed books! Newly announced books like Marvel’s HALO, previous favorites like G.I. Joe and Star Wars, surprising kid favorites like Sonic, horror licenses like Silent Hill and Friday the 13th, book adaptations like Anita Blake and Dark Tower, even a few nods to “where are they?” licenses like Harry Potter and Heroes. These licenses, all points in between and a general discussion of licensed comics, the pitfalls and the promise, in the latest Comic Pants podcast.
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Some of you may have noticed on the sidebar, we have our “Top Five of the Moment” listed. These are the five books that are most clicking with each Pants writer. It may or may not represent the best books we’ve read all month, year, or just what we’re digging that week. We generally try to update it with books from that week, but there are no hard and fast rules. Inspired by an email from one of our readers, we’re going to post every Friday with the most recent Top Five from each member of the Panteon, and hope for your comments on our lists, or maybe even your own “Top Five of the Moment.”
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Writer: Christos Gage
Artist: Phil Winslade
Company: DC Comics

If you haven’t been reading Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight (and I generally haven’t), it’s entirely possible that you missed its final issue. Generally, if you’re not reading a book, there’s no need to catch the final issue, but in the case of Legends of the Dark Knight, the final issue is also one of the book’s strongest. It’s a Batman story, but it also makes a nice epilogue to the Christos Gage/Stephen Cummings Deadshot miniseries of 2005, as it features Batman and Deadshot facing off over a mob witness that the latter has been hired to kill. Given that the story is written by the guy who gets Deadshot Continue Reading »