Writer/Artist: Alex Robinson
Company: Top Shelf

Alex Robinson, author of mega graphic novels Box Office Poison and Tricked, is back this summer with a shorter tale in Too Cool To Be Forgotten. The length of the book isn’t the only difference, as Robinson focuses in past his usual big ensemble cast and inter-locking stories to tell one story mostly about one character, Andy, a forty-something father who, in trying to cure smoking through hypnosis, winds up re-living his high school years. It sounds like the premise for a wacky comedy, and there are some laughs here, but Robinson does a great job of bringing to life the very real unpleasantness inherent in re-living your high school years, especially if you’re not sure how you got there or how long you’ll be staying.
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Writer: Mark Andrew Smith
Artist: Paul Maybury
Company: Image Comics

Aqua Leung is not, in fact, an appreciation of Jethro Tull. Instead, it is Image’s first What If? Specifically, What If Aquaman Was Completely Awesome? There’s a lot more to Aqua Leung than that, but if I had to sum it up in a nutshell, I’d say that Smith, Maybury and their cohorts in coloring, lettering and editing have finally created a cool aquatic superhero tale. Actually, even that’s not wholly accurate, because Aqua Leung has as much in common with the fantasy genre, and maybe a touch of sci-fi, as it does with superheroes. Aqua Leung is a thick tome of epic battles and bloodshed and prophecy, leavened with some hipster humor and loaded with action. And it’s clear that while there’s a ton that happens in this first volume, Smith and Maybury are in for the long haul and are starting a fantasy epic here. Continue Reading »

Life Sucks GN
Writers: Jessica Abel & Gabe Soria
Artist: Warren Pleece
Company: :01 First Second Books

Vampire stories are a dime a dozen, and it seems like every variation on the mythology has been done. However, while I’m not an expert on the vast stores of vampire fiction available now, I will say that Life Sucks seems to offer up a fresh interpretation of vampires. That interpretation? Think Clerks with vampires and you’re not far off the mark. Abel, Soria, Pleece and colorist Hilary Sycamore serve up a tale of a wage-slave vampire whose eternal unlife is filled with the same kind of tedium as that of Clerks‘ pathetic protagonist Dante Hicks, right down to the wisecracking, more cooled-out Randal-style buddy, but where Dante only Continue Reading »

Writer/Artists: Various
Company: Image Comics

The anthology format in comics is full of promise and pitfalls. A wide range of creators and stories means you’re almost guaranteed to get as many big misses as big hits with any particular reader, and anything you like is probably going to feel too short, while anything you hate is going to feel like it’s taking up valuable space. And almost every single reader will have a different view on which one is which. And even the corporate superhero giants have trouble selling anthologies, so something non-superhero from another publisher is going to have a huge uphill battle. So why do folks keep making anthologies? Continue Reading »

Fat Pants is a monthly Comic Pants feature in which we mull over the last month’s trades and graphic novels in order to let you know which ones we feel are most worth your attention. It is far from a comprehensive list of all the good reads published in the past month, so please feel free let us know in the comments which trades and graphic novels came out in the last month that you, the reader, feel are most worth our attention. So, without further ado, here are the books we think really stood out this month.
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Rejoice, friends, because a new Scott Pilgrim volume is here, and the good news? It’s probably the best one so far. Without losing Scott’s likeable slacker ethos, O’Malley presents a maturation of his character, as we see that to be worthy of a real relationship, he might need to do more than defeat seven evil exes in martial combat. He might actually have to grow up a little. Seeing Scott, the perennial slacker/wastrel, try to interface with the mechanisms of reality like applying for jobs, actually doing a job and deciding if he’s infatuated or really in love is not only as funny as ever, but fairly substantial and affecting in terms of Continue Reading »

Fat Pants is a monthly Comic Pants feature in which we mull over the last month’s trades and graphic novels in order to let you know which ones we feel are most worth your attention. It is far from a comprehensive list of all the good reads published in the past month, so please feel free let us know in the comments which trades and graphic novels came out in the last month that you, the reader, feel are most worth our attention. So, without further ado, here are the books we think really stood out this month.
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Writers: Dan Abnett & Ian Edginton
Artists: Greg Boychuk, Lui Antonio, Daniel Lapham & Kevin Chin
Company: Boom! Studios

In my review of the first issue of this book, I summed it up as “painted art, a lot of imaginative gory visuals and concepts and characters who seem like they escaped from Jack Kirby’s mind when he was tripping heavy on steroids and meth.” Though my reaction to the stories warmed when I saw the whole arc collected in this trade, I stand behind that description, but I don’t necessarily mean it as a pejorative. Damnation Crusade is about as true a translation of the Warhammer 40K universe as you’re likely to find, which makes sense given that writers Abnett & Edginton have handled their fair share of Continue Reading »

Fat Pants is a monthly Comic Pants feature in which we mull over the last month’s trades and graphic novels in order to let you know which ones we feel are most worth your attention. It is far from a comprehensive list of all the good reads published in the past month, so please feel free let us know in the comments which trades and graphic novels came out in the last month that you, the reader, feel are most worth our attention. So, without further ado, here are the books we think really stood out this month.
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Writer/Artist: Jeffrey Brown
Company: Top Shelf Productions

I have previously expressed an appreciation for Jeffrey Brown’s work, which matches the gleeful innocence and sheer weirdness of James Kochalka with the occasionally too painful to look at sincerity of Craig Thompson for a variety of borderline embarrassing but often very funny autobiographical tales of romantic failure. When he diverges from that genre and applies his same sort of sensitive dude ethos to superhero parody tinged with a sincere love of the genre, that’s pretty entertaining too. But with Incredible Change-Bots, a mixture of pure, sincere Continue Reading »