It’s drawn well and smart and a lot of fun from start to finish. Part of Archie’s horror renaissance, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is a genre anachronism that revels in its horror story trappings and delights in placing wholesome Archie characters in it.
The best thing about it is how faithful to the comic the TV adaptation is. The best thing about Chilling Adventures of Sabrina isn’t that it spawned a great TV adaptation on Netflix. Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, Robert Hack (Archie Comics) It’s basically Bad News Bears with a little more murder and some great manga art from Matsui.
Then, and this is where it gets nuts, he takes over as homeroom teacher for a group of misfit teenagers and starts teaching them how to kill him. But he gives mankind an out: Kill him inside of a year, and he’ll leave them alive. A monster destroys ¾ of the moon and says more is coming. I’m not sure how I would briefly describe this book, and that’s part of why I love it. That damn sloth meme has been stuck in my head for five years. Donovan’s art manages the tricky feat of nailing the genuine horror of the situation, from the shock on the characters’ faces to the gross-out body horror later in the book, but it’s also genuinely funny at times. It’s genuinely creepy horror work from Tynion and Donovan, but it’s also about a meme and the homogenization of culture, and it landed like, 3 years before those ideas really penetrated the cultural zeitgeist. It’s shocking how prescient Memetic feels.
James Tynion IV, Eryk Donovan (BOOM! Studios) Every part of the story is given equal attention, and the final result is really, really good comics. Virgil is a dirty cop in Jamaica and also a gay man who loses his love and goes on a rampage. It’s simultaneously about how reprehensible Jamaica is towards gay people crooked cops and a love story and a revenge story, and no one aspect overrules the others. What I liked most about Virgil is how little it felt like Orlando and Faith were shading the story.
The story is excellent too, about Burmese (or I guess Myanmarese now) child soldiers defending the land of their gods from resource extractors.
It’s bright and full of greens and pinks almost to the point of being disorienting, which is I think the goal of that palette choice. And the coloring adds to the surrealness of the story. The camera zooms from pulling in really close on an eye about to bleed to pulling waaaay back to show giant beasts roving what looks like a fantasy countryside, and each decision about where to put the camera serves the story well. The Hanukas do two things really, really well in The Divine. This was the first time North managed to get rollover text into a printed comic, and it works, man.īoaz Lavie, Asaf Hanuka, Tomer Hanuka (First Second) So it was a huge surprise when the comic nailed it – it was every bit as wild as the show, only it also captured the voices of the characters perfectly and delighted in being a comic in a way that made it a celebration of the medium. The cartoon is so inventive that even if you match what shows up on the screen, it’s still just a pale shadow because the creativeness of the ideas is the point.
It’s a straight up summer blockbuster action movie in comic form that does an excellent job blending voices, art styles and ongoing plots with the overall narrative of the crossover without losing any momentum.Ī licensed property like Adventure Time is tough to get right. It starts out blazingly fast, and then plays out over the course of 14 issues and somehow speeds up as it goes along. Second Coming is the payoff to my favorite era of X-Men books so far, the Messiah Era. Matt Fraction, Zeb Wells, Mike Carey, Craig Kyle, Christopher Yost, David Finch, Terry Dodson, Greg Land, Mike Choi, Ibraim Roberson, Rachel Dodson, Sonia Oback (Marvel Comics) Dysart and the art team give us an outstanding story about megalomania here. Doom, but he’s got the benefit of operating in a world where the political rules are more like those of ours, which enhances everything good and bad about his character. He’s as big an egomaniac as Lex Luthor or Dr. Valiant books have, since their return early this decade, been pretty tightly intertwined, but most of their central narrative has revolved around Harada. Toyo Harada is a underratedly great villain, and Imperium is the story of him trying to impose his will on the world.