Almost exactly two years ago, Image Comics teased Ivan Brandon and Esad Ribic’s “space gladiators” series Vs, whetting the appetites of sci-fi fans looking for some Heinleinian exploration of military evolution to offset the wave of post-apocalyptic and cyberpunk works that had taken over the genre. That wave is still rising, if anything it’s grown larger, […]
Bingo Love has Laudable Aims but Its Storytelling Falters
Queer people don’t usually get to see themselves live happily ever after in most media. We get the love stories that end in tragedy. This is largely because non-queer people are making most of the media that represents us–which means we’re not really represented in it at all. So it’s refreshing to see a book […]
Winnebago Graveyard Offers Ample Thrills but Needs More Space to Tell its Story
No matter how often we took them, family trips always made me uneasy. I’d sit in the back seat imagining all the ways we could meet untimely ends, burning through books and comics that only provided further nightmare fuel. What is the American interior but a patchwork quilt of ideal murder spots and forgotten places […]
Why Does Image’s Vision of the Future of Comics Mostly Center Around Exploiting Queer Voices?
For the past month or so, the key buzzword in comics has been “conversation.” At some point, the problem children of comics realized that shock was a loaded term and they needed to find a new way to absolve themselves of blame and guilt any time a questionable work of theirs received intense scrutiny and […]
What Conversation is Image Actually Willing to Listen to with Divided States of Hysteria?
Having even a slight interest in comics while being active on Twitter means witnessing more or less nonstop conversation about the industry, its works and the creators living within it. Comics is in a state of constant discourse, partially because even as its impact on culture grows, its world remains unbelievably small, making it easy […]
Image Comics’ Plastic Makes One Wonder if the Future of the Medium is as Dead-Eyed as a Realdoll?
Plastic is par for the course for mainstream American comics. The only female presence on the book is the colorist, and the only women in the comic exist as mentions (the protagonist’s mother and another character’s dead wife). This is a comic that refuses to pretend: the only visual representation of a woman is a […]
Questionable Comics: Steve Lieber and Chandra Free
Questionable Comics is a series where Dan Hill surveys professionals from every corner of the comics industry about their methods and experience. Up first is Steve Lieber, whose work has been published everywhere from DC to Marvel to Image, where he can currently be seen on The Fix, volume two of which comes out tomorrow, April 12th. What […]
Black Cloud #1 is a Promising Political Fantasy Bogged Down by Exposition
When you get down to it, America essentially willed itself into being a global superpower by hyping up and commodifying the collective dream of America. The Industrial Revolution saw rogues and con artists and thieves rebrand themselves as entrepreneurs, who sold their fellow Americans and the world at large on the idea of themselves as […]
Extremity Manages to Make Dismemberment Poetic
There’s an ongoing joke about DC Comics being Dismemberment Comics because of the publisher’s obsession with severing characters’ limbs to prove how Mature comics are now. It’s an easy trick since we tend to have a pretty visceral reaction to any injury that gets in the way of our mobility and cleverness. We rely so […]
Curse Words #1 is an Unrelenting Punchline to a Joke No One Set Up
To dust off an old chestnut, comedy, like all art, is subjective. One person’s Peter Sellers is another’s Adam Sandler. Unfortunately, Curse Words is far more Little Nicky than it is Dr. Strangelove. The elevator pitch of a wizard sent to destroy the world only to fall in love with it and use his powers […]
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