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This Week in Comics – 1/17/10

This week I seem to be out to prove that I’m not a pessimist, because I’m picking things that I actually want to read. In fact, I don’t make fun of a single book this week. What the hell is wrong with me?

Don’t worry, there’s nothing wrong with me. Comics just happen to be delightful this week.

Welcome to This Week in Comics, where every day is a comic book, and some weeks, as you’ll find out, are more promising than others.

MONDAY

First Issues. You really should have seen this one coming.

Joe The Barbarian #1 (of
(Grant Morrison/Sean Murphy)
Vertigo/DC Comics

It’s a good thing Grant Morrison treats his superhero comics as serious business or the infrequency of his creator-owned stuff would frustrate. The plot to Joe the Barbarian sounds a bit like a kids’ version of Flex Mentallo: instead of an ODing rock star possibly imagining his comic books are real, it’s a diabetic, insulin-deprived kid who may or may not be visiting a world where all his toys live that he must save from dark forces. While the premise sounds a bit rote, this is Moz we’re talking about.

Also, it’s only $1.00.

TUESDAY

New manga comes out on Tuesday, new comics Wednesday. Clearly they’re two completely different mediums.

Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka Volume 7
(Naoki Urasawa/Takashi Nagasaki)
Viz Entertainment

Here’s the rule, Internet: if there’s a Naoki Urasawa book or a new printing of Osamu Tezuka material, then it’ll probably show up here this week. Pluto covers both, so here we go. To get you up to speed, Pluto is Naoki Urasawa’s (with co-plotter Takashi Nagasaki) reinterpretation of Osamu Tezuka’s Astro Boy story arc “The Greatest Robot on Earth” as a murder mystery. I haven’t been keeping up with Pluto, but I read the first few chapters of Volume 1 and they were fantastic. Especially good is when Gesicht has to tell an emotionless robot that her husband has been killed.

P.S. The newest volume of Tezuka’s Black Jack comes out this week, too.

WEDNESDAY

Mainstream superhero stuff, because that can be good, too

Superman/Batman #68
(Joe Casey/Ardian Syaf/Vicente Cifuentes)
DC Comics

Joe Casey had a good early-to-mid ‘00s, writing subversive stuff into high-profile books like Uncanny X-Men and The Adventures of Superman (both of which were unfairly reviled) as well as doing even more subversive work in stuff like Automatic Kafka, The Intimates, and Wildcats Version 3.0. For the rest of the decade he’s been freelancing on various minis for Marvel while working on his creator-owned Gødland, a Jack Kirby-inspired book that’s just looking to endear itself with me. Now 2010 brings a gig writing the ongoing Superman/Batman. Last time he wrote Superman he tried to make him a pacifist, so we’ll see if he continues to explore that. I’m guessing no, but a guy can dream.

THURSDAY

Not Quite Friday, but Still Exciting (for me, at least)

Glamourpuss #11
(Dave Sim)
Aardvark Vanaheim

Y’know what intrigues me? Follow-ups, especially (in comics) those from the indie guys who worked on their projects for YEARS. Eastman and Laird are known for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, but little else as far as comic books. Ditto Stan Sakai, who has done Usagi Yojimbo for the past 50 years, or some of the ‘90s Image guys (McFarlane with Spawn, Erik Larsen with Savage Dragon). What if Los Bros Hernandez suddenly stopped doing Love & Rockets and moved on to a new mega-narrative?

Take Dave Sim, who spent 27 years creating Cerebus before moving on to Glamourpuss, which is part fashion magazine satire, part survey of photorealism in comics history, part superhero comic (seriously). Cerebus, by comparison, was about a talking aardvark*.

*Look, I know it’s more complicated than that, but I took a bit of artistic license for the sake of a joke — what do you care, anyway? You don’t read Cerebus.

FRIDAY

TGIBone

RASL #6
(Jeff Smith)
Cartoon Books

See? There’s a reason I didn’t mention Jeff Smith in the previous blurb. I was saving him for his own little section. Jeff Smith spent years doing the wonderful Bone which you can buy in an incredibly thick but affordable one-volume edition. While Bone was a fantasy epic with three cartoon characters (the Bones) as the main protagonists, RASL is a sci-fi noir about an interdimensional art thief. Now THAT is how you do a follow-up.

SATURDAY

Essential Reading

Young Liars Volume 3: Rock Life
(David Lapham)
Vertigo/DC Comics

For a while David Lapham was going to be one of those guys, too. He’s best known for the indie crime book Stray Bullets but has since been scoring mainstream work doing books for DC and Marvel. It’s worth the sacrifice, as it’s afforded him the opportunity to do Young Liars, a brilliant Vertigo book about how the coolest people have completely invented themselves and about how you must protect yourself from the Spiders from Mars (the space-arachnids, not the band). This is the final volume because Vertigo had to cancel the thing after 18 issues when nobody read it, which I take as undeniable proof that people are inherently evil.

SUNDAY

Last Issues

Rapture #6 (of 6)
(Michael Avon Oeming/Taki Soma)
Dark Horse Comics

I love when artists work on their own thing whilst working with writers. It’s like watching a good solo act. Bá and Moon do Casanova, but they also do Daytripper. Ditto Cameron Stewart, who works with Grant Morrison but also does the webcomic Sin Titulo. David Mazzuchelli, artist with Frank Miller on “Born Again” and “Year One,” has got Asterios Polyp, which you’ve heard of if you’ve read any 2009 list of best anything.

Which brings me to Michael Avon Oeming, who people might know best as the artist on Brian Michael Bendis’ Powers. His comic Rapture (with wife Taki Soma) is about humanity dealing with the aftermath of all the superheroes and supervillains disappearing from the face of the Earth, which sounds great because I love high-concept takes on superheroes like that that can’t be done at Marvel or DC. Stuff like Irredeemable and The End League.