Comic Books

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #36 by Drew Barth The Comeback On rare occasions, comic series go on extended hiatuses before returning in a glorious fashion. Two such series—Warren Ellis and Jason Howard’s Trees and Kelly Sue DeConnick and Emma Rios’ Pretty Deadly—have each made a such return after three-year breaks. Launched in 2013,… Continue reading

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #33 by Drew Barth No One’s Left I’ve talked about shonen manga a few times on here—both positively and negatively—but it’s hard to overstate the influence shonen as a genre has had on western comics. Many creators have talked about their love for the genre as younger kids… Continue reading

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #32 by Drew Barth Fantasy House Party With the recent publication of DIE #6, I was reminded of another series that I had written about previously: Coda. With its examination of fantasy tropes and classic D&D character classes as starting points for exploring what fantasy is and what it… Continue reading

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #30 by Drew Barth I Was Told By Imagine, as wild as this sounds, that the United States becomes a theocratic, imperialistic super-state that invades Canada because the Lord said so. That is the story-ground that Darcy Van Poelgeest and Ian Bertram set their series Little Bird upon. Little… Continue reading

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #29 by Drew Barth Cracking Open the Vault I talked a few weeks ago about the closure of Vertigo, the first mainstream purveyor of independent-minded comic work. Vertigo’s spirit has lived on in other publishers like Image, Oni Press, Aftershock, Black Mask, and many othesr. Fairly recently, like… Continue reading

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #28 by Drew Barth Pros of Cons Another year and another round of San Diego Comic-Con has come and gone. I’m not going to lie, it’s hard to keep track of  the avalanche of information continually coming out of the San Diego Convention Center. The problem with a… Continue reading

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #26 by Drew Barth The Wild Storm Nearly thirty years ago, we saw the birth of Jim Lee’s WildStorm imprint within Image Comics. The name, taken from Lee’s WildC.A.T.S. and Stormwatch, would typify 90s extreme comics: ultra violence, para-military mercenaries, spandex tighter than skin, spikes on everything, and… Continue reading

Comics Are Trying to Break Your Heart #25 by Drew Barth Triple Threat A little over a decade ago, Top Cow Productions created a comic competition known as Pilot Season. Pilot Season began with a simple premise: get six creative teams to each produce the first issue of a longer-running series and pitch that story… Continue reading