Deadpool and his Mercs for Money - Stingray, Terror, Foolkiller, Slapstick, Solo, and Masacre (the Spanish Deadpool!) – find themselves in possession of a supposedly future-predicting robot. Do they use it to learn how to avoid mistakes in the present or help people prepare for the future? Nope, they tries to make bank by selling it to the highest bidding supervillain!
Laura Kinney is X-23, so-called as she’s the 23rd DNA sample from Weapon X/Wolverine and survived the lab that was trying to make her into another Weapon X. She’s Wolverine’s clone/daughter with all of his powers from a healing factor to the snikting claws!
In The Killing Dream, Laura deals with mental scarring as she confronts her traumatic past as well as a shape-shifting demon(?!) and then later teams up with the ragin’ Cajun himself Gambit to take on Mister Sinister – who’s trapped in a woman’s body?!?!
Set during Dark Reign after Secret Invasion, Deadpool knows something about Norman Osborn that he doesn’t want others to know so Norman sends the Thunderbolts out to kill Deadpool. But they don’t have to look far as he’s after Norman himself for owing him cash - time for a good old-fashioned supervillain smackdown!
Comics Class is a short memoir of when Matthew Forsythe attempted to teach comics to a class of disinterested 11 year olds – and it’s hilarious!
Want to read something enormously pretentious? Try The Age of Earthquakes by Shumon Basar, Douglas Coupland, and Hans Ulrich Obrist!
I picked this one up because I’m a Douglas Coupland fan and thought a nonfiction book about the current state of the world sounded interesting. Be warned though: this is a not a real book in the sense that you think. It’s a PowerPoint presentation masquerading as a book, and a really crappy one at that!
Batman and Aliens, together at last! I read the Batman/Predator crossover last year and it was really, really bad so maybe it’s because my expectations for this one were so low but I found Batman/Aliens to be a surprisingly pretty decent!
Bruce Wayne “sends” Batman to South America after a Wayne Enterprises employee goes missing in the jungle and then encounters an American special ops squad looking for a nearby hidden alien spaceship. The two join forces, head into an ominous ruined temple and… well, you know.
Set three months after the end of the first volume, we’re introduced to a new main character from the start: Ohara Emi, another Japanese teenager in Rori’s school who’s suddenly begun manifesting magical powers for no reason. And, though it’s only the second volume, this is where I say goodbye to Wayward!
This is the third and final main X-Men book currently being published and, yup, it’s also a stinker - 0 for 3, Marvel, take a bow!
A couple of gullible fools are conned into believing a book of gibberish contains the mysteries of the universe. They establish a secret society based around the text and spend the rest of their lives being idiots.
Set in Pirate Times, Gwenny’s pop went a-sailing to find the legendary treasure of the Isle of 100,000 graves but never returned. Then Gwenny finds a map to the island in a bottle and joins a swashbuckling crew of pirates to find out what happened to him. But what she discovers is something completely unexpected…
There’s a scene in this where Deadpool’s got an arrow in his head and he’s staggering towards the reader saying “DUUUUHHHRRR” that made me laugh so much, if the rest of the book had sucked, it’d still have been worth reading. But actually there’s a lot here to enjoy so it’s one highlight among many!
Look at that cover. This book’s exactly that: a cartoonist wanking himself into oblivion, literally and figuratively - and it’s brilliant!
I loves the superhero comics but if it weren’t for great indie cartoonists like Joe Matt, I’d probably have left the medium behind years ago. When indie creators are as compelling and gifted as Joe Matt is, reading about an ordinary schmuck talking about his life in an empty room is vastly more exciting and gripping than seeing the Green and Red Lanterns fighting in space for the fate of eternity or whatever for the umpteenth bloody time!
Quite a few genre novelists have turned their hands to comics in the past - Greg Rucka, Brad Meltzer, Gregg Hurwitz and Caitlin Kittredge to name a few - some of them successfully too, but there’s been a weird trend recently of literary novelists having a go at comics as well. Chuck Palahniuk’s much anticipated sequel, Fight Club 2, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Black Panther for Marvel are two high profile examples from the last year with Margaret Atwood’s Angel Catbird being the latest. And, like Palahniuk and Coates’ efforts, Atwood’s is complete rubbish!
A virus that threatens mass extinction of the human race is on the loose - it’s up to Valiant’s Iron Man, XO Manowar, their Hawkeye, Archer, and their joke Cyborg, Beta-Max, to save the day!
Dead Drop stinks. XO Manowar’s on the cover but he’s only really in the first issue. The second issue is Archer’s, the third is Beta-Max’s, and the fourth ties them all together.
