Titles you should be reading.

The great problem of comic book collectors, probably for collectors of things generally, is collection expansion. One item or line, leads to another and your promise (to yourself or concerned loved ones) to collect only a few books, looks more like a junkie's promise that heroine won't be a gateway to a larger world of misery. First you start buying on weekly visits. Then you agree with your local comic shop owner that, "yeah, I probably should get a folder." After that it is a short walk to collecting 10-15 different titles, plus the event books, occasional trades. All of this leads, inexorably toward falling behind in your reading, and a giant (growing) pile of comics you wonder if you will ever have time to read. 

I'm not even treading water here, I'm drowning in unread books. This isn't as terrible as it seems, though I do wonder why I'm so terrible at keeping up with the reading. Never mind that. Despite the fact I am not wholly caught up, I can point you in the direction of some great titles. 

She-Hulk Issues 1-12. By Soule, Pulido and Vicente

The series has been canceled, but as of 20 March 2015 you can probably still get all the back issues in your local shop, or collect it in trade paperback. Just about every iteration of She-Hulk has been interesting, quirky and fun. This run is no different. Jennifer Walters, cousin of Bruce Banner, is a fascinating Hulk. Comfortable in her own skin, she doesn't change when she is angry, nor is she brutish when she does change. She is a capable lawyer, and chooses to be an adventurer. 

In this iteration, we get a quirky art style, and Walters, mostly walking away from superheroing, to pursue her own practice. She is often hired by super-powered beings, or by people who make highly advanced sci-fi gear so there is adventure, and occasionally patent law. In addition to the day to day workaday world she inhabits, she also lives in a building, one of the few in New York City, that will openly house the weird, and uncanny. So adventure abounds.

The tone though is light, and our heroine smart. Visually its kind of a glory. For all these reasons, Marvel fans have managed to overlook it, and the book wasn't picked up for more issues after twelve. You can't see it, but I am, at this moment flipping off Marvel fans for consistently over looking this gem of a character. 

cover #8

 Interior art (#8)

Definitely give Jennifer Walters a whirl. You will thank me for it.

Velvet Issues 1-ongoing Brubaker, Epting and Breitweiser. 

 Velvet is classic Ed Brubaker. It is espionage, through a pulp tradition lens. This doesn't make it light fare by any means, and its conceit, an uber on the other side of her prime (early to mid forties) is engaging and new, even if the story of a mole in the agency and larger conspiracies isn't. Secret Agent Velvet, a Cold Warrior if ever there was one, is engaging, tough and smart. What begins as her personal investigation into a suspicious murder (a friend and agent is accused of killing another agent) widens into a larger story about the roots of the Cold War, and conspiracies within her super secret organization that carry our heroine forward into the 1970s. Mystery, a bit R-rated, awaits. It is a master class in the non-superhero comic art form. 

Enjoy!

X-Men Issues 1- Ongoing Various Teams

Its hard to know where to begin with this book. The adventures are fairly standard Marvel Mutant Fare. Consistently plotted, generally well scripted, though its tactical dialogue seems too often to be trying hard to impress, this title is unique mostly in the roster of heroes it gives us. And this roster also influences the human stories that have almost always formed the heart of great X-Men teams. Sure the X-Men save the world, form a ready allegory for racism and and xenophobia and homophobia, but for any of that to work, the stories have to be built on good relationships and family drama. The roster is pretty much all women, in fact the only actual X-Men in the book are women, generally with a nucleus of Storm, Rachel Summers (Phoenix), Psylocke, Monet (no codename), and Jubilee (her actual name). All of these characters have deep history in X-Men mythos, and have deep ,sometimes troubled and tense relationships among each other. This core of X-Men gets to play in the rich fields of the X-Men's rogues gallery with all its grudges and its scheming minds.

Like any X-title it swaps out writers after a few story arcs, and so the quality of the adventure and the internal dynamics can be hit or miss but the book generally rewards the reader, and the all-female angle doesn't feel too much like a gimmick so much as a way for writers to play with the deep field of X-Men that don't always get their own due. It is worth your time.

Ed Brubaker's Angel of Death

Ed Brubaker and I got acquainted (no I don't know Ed personally) last year when I started, well actually the other comic book collecter in the family started, reading The Death of Captain America collections. I was pretty skeptical of the whole endeavor. Killing off a hero in comics is often a gimic, an angle, an attempt to inflate interest and boast sagging sales. Sometimes it works. Not just for the stated goals just mentioned, but some times the stories created in the enterprise really cook. The immediate aftermath of D.C.'s Death of Superman is a prime example. Ed Brubaker though brought some of his hardboiled sensiblities to Captain America and in killing him (something that he has gone out of his way to make narratively hard to reverse) has crafted some of the finest work ever seen in Captain America. He as killed off Steve Rogers, and the title continues to tell the tale of Cap's friends, and the ways in which they cope with the aftermath of their friend's death. Rarely has a death in comics been so effective at driving a story forward, or affecting the universe in which they inhabit.

All this is a massive aside. What Brubaker is known for, and which I am enjoying exploring is his hard-boiled crime comic books. He has several collections Criminal is as good a place to start with Brubaker as any. His new dark look at superhero noir, Incognito isn't half bad either.

Okay that was a tinier aside.

I was watching Penn Jillette on youtube the other day (his vlog Pennsays for the curious) when I saw a preview for a web-based series playing at www.crackle.com, which I then started watching. The show in question? Ed Brubaker's Angel of Death. New episodes up every weekday. It stars the incomprable stuntwoman extrodinaire, Zoe Bell. You may remember her from Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof. Its eight episodes into the series (each episode averages about 8 minutes in length). Without giving too much away it is the tale of a hit woman who contracts for the mob. We get shady mentions of New York and Chicago ties, but really those particulars are not important. There is one crime family in her city and currently that is all that matters. Oh that and the events of the first episode. A classic theme in the hard boiled crime genre is the hit gone wrong, and that in a nutshell is where we meet our heroine. Its a fine, shocking, and totally entertaining meeting at that. I was born too late to get a taste of the weekly serials that preceded the movies of the forties and fifties. But this in many ways reminds me of what those must have been like. Bloodier maybe, and there is the foul language....but yeah just like the movie serials of an earlier era.

Click on the title of this blog and you can judge for yourself.