Leila Del Duca Things that are just kicking off but look great The comic may have only just kicked off, but to my undying surprise. Geoff Johns and Gary Frank’s Doomsday Clock had a huge ledge of my skepticism to climb over and gain my interest. I said it in my review, and I’ll say it here. Miracle, this was the year Tom King became one of my favorite comics writers. But by the end of this year, it felt like everything I picked up from him was a home run with the bases loaded. I admit that after enjoying his work in Omega Men and Grayson, I found the first few arcs of Tom King’s Batman to be uneven and sometimes feel purposeless. Tom King, David Finch/DC Comics The biggest surprises And while Steve Orlando always kills it when writing the sardonic Midnighter - even more so when he’s on a love-crazed warpath - in Midnighter and Apollo he proves that he can do justice to Apollo as well, as Midnighter’s (sorry) straight man. Midnighter and Apollo has been a long time coming, a toweringly hopeful queer revenge anthem about the world’s biggest badass taking a magic candle portal to Hell to recover the soul of his dead superpowered boyfriend from the devil himself.įernando Blanco’s layouts present superhero apartments and teeming masses on the plains of the underworld with equal interest. None moreso than Apollo and Midnighter, the gay, oft-married superhero duo who were created to coyly point a finger at Superman and Batman as much as they were to be themselves.
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I was frequently blown away by the book’s colors and layouts and now that it’s confirmed to have been cancelled, I just wish even more people had picked it up.įernando Blanco/DC Comics Midnighter and ApolloĭC may have purchased the Wildstorm comics setting in 1999 and merged it with the main DCU in 2011, but its characters have never quite felt a full part of the whole. Tamaki makes Hulk a book about Jen balancing her mental health, reframes the metaphor of hulking out with the language of anxiety rather than anger and adds in a supervillain who preys upon fear, doubt and paranoia. When Jen used to hulk out, she got to keep her personality and brains - but after her cousin’s unjustified murder and her recovery from a coma, she finds herself with less control than she’s used to. Mariko Tamaki and Nico Leon’s Hulk takes Jennifer Walters in a somewhat different direction.
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Her first big hit series was infamously fourth wall breaking, and successive series have focused on her work as a lawyer for superheroic problems (like suing the company whose lax safety regulations caused the accident that gave you the amazing powers that are ruining your life) more than her work with the Avengers. Jen (you might know her as She-Hulk) has long been a counter-narrative character at Marvel. In 2017, Hulk was about Jennifer Walters. Mariko Tamaki, Nico Leon/Marvel Comics HulkĪfter the death of Bruce Banner in Marvel’s Civil War II, his distaff counterpart stepped into his name and title. I may not have gotten that exactly right, but Doom Patrol is wildly surreal, full of heart, beautifully colored and inventively drawn. an ambulance that’s also a sentient fictional world named Danny? With a lead whose memory gaps turned out to lead back to the revelation that she’s the hero of a comic about more violent version of essentially-Rainbow-Brite, brought to life in reality by. It’s quite an achievement to put together a cast of characters who I found instantly compelling even when I wasn’t exactly sure what was happening. That book is Gerard Way, Nick Derington and Tamra Bonvillain’s Doom Patrol. The Young Animal imprint is not only still going strong, but hurtling towards a crossover event with the Justice League of America called (pause here, please) “Milk Wars.” And while all four books in the imprint, which includes Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye, Shade the Changing Girl and Mother Panic, have their charms, there’s only one that I desperately want more people to read so I can have someone to talk to about it. The books might be bright flashes of creativity worthy of reading, but the hurdle to find an audience would be too great. It seemed like a great project for another company the sort of idea that, at a Big Two publisher like DC or Marvel, would sell plenty of #1 issues and slump immediately after. I was skeptical when DC Comics announced that Gerard Way - yes, the lead singer of My Chemical Romance, he does comics sometimes, too - was going to be heading up a whole imprint of alternative comics featuring either original characters in the DCU or very obscure classic ones.