Decades ago, Paul Barry’s deep sea exploration crew was lost under inexplicable circumstances, and he’s spent the intervening years plagued by guilt and not knowing what happened. Now not only has their vessel been found, the crew is alive and they appear not to have aged a day in the interim. It’s a massive mystery, one that unfolds beautifully in the hands of writers Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray, artist Tony Aikins, and colorist Paul Mounts.
It seems simultaneously both not that long ago and forever ago, the heady period of the early 1990s with Marvel’s Spider-Man #1 and X-Men #1, Image’s Youngblood #1, and the launch of Valiant by Jim Shooter, Barry Windsor-Smith, David Lapham, Don Perlin, JayJay Jackson, Bob Layton, and others. In those days, comics were selling
Corto Maltese: Under the Sign of Capricorn, the initial offering of the imprint, was the first of 12 volumes which collected writer-artist Hugo Pratt’s seminal work. The first book collects Pratt’s first six interconnected short stories: “The Secret of Tristan Bantam,” “Rendez-vous in Bahia,” “Sureshot Samba,” “The Brazilian Eagle,” “So Much for Gentlemen of Fortune,” and “The Seagull’s Fault.”
It’s very hard to replicate the impact, however, of the 1976 collaboration of DC Comics and Marvel Comics on their first high profile crossover, Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man. In those days, such a thing was just about completely unheard of. It’s impact was bigger than it’s Treasury-size format.
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The first chapter of a four-issue mini-series from writer-artist Howard Chaykin took on three seemingly impossible tasks and made them look easy. While it took until the last page of this issue to show it, it brought The Shadow from the 1930s to the then-present (1986) and did so convincingly. It set the stage for an origin tale that combined many of the disparate story elements – many of them conflicting – that had been sown over the years and pulled them into one story. And it made a whole new generation of fans aware of just how cool The Shadow could be.
Successfully crowdfunded several months back, Rob Liefeld’s return to Youngblood hits the ground running as the team is dispatched to deal with a crisis in the Pacific. All of the bold characters and raw, kinetic energy that made the original Youngblood #1 the symbol of the early days of Image Comics are on display here, but with more polish and sophistication. With creator-writer-artist Rob Liefeld regaining control over the characters, this new, 33-years-later version of the team is crackling.
Like the first two issues, Planet Death #2 puts the spotlight on Corporal Scott, apparently the lone survivor of a planetary invasion force that went up against a surprising and overwhelming barrage of alien enemy fire. He’s left to single-handedly fight his way to the failed invasion’s objective, a seemingly impossible task
Rook and fellow warden Dire Wolf search for Bloodhound, Dire Wolf’s father and perhaps the only warden left on Exodus who can help salvage the failed world engine and save their lives. If it were only that simple, it might have been a single-issue story, but there are complications galore, and those complications make for some excellent reading.
In 2012, Image Comics published the first of two volumes collecting the run of writer Jay Faerber and artist Simone Guglielmini’s Near Death, a crime comics series that has the power to stick with you a good bit after you’re done reading it.
