Take a Good Look at My Good Looks, by Martha Thomases
It’s not a secret that I worship Kyle Baker. Perhaps his wife, Liz, is a bigger fan, but that’s debatable. So it’s no surprise that I looked forward to his new series from Image, Special Forces. It’s even less of a surprise that I like it so much.
The surprise is the subject matter — the war in Iraq. We’re nearly five years into this war, and there have been very other few comics about it (notably Rick Veitch’s Army @ Love). I can’t think of another war in the modern media age that hasn’t inspired comics. Wars have been the springboards for some of my favorites in our medium, including Harvey Kurtzman’s Two-Fisted Tales and George Pratt’s Enemy Ace.
Special Forces is hilarious and terrifying. In the tradition of war comics (and movies), it follows a troop of lovable misfits. These are modern misfits, however. Using actual news stories as springboards, Baker casts his unit with the type of people being recruited for this war: felons, the mentally ill, the physically unfit. That’s what makes these forces “special.” And the most special is Zone.
Zone is autistic. He doesn’t look people in the eye. He doesn’t talk. He carries a small plastic toy soldier with him at all times. And he’s a perfect soldier: he follows orders precisely. Nothing stops him from doing what he’s been told to do, not teasing, not pain, not enemy fire.
Zone briefly went to high school with Felon, our narrator. Felon is a beautiful woman with anger issues. She enlisted in the army to avoid a prison term. Felon and Zone are the only two characters to survive the first issue. (more…)
This may be turning into a bad series of coincidences. 
Only two books for Manga Friday this week; the deadline crept up on me and found me with a smaller “read” pile than I expected. But they’re both pretty good, and both are brand-new, which may make up for it.
Lee Falk’s Mandrake The Magician – arguably America’s first costumed comics superhero – is headed to the big screen at last.
In his newest adventure, Sable is hired by the head of an African diamond cartel to transport a magnificent raw diamond to an exhibit in New York. But his task is complicated by having to play escort, bodyguard and babysitter to the cartel’s corporate spokesperson, Bashira, a temperamental model with a history of drug problems. While Sable struggles to keep her under control and out of tabloid headlines he finds himself the center of a deadly hunt and a plot that reaches beyond the world of glamour and into the world of terror…
According to 
