So I was, to put it mildly, not happy with the way Descender ended . I knew that there was a sequel to that series — this is it, Ascender — but I figured I would not be coming back after writer Jeff Lemire set up a Backswing Fantasy larger than any seen previously. (Larger both in…
Somehow I’m over two years late on this Jeff Lemire comic, despite reading the first two (see my posts on volumes one and two ) right when they came out and liking the series a lot. What can I say? There are too many good books in the world, and keeping up with them all…
In a serial medium, there’s always the need to make sure the audience keeps up. So each new installment needs to do some work to give backstory, either with the potted “who they are and how they came to be!” box or flashbacks or whatever. And when the story is moving quickly, one of the…
Any self-respecting family story needs a flashback. Whether it’s a Ross Macdonald novel finally explaining just what horrible thing happened twenty years ago in Canada or a family saga that stops in the middle of Chapter Two to explain just how Sadie McGuffins first came to the Maritimes from Scotland as a teen domestic servant…
At some point, writing about an ongoing series becomes gibberish to the uninformed and spoilers to the slightly behind. (Maybe not both at exactly the same moment, but both eventually.) I’d like to think that can still be a long way off, that I can spin out interesting things to say about the fourth volume…
A new year is, metaphorically, a blank slate. So is my brain, at least as far as this column is concerned. Usually, when I am faced with no new ideas I travel the Internet, looking to see what other people in comics are talking about. Usually, this works. Unfortunately, a lot of media doesn’t publish…
Uncanny X-Men #600 has come and gone, leaving us with a newly out present day Iceman, joining his time travelled past version in being out. I already wrote up my feelings on this here last month. Since then, we’ve seen three issues of Extraordinary X-Men featuring the present day Iceman, and one issue of All…
Old Man Logan #2 Well this went off the rails fast. After a first issue long on potential, this is a chain of scenes, all of them interrupted before anything interesting is allowed to happen so that Logan can be dragged to some new potentially interesting scene that won’t play out. Sorrentino’s art is very…
Written by Brian Azzarello, Jeff Lemire, Dan Jurgens, and Keith Giffen. Art by Aaron Lopresti, Art Thibert, and Hi-Fi. I beg you, dear reader, to not skim over the author credits in this review. Azzarello. Lemire. Jurgens. Giffen. A master of noir, the macabre, cape and cowl, and team action. I want you to let…
FUTURES END #1 Written by Brian Azzarello, Jeff Lemire, Dan Jurgens and Keith Giffen Art by Patrick Zircher I won’t lie to you, this book’s got me confused. It starts in the semi-distant future of the time of Batman Beyond, a world that has been taken over by the latest iteration of Brother Eye, a…
With final third of his "Essex County" trilogy of graphic novels set to hit shelves later this year, creator Jeff Lemire has already had a pretty good 2008. The first two projects in the trilogy, Tales From the Farm and Ghost Stories, have been celebrated by critics and nominated for multiple awards (and won quite a…
Essex County Vol. 3: The Country Nurse By Jeff Lemire Top Shelf, October 2008, $9.95 The finale of the “[[[Essex County]]]” trilogy – which will be available in October, so start saving your pennies now – draws together the first two graphic novels in the series, but at the expense of not being as coherent…
