GRAPHIC NOVEL COLUMN: Spring mini-reviews
By Dan Brown It’s that time again . . . when I give you the lowdown on the comics I’ve been reading lately. Here, in no particular order, are brief reviews of a few of the titles I’ve picked up recently from the L.A. Mood new-releases shelf. As always, there's no logic to my choices, these ones just caught my fancy. Fantastic Four No. 7 and 8: The creative team of writer Ryan North and penciller Humberto Ramos has hit its stride. The superhero foursome is forced to leave Earth after receiving a cryptic message from Galactus about Sue Storm. At the end of issue No. 8, they discover an alternative-reality Invisible Woman who is powerful enough to defeat the World Devourer on her own. “You can call me the Invincible Woman,” the baddie says, “I’ve been killing Galactus.” North and Ramos know just when to hit the accelerator, and when to lay off. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles no. 15: I just love the variant portrait cover of this IDW Comic, which features a red-eyed Splinter, mentor to the young martial artists and my favourite Turtles character. It’s drawn by Ben Bishop and Kevin Eastman. If you’re a fan of Gene Luen Yang, sometime Superman writer, you’ll want to check this series out! Feral No. 13: Truly suspenseful tale about a group of cats trying to survive an apocalypse. In this issue, they plan to break into a Pet City Supercenter, which has all the food and treats to sustain them. The problem: It’s guarded by angry, sick dogs. Love the art from Trish Forstner and Tone Rodriguez. An Image joint. X-Men Annual No. 1: To give you some sense of how long it’s been since I picked up an X-Men book, I did not know Phoenix is again a member of the team. This is a self-reflexive story that reminds readers they are looking at a comic book. “We aren’t flesh and blood right now . . . we’re ideas,“ Jean Grey tells Wolverine when the pair travel to a sketchy “conceptual space” outside reality. X-Men United No. 1: The X-Men get together to start training young mutants again. I like this book’s spunky version of Kitty Pryde, as written by Eve L. Ewing and drawn by Tiago Palma. As a reminder of how far things have come since the Krakoa storyline, mentor Wolverine reminds his charges, “You’ve got one body.” Love that Cerebro is now the Empathy Engine. Logan: Black, White and Blood No. 3: Contains three self-contained untold stories of Wolverine’s past. There’s a horror Western, a civil-rights thriller, and a story in which he takes on Big Pharma! Wolverine: Weapons of Armageddon No. 1: Written by Chip Zdarsky (who seems to be everywhere these days), it shows the Canadian mutant tracking down someone who might be a younger version of himself! Teases a showdown with Nuke, the super-soldier introduced in the pages of Daredevil all those decades ago. Thundarr the Barbarian No. 1 and 2: Published by Dynamite, this is the comic that fans of the Steve Gerber-created character deserve! The setting is deliberately reminiscent of Jack Kirby’s animation designs from the 1980s Saturday-morning series. Writer Jason Aaron clearly put a lot of thought into making the post-apocalyptic world of Thundarr make sense. And yes, Ookla the Mok and Princess Ariel are at Thundarr’s side. Big Rig No. 1: This Vault comic is being sold as coming from the mind of Post Malone (the singer guy). He wrote it with Adrian Wassel. It’s frenetic and takes place in a landscape where demons roam the Earth. I liked the lush art by Nathan Gooden. Lady Mechanika No. 1: Published by Image Comics (the series actually started with Issue 0). Steampunk horror is not really my thing, so I’m not the target audience. More than just the title character – who is searching for her creator – have mechanical limbs. Written and drawn by Joe Benitez. The Dark Knight Returns: This facsimile release reprints the Frank Miller classic from 40 years ago that thrilled comic fans and changed the industry forever. Comes in regular and foil versions, as well as with a variant cover by Jim Lee showing a weary Bats sitting in the tank version of the Batmobile. What have you been reading lately? Are there any comics you would like to recommend – possibly ones that got you through the winter? Let me know in the comments! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than three decades as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
The Modern Comic Industry Began in 1986
By Dan Brown I wouldn’t be doing my job as a graphic-novel columnist if I let 2026 pass without noting it was 40 years ago that the modern comics industry was born. I can guess what you’re thinking: “Wait a minute, Dan, don’t comic books have a history that stretches back until at least the 1930s, with some proto-comics appearing even in the late 1800s?” You’re right. You got me. But I’m not talking about the Golden Age or anything like that. I’m talking about what I call the modern era, the four decades following the publication of three landmark comics – a sequential troika that shapes our expectations of what comics will be in 2026. Readers with long memories remember a time before Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and Alan Moore’s Watchmen. And I can say with confidence that the industry hasn’t been the same since. The industry had been struggling in the 1970s. Some historians even credit a single title, Star Wars, for saving Marvel Comics on its own. Then, in the 1980s, events like Marvel’s Secret Wars and DC’s Crisis on Infinite Earths were helping shore up the Big Two Comics Houses. Alternative publishers such as Dark Horse Comics were still embryonic. Drawn and written by Miller, Dark Knight Returns ushered in a dark and gritty form of storytelling that can still be seen on the stands of comic stores today. Its bleak depiction of Gotham was so scary that readers were willing to look past Batman’s fascist tendencies in his bid to bring order to his hometown. Printed on slick paper, its vivid art still excites me 40 years later. Miller famously said in an interview with Rolling Stone at the time he wanted to produce a comic book that a businessman wouldn’t be ashamed to be seen reading on an airplane. Comics weren’t kids’ stuff anymore. Miller followed the miniseries with Batman: Year One, which re-told the character’s origin in a Gotham that existed in a strange, timeless setting. Maus, which Spiegelman wrapped in 1986, told the story of his father’s concentration-camp experiences in the form of a cartoon-animal tale. It demonstrated that comics were a serious medium and could be put to other uses apart from glorifying the exploits of superheroes. Watchmen, meanwhile, is ostensibly a murder mystery answering the question of “Who killed the Comedian?” but is so much more. Set in an alternate 1980s in which Richard Nixon is serving his fourth term, the backdrop is a Cold War about to turn hot. Among other issues, it grapples with the consequences of having a real-life Superman (in the form of Doctor Manhattan) striding the Earth like a giant. How would that make the average person feel? Out of the three, my favourite is likely Dark Knight Returns – it took an existing comic character and tried to square how he would operate in the real world. It is at once a satire of, and a tribute to, the Caped Crusader. Sequels to Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen have failed to live up to the books that spawned them, likely because they set such a high standard for sequential storytelling. Without those three comics, we wouldn’t have comics as they exist today. But who knows – there may be creators out there who are poised to re-shape comics again. It would be entirely cool for some smart artist or writer to revolutionize our thinking about the form once again. If you have any guesses on who that might be, or which comics are changing the industry right now, let me know in the comments! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Graphic-novel Gift Guide
By Dan Brown I love giving (and getting) graphic novels and comics at Christmas! As you’re shopping for family and friends this festive season, I’ve got some suggestions on which books to get the different people who made your list. Check it out! For the newbie graphic-novel reader: I would recommend a starter pack of Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns and Maus. Released at roughly the same moment in the 1980s, these are the foundational graphic novels – along with Will Eisner’s A Contract With God – that showed comics could be taken seriously. For the superhero fan: I would give this person Irredeemable from Boom! Studios. Written by Mark Waid, it takes a look at what happens when an all-powerful hero in the mold of Superman goes off the rails. For the fan of Canadiana: Maurice Vellekoop’s I’m So Glad We Had This Time Together is a gay coming-of-age story set in Toronto and includes a lot of history about the queer community in the Big Smoke. There’s also Kate Beaton’s Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, set in Alberta’s Oil Patch. For the fan of local talent: Derek Laufman has books like Bot 9 and The Witch of Wickerson for kids, plus titles such as Crimson Fall: The Shore Tower for mature readers. He recently published the first issue of The Rats of Ironwood and has taken over art duties on Skottie Young’s I Hate Fairyland series. A Byron resident, Laufman is as local (and as good a creator) as it gets. For the fan of overlooked gems: Get this person on your list anything Mouse Guard, Londoner Bryan Lee O’Malley’s Seconds, or Southwestern Ontario native Jeff Lemire’s The Nobody, the latter of the three being a re-telling of the H.G. Wells novel The Invisible Man in a small town. For the history buff: Maybe I’m in the minority, but I had not heard of Eadweard Muybridge, the pioneering photographer who was also involved in one of the most notorious murder trials of the 1800s, until Quebec graphic novelist Guy Delisle published this biography. A fascinating character whose story is told in a fascinating way. You could also try Scott Chanter’s Two Generals, about the D-Day invasion told from the perspective of two Canadian grunts. For the political buff: Are You Willing to Die for the Cause? is the first of a two-volume history of the FLQ, the separatist terrorists who are portrayed by veteran cartoonist Chris Oliveros as a bunch of stumblebums. For the art lover: I came relatively late to Dean Motter’s Mister X. Check out Mister X: The Archives or Mister X: The Modern Age, with its glorious retro look, billed as “a fusion of film noir, Art Deco and German Expressionism.” All of those elements combine to make a comic that will live in your imagination for a long time. And Los Bros Hernandez worked on some of the early issues of this Canadian classic! For the lover of the printed word: Anything, really, by Hamilton’s Joe Ollmann. If you want a starting point, try some of his short graphica, for instance Happy Stories About Well-Adjusted People. If you like what you read, move on to Fictional Father and The Abominable Mr. Seabrook. Don’t get me wrong, I love Joe’s art, too, but there are few comic creators whose voice comes through as clearly as Ollmann’s does. For the one who loved this summer’s Superman movies: The James Gunn film was based on a number of storylines, including All-Star Superman, Superman For All Seasons and Superman: Birthright. If you can find a compilation of John Byrne’s 1980s run on Superman, this person on your list will likely enjoy that one, too. For the one who loved The Fantastic Four: First Steps this summer: The Essential Fantastic Four Volumes 1-5 were the source material for this movie, with its retro-futuristic look. The new motion picture was dedicated to artist Jack Kirby, and these five volumes contain his entire influential run on the title with Stan Lee. For the one who is looking forward to Avengers: Doomsday next year: See my Fantastic Four recommendations. Also the Essential Super-Villain Team-Up Volume 1 and the individual issue The Invincible Iron Man No. 150 – in which Doctor Doom faces off against Iron Man. For the music fan: Scott Chantler’s Bix, Rush: The Making of a Farewell to Kings and David Collier’s Topp: Promoter Gary Topp Brought us the World. For the person who’s impossible to buy for: Why, a gift certificate, of course! So that’s it for my suggestions for this year. Are there any graphic novels/comics you are giving this year, or hoping to see under the tree? Let me know in the comments! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 32 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
