Yeah, good point poorly-drawn Grimlock! When’s Michael Bay gonna wise up and start using the Dinobots? They’re giant robots and dinosaurs in one! What could be more popular? Squabbling robots with gold teeth who speak Hollywood stereotype street slang? An ankle-humping remote-control car version of Wheelie? Freaking Arcee? Feh. Well, even if you can’t find giant robots that transform into giant robot dinosaurs with speech impediments at your local cineplex, you can find them in Transformers: Maximum Dinobots Vol. 1, a 130-page, $20 trade collecting IDW’s miniseries of the same name, by Nick Roche, Marcelo Matere and, (of course) Simon Furman.
It looks like a huge week for big, must-read comics, even if the field of super-comics seems a lot lighter than usual. What looks good, and what looks not-so-good? Look after the jump to find out!
Asterios Polyp: “Eagerly awaited” probably doesn’t even begin to describe David Mazzucchelli’s new original graphic novel, which I believe has been in the works for somewhere in the neighborhood of 85 years now. It’s a 345-page hardcover from Pantheon, and it will run you $30. This one’s pretty much mandatory reading.
Amazing Spider-Man Annual #36: Marc Guggeneheim and Patrick Olliffe tell a tale of Peter Parker “as he prepares for the 2nd most important wedding day of his life.” What was the first one? I kinda sorta half-remember Parker and the long-term girlfriend he was cohabitating with planning a wedding, but I think something happened on that day that prevented it and they never did get married? Or something? My memory on the subject is strangely clouded for some reason.
Booster Gold #22: It looks like this title is back to doing what it does best, using DC continuity as a canvas on which to paint new adventures featuring the time-traveling hero. With this issue, it looks like writer/artist Dan Jurgens is sending Booster Gold into the classic Wolfman/Perez Titans run. And in the back-up, Blue Beetle battles robots. Preview here.
BPRD 1947 #1: Hey, it’s the start of a new series from the Hellboy-iverse! That’s always something to get pretty excited about, but this particular series is a little extra exciting, as the art is coming from Brazilian super-team of Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá. Mike Mignola and Joshua Dysart write, and as for the story? Well, it’s a direct sequel to BPRD 1946, the story that started out like The Good German and ended with a mad Nazi scientist launched a missile with a warhead full of vampires at the U.S. and, oddly enough, the book ended up being even more awesome than that sounds. Preview here.
Pixu Vol. 1: Mark of Evil: If this week’s BPRD issue doesn’t fulfill all of your Dark Horse-published, Moon/Bá horror-themed story needs, here’s the publisher’s new volume of the brothers’ two-volume anthology work with Becky Cloonan and Vasilis Lolos. Given the creative team, I honestly can’t imagine that it won’t be pretty excellent. It’s 130 pages for $18. Preview here.
Dark X-Men: The Beginning #1: Wait, Namor’s on this team? Oh man, that means they’re probably not going to do a Dark Defenders now.
Everybody Is Stupid Except For Me and Other Astute Observations: Damn it Peter Bagge, now what am I going to call my autobiography? This is a nice-looking collection of a decade’s worth of the master cartoonist’s cartoons from Reason magazine. I’m working my way through a preview copy at the moment, but I can personally attest to the first two chapters being pretty great. It’s 112-pages for $17. Fantagraphics has a slide-show video preview thingamajig here.
Leave it to PET Vol. 2: I really enjoyed the first volume of this new series from Viz Kids, about an ineffectual super-robot made from a recycled bottle that returns to save the nine-year-old boy who recycled him. This is another volume of it. It’s 200 pages of all-ages fun for $8.
Marvel Adventures Super Heroes #13: I really love the sheer unpredictability of this book, Marvel Adventures’ catch-all title in which pretty much any character can bask in the all-ages, done-in-one spotlight for 22 pages. I mean, one month it’s a Thor story, the next it’s a pair of Captain America stories, and the next it’s Spider-Man, She-Hulk and Tigra vs. The Leader’s robotic bulldog. Yes, that is really the plot of this issue! Paul Tobin writes and Marcelo DiChiara draws.
NGE Shinji Ikari Raising Project Vol. 1: I confess I have no idea what this is exactly, other than a Neon Genesis Evangelion-related manga. It’s not the original anime adaptation by Yoshiyuki Sadamoto that Viz published, nor does it appear to be a new version of the Neon Genesis Evangelion Angelic Days manga that used the cast in a light-hearted high school comedy version of the story that ADV Manga published either. So it’s apparently a new, third version from a third publisher…? You can look for clues in Dark Horse’s solicitation copy and three-page preview, located here. (UPDATE: Between writing these words last night and posting them here this afternoon, I read Jog’s invaluable preview post for this week’s new releases, and he makes sense of all the Evangelion manga. Or as much sense as one can make with words. Someone really needs to do, like, a tree-shaped chart explaining the various versions of the various Eva stories someday).
The Nobody: Jeff Lemire, the cartoonist responsible for the critically acclaimed Essex County trilogy from Top Shelf, makes his Vertigo debut with this 145-page, $20 hardcover about a mysterious stranger who dresses like H.G. Wells’ Invisible Man moving into a curious small town.
Showcase Presents Bat Lash: This particular volume of DC’s cheap reprint series (i.e. My Favorite Thing In the Whole World) is only $10, but that’s because it’s a bit slimmer than the others, at 240-pages. Not that 240 pages of cowboy comics from the likes of Nick Cardy, Sergio Aragones, Dennis O’Neil, Len Wein, Cary Bates; and Mike Sekowsky is anything to sniff at.
Wednesday Comics #1: Let’s see, some of the greatest writers, artists and writer/artists in comics doing stories featuring some of DC’s biggest superhero characters and oddest oddball characters in a brand-new format never before seen in comic shops, every Wednesday for the next three months. Yeah, I think it’s safe to see this is going to be one of the books of the week—except it’s not even a book! We don’t even have a word for what this crazy thing is yet! It’s $3.99, but the way the pages work out, it should be plenty more comics than you’d normally find in a 22-page, $2.99 book.
July 7th, 2009 at 3:53 pm
Gotta get me that Wednesday Comics goodness!
July 7th, 2009 at 4:02 pm
Wednesday Comics looks like the highlight of the week, but I’m also looking forward to the prologue to Blackest Night, Green Lantern #43.
July 7th, 2009 at 5:02 pm
Transformers land like comets and scan nearby vehicles to transform into. What’s to stop one of the robots landing in the Museum of Natural History and mistaking the exhibits for the modern world, scanning the T-Rex and giving birth to Grimlock? Anybody who knows Grimlock knows he’d be too stubborn to change into anything else once his mistake had been uncovered… Problem solved, Michael Bay!
July 7th, 2009 at 6:58 pm
Actually, I thought that Grimlock was some of your best work. And Maximum Dinobots was not some of Roche’s best, much less Furman’s. (I picked up the floppies.)
July 9th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
Someone really needs to do, like, a tree-shaped chart explaining the various versions of the various Eva stories someday
Dude, the people making the Eva anime can’t even get the story straight. They keep rewriting the ending. I doubt anyone can make sense of that crap.