Here at a few (mostly) non-super-hero titles from publishers other than Marvel/DC I've sampled recently.
Nameless - (Grant Morrison, Image)
Frankenstein Underground - (Mike Mignola, Dark Hourse)
Joe Frankenstein - (IDW)
Secret Identities - (Image)
D4VE - (IDW)
Jupiter's Circle / Jupiter's Legacy - (Image)
King Features series - (Dynamite)
Sirens - (George Perez, Boom Studios)
Anyone have any opinions to share? Feel free to discuss other series as well.
Replies
I'm reading Nameless, and I read D4VE.
I think Nameless will read better on its second reading; it's certainly intriguing and creepy, but I'm losing track of the characters. I need to read 1-4 before issue 5 comes out, just to re-ground myself in the story, which is standard operating procedure for Morrison books. I like Burnley's art a lot -- I always have. I liked the way he conveyed the scale of the features of that giant asteroid with those little drones. But I don't really have a handle on it right now.
D4VE was a lot of fun. It's a pretty standard shlub-beats-back-alien-invasion story, except the shlub is a robot, part of the robots that took over from human society. The most fun is seeing the robots mimic human behavior and neuroses. A fun series, and I hear there's a sequel in the works.
The others I haven't had a chance to read yet.
Thanks for the feedback, Rob. I’ve fallen a little bit behind on my new comics reading, and I thought potential discussion on this board might motivate me to get caught up.
NAMELESS: I read the first issue and deemed it worthy of my time (and $), but I purposefully let a few issues build up. I’m ready to move forward at this point.
D4VE: I agree with everything you said about this one. I’m caught up reading the first mini, but I’ve decided to tradewait the second.
KING FEATURES: After careful consideration, I decided Prince Valiant was the only one I was interested in enough to buy (and that’s with beautiful top-to-bottom interlocking covers by Darwin Cooke on the first issues). The others are, let’s see… Flash Gordon, The Phantom, Mandrake the Magician and Jungle Jim. The first two issues were straightforward action/adventure in the Hal Foster vein, but with issue #3 it became clear that the Prince Valiant series was only part of a line-wide crossover.
At the end of #2, Val jumps into a misty portal, and at the beginning of #3 he emerges, with a young Flash Gordon and Mandrake (in the body of a small dinosaur), onto the deck of a clipper ship alongside the 18th century ancestor of the present day “Ghost Who Walks.” Okay, definitely not in continuity, but certainly lots of good, clean fun. It’s not even necessary to have read the pervious issues of the other series, although one might if one is curious to learn, for example, what Mandrake is doing in the body of a dinosaur. Flash Gordon, BTW, is not yet in college; he is referred to on the splash page as “Kid Flash Gordon.” If I have one quibble about issue #3, it is with Flash’s anachronistic dialogue. He sounds more like a teenager from the 1990s than one of the 1920s. “Lame!”
I don’t plan to buy back issues of any of the series I’ve missed, but I might buy a collected edition if one is offered.
Nameless: I have a few issues of this built up, much like Jeff. I think I've read a couple of them, but also like you, I want to read the four or five that have come out at this point, as I'm pretty sure it will make much easier sense that way. I love Erik Burnham's artwork!
Jupiter's Legacy: This was my happy surprise of the year. What a great ending to the first series! Of course, this is as much because of Frank Quitely as much as Mark Millar (and I've never been a big fan of his, but was this ever a treat). Yes, this definitely has the trappings of a Mark Millar comic--including some pretty horrific scenes of brutality. But the way the story changes by the end, and the way the good guys come through in the end gives this two thumbs up from me. I gave the prequel series a try, but I just couldn't get into it as much because the art took such a dramatic tonal shift.