The Humans, Vol.2: Humans Till Deth

 

As a guy who loves the whole 60's Culture, the VERY adult comic series THE HUMANS continues their Monkey-eyed take on hippies, motorcycle gangs. the Vietnam war  and Alcohol, Sex and Drugs with so much excitement and energy it's like watching a movie! Really great series...and is it just me or is main character Johnny a dead-ringer for Neil Young???

The Fuse, Vol.3: Perihelion

Continuing on with Anthony Johnson and Justin Greenwoood's wonderful space saga THE FUSE with their third book following the exploits of Space Station Detectives Rystovich and Dietrich.
They seem to be softening up Klem Rystovich in this one, portraying her a bit more womanly and even hinting at a former romantic backstory. An excellent ongoing series.

Afterlife With Archie

Re-read this one again to see if I liked it any better than I did the first time around, but it looks like I'm the only one who hasn't warmed up to this revamp as everyone else seems to be praising it to the high heavens, LOL.

A Favorite MAD Magazine Strip: "A Modern Business Success Story"

Was flipping through an old MAD Magazine and came across a strip that I really, really loved as a kid. Written by Dick De Bartolo and illustrated by Bob Clarke , “A Modern Business Success Story” showed a little old lady selling Apple Pies out of her house and slowly becoming more and more successful til she was the president of a huge conglomerate business.
Boy, did I LOVE this strip, ESPECIALLY the art- artist Bob Clarke was really a master at details in his artwork, and I remember spending ours poring over his stuff, looking at every thing going onion his pictures, from the customers, children, dogs and even chickens, to houses, cars, trucks and trains. He drew whole WORLDS in there!

At a kid, I enjoyed reading the strip and following the little old lady on her step up to the top, but it was only when I was older that I realized the REAL message wasn’t about how she grew from small time to big time, but, like a LOT of real businesses out there that you deal with all the time,  the more successful she got, the more her product relied on cost-cutting methods,, from mass-marketing her items, moving from fresh to frozen pies, and finally, substituting real ingredients for processed, artificial substitutes, and as we see in the little corner, the people are now flocking to a NEW little old lady, offering what “Mom” once did, real, homemade apple pies!
From the beautiful artwork to the tale’s valuable lesson, this is MAD at its best! Man, they just don’t make strips like these anymore!
PS, if you look really close, you see only TWO people going to the huge factory outlet at MOMCO, and one of them is a blind man that probably meant to got to Aunt Bertha’s but got led to the wrong place by his seeing-eye dog, LOL!

Beasts of Burden: What The Cat Dragged In

Just finished re-reading the awesome "Beasts of Burden by Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson and my friend informed me that a new Beats of Burden special had just come out! What timing!

MPH

Re-read this one again just for the fun of it! A great One-Shot Graphic Novel!

4 Kids Walk Into A Bank

Along with the awesome Manifest Destiny book, Gerg also gave me the first in a 5-part series called "4 Kids Walk Into A Bank" that he really loved. Can't say I cared for this as much as he did, but then again he was always a bigger fan of the "witty youngsters" kind of stories than I...
NO MORE SARCASTIC WITTY KIDS COMICS!!!!

Manifest Destiny, Vol.1-3

When my friend Gerg comes to visit, he always brings a bunch of new titles he thinks I'd like, and among the comics he brought on his latest visit, was an insanely creative graphic novel about an alternate history Lewis & Clark trudging through and mapping out the great untamed wilderness of unexplored America... and battling the Mystical Creatures, Otherworldly Aliens and Abominable Animal Aberrations they come across!!!
WOW, just like ATOMIC ROBO, with its evil mastermind Thomas Edison and Cool Agent Carl Sagan, this "History that never was" features ‎Meriwether Lewis and ‎William Clark as the coolest Gun-totingest agents ever, and ‎Sacagawea as a kick-butt super-warrior ready to take on and disable any new menace they come across!
I IMMEDIATELY fell in love with this one and RAN to the comic store to grab the other two Trade Paperbacks so I could catch up on 'em all! Manifest Destiny has become a HUGE fave of mine!

Beasts Of Burden: Animal Rites

Ahhhh, just finished re-reading the AWESOME Evan Dorkin/Jill Thompson Graphic Novel BEASTS OF BURDEN: ANIMAL RITES, oh how I love this series!!!! Was even better the second time around as I now know and love all of the characters and could take the time to examine all the little things Thompson draws in her pictures that make the comic such a joy to look at!

Coraline

My friend has a young daughter who is just getting into reading stuff of the sci-fi/fantasy/comic genre (the George O'Connor/Rick Riordan-ish Mythology stuff, to be precise) and we've been scrambling to find new things for her to give her daughter to check out. I re-read  this, thinking it would be a GREAT book to give her,(I love this book so much!) but my friend said her daughter had already watched the movie and wasn't much interested in reading a comic version. Oh Well.

Desolation Jones: Made In England

Just felt like re-reading the excellent Warren Ellis/JH Williams TPB Desolation Jones: Made in England again. Man, this is such a great comic, such a shame they dropped the strip after this arc. Still, at least it's kind of a contained story that you can read and enjoy without worrying about it having a huge unresolved ending.

The Walking Dead, Vol.25: No Turning Back

I was not a regular monthly collector of Rober Kirkman/Charles Adlard's Walking Dead, opting to wait for the huge 50 issues thick "Compendium" Editions, but I found it was agonizing waiting so long to see what happened next to Rick Grimes and his crew, additionally, So much time had passed that i would have to re-read all the previous omnibuses before to remember what happened!
Finally, after the third Omnibus, I decided that I jsut couldn't wait for the next omnibus, and finally began collecting the trade paperbacks which came out a bit more regularly, starting with Trade 25.
Awwwww so good!

Lazarus, Vol.4: Poison

Picked up the latest trade collection of the cool Greg Rucka/Michael Lark series LAZARUS and decided to re-read the entire series again from Book One! The futuristic story of Forever Carlyle, bodyguard and protector of her family as the factions go to war is such a exciting series that I'm surprised at how few people I know have heard of it. This should be a lOT more popular!

Harrow County, Vol.2: Twice Told

Continuing on with Cullen Bunn and Tyler Crooks' wonderfully spooky and mesmerizing comic HARROW COUNTY. Seems like these books come out a lot faster and more frequent than others, and that's a good thing!

Love And Rockets #8

What a happy surprise walking in to my local Barnes and Nobles and seeing this sitting on the shelf! As you know, release dates for Love and Rockets have been famously unpredictable since like, forever, and so when one happens to come out it's like a special gift!