Category: Staff Picks

If, like me, you’re someone who has looked your spouse or partner dead in the eye and said, “No, these are not identical Optimus Prime figures. This one is painted like he was in the original cartoon, and this one has 25% darker colors to look like his 1990s ‘Generation 2’ toy” as if that explained everything or anything, you’ve probably already bought this comic. If you’re someone who finds the Transformers and their world to be a head-scratcher (fair enough), you should buy this comic, because Daniel Warren Johnson draws it with love, and finds some cool new twists on the visual language of classic Transformers that really sing. As someone who has read a lot of comics about Transformers (IDW’s More Than Meets the Eye/Lost Light run by Alex Milne and James Roberts is possibly my favorite comic of the last 10-15 years), I’ve seen them drawn by people who are good at drawing Transformers but dicey at drawing people and vice versa, but Johnson manages both here. He also writes and draws a great Starscream, the Daffy Duck of Transformers, giving him a page near the end of the issue to prove why he’s the universal favorite as he bitches about his lot in life while trashing public infrastucture. Even if you don’t like Transformers, I think you’ll like Daniel Warren Johnson’s Transformers. Check it out.

After wrapping up Ultimate Invasion last week, Jonathan Hickman teams up with Valerio Schiti to bring us G.O.D.S., a new series led by a character who looks so much like a fashionably made-over Dr. Strange that I spent a good chunk of this book thinking, “Is this guy not Dr. Strange?” Schiti and Hickman, evidently aware that this might be an issue for readers like me, make sure to establish that our raffish new hero is not Dr. Strange by showing him talking to Dr. Strange on page one of the story, and even then I spent about thirty pages thinking, “That’s Dr. Strange though.” But he is not Dr. Strange. He’s a new guy named Wyn who reads floating books, gestures theatrically to do magic things, has a streak of distinguished white in his hair, and wears a red coat that swirls animatedly about him as though it were a sort of red cape. We’ve never seen anything like him before. At least he’s good company through this extra-sized first issue, and he has good banter with his on-the-spectrum sidekick. This one is like one of those early Vertigo comics where marginalized misfits would do magick-with-a-k and talk to old, bored gods and quote Arthur Rimbaud, except this one has the Collector and Dr. Voodoo in it. One weird thing about this book is that even though it’s a 64-page Jonathan Hickman story, there is not a single graph. Where are the graphs? There’s a lot of jargon here and a good graph would help keep the players straight and they could also throw in the reason this book is called G.O.D.S. Well, I’m sure they’ll get around to it.

It’s been a couple of years for us since we last saw hard-boiled, chain-smoking, magic-using investigative reporter Elena Abbott, but for her, it’s been six years, and things are not going great. It’s the end of the 70s and it’s tough all over—there’s a gas crisis, no one knows what to do about this hostage thing, Carter is blowing it right and left, and Japanese auto manufacturers are introducing economical, reliable cars to Americans, which is bad news for Abbott’s hometown of Detroit. Of course, society always has some extra curveballs for a Black woman, especially when she’s responsible for thwarting an occult conspiracy bent on taking over her city and then the world. This is the conclusion to the Abbott trilogy. If you’ve read the last two, you’ll know you’re in good hands, and if you haven’t, you should catch up at Ash Avenue Comics because we have both of the trades in stock.

Clementine, Book Two (Image Comics)

Art and story by Tillie Walden

Plucky apocalypse survivor Clementine’s YA adventures continue as she adjusts to life after being rescued by an island community. But things are not what they seem. Things are about to get coco-nuts! Note: Don’t write to me if they don’t live on a tropical island. I haven’t read it yet. It just came out! I’m the guy who thought that guy was Dr. Strange!

Alice Cooper #1 (of 5) (Dynamite Entertainment)

Art by Edu Menna/Story by Rodney Barnes

Living legend of rock and Phoenix-area local treasure Alice Cooper returns to comics to take on the Devil himself, who is threatening to take his own band on tour to do I don’t know what. But the archangel Gabriel wants Alice to stop him. That’s right. What they condemn today they’ll embrace in 40 years. Is this in continuity with Marvel’s The Last Temptation of Alice comic from the 90s that Neil Gaiman wrote? If not, does that open the door to some kind of Crisis of Infinite Alices? I look forward to it.