Comics

[avram]

I joke that my weekly comics habit has turned into me walking around the store moaning about how there’s nothing worth buying, but this week I found the latest trades of Ex Machina and Ultimate X-Men. I think I’m gonna give up on the latter — they’ve just introduced the Magician, and checking the storyline on Wikipedia), it looks pretty lame. Ex Machina’s still doing a decent job of looking like it might actually lead somewhere in along with the melodrama.

In webcomics news, eurotard linked to Dean Haspiel’s Immortal, a new Billy Dogma and Jane Legit story. I’d seen Billy and Jane in various indie sources over the years (probably SPX but maybe other places too), and somehow never taken a shine to them, but damn, this story’s got graphic chops! Simple, square panels, black and red and a bit of a tone, a nice grainy brush line, and a sexy story that reads like a Brooklyn creation myth with superheroes (or villains, or whatever Billy and Jane are). (Panel © Dean Haspiel)

And a couple days back, scans_daily put up the entirety of the Cerebus-Elrod-and-Lord-Julius-in-a-closet (actually a ship’s cargo hold) story that originally ran in Cerebus #51 and was reprinted in Cerebus #0. I first started collecting Cerebus around the time this came out, and even though I didn’t know who the characters were, it was still hilarious. What really knocks me out after all these years is this: Not only is Sim using these tall, thin panels to give himself lots of time (because time progresses across panels) for reaction shots to properly pace his dialog-heavy comedy, but he’s also slightly tilting the panels to indicate the ship’s rocking motion. (Page excerpt © Dave Sim)