Required Reading: Comics for 6/28/17
Main Art by Sami Kivela
June is nearing its end, and with it go two major second acts: Greg Rucka’s return to Wonder Woman concludes this week with #25, and Lucifer’s second solo run wraps up. The former will continue next month under new management, but the latter is flying back into the void. Luckily, this final Wednesday of the month brings with it several notable debuts, including the winding Black Mask kickoff Beautiful Canvas, firebrand writer Alex De Campi’s latest, a totally rad Jem crossover, Valiant’s high-profile new team title and a crossover between the world’s greatest detective and a man who struggles with the delineation between rabbit season and duck season. If nothing hitting stands this week quite scratches your late-June itch, consider bidding adieu to Pride Month with some quality queer comics instead.
A.D. After Death HC
Writer: Scott Snyder
Artist: Jeff Lemire
Publisher: Image Comics
Current All Star Batman scribe and DC Comics architect Scott Snyder started his career teaching and writing prose, and it was lovely. His work was collected in the short story collection, Voodoo Heart, and while it lacked capes and fisticuffs, it exposed the writer’s obsessions of history, legacy and romanticized isolation; Paste’s first books editor, Charles McNair, called Snyder “a young writer who is simply too good to be overlooked for long.” McNair wrote the understatement of the century, though Snyder’s trajectory has veered far from his origins. The 10 years since Heart’s publication have witnessed Snyder’s ascent into comics royalty without a hint of his return to prose, save a looming novel called The Goodbye Suit. That absence makes a book like A.D. After Death all the more surprising and delightful. The project mixes Snyder’s fiction with spot illustrations from Jeff Lemire for roughly two-thirds of the work, with paneled sequential art rounding out the rest. The wordcraft borders on the sublime at moments; few writers can articulate music, color and melancholy with the economy and vividness displayed here. Snyder also embraces his recent predilection for pseudo-science, digging into pathology and ophthalmology to paint a world where a man refutes his immortality. Lemire’s soft watercolors contrast the story’s themes of fragility with their text of absolutism, and the resulting experience is both remarkably ambitious and heartbreaking. Sean Edgar
Batman/Elmer Fudd Special #
Writer: Tom King
Artists: Lee Weeks, Byron Vaughns
Publisher: DC Comics
The best mash-up of the year doesn’t come from audio chef Girl Talk, but from a gothic billionaire vigilante brawling with a bald cartoon sportsman. The only thing we can add to Jannon Calloway’s analysis is that this shit is crazy. Monthly Batman writer Tom King plunges both characters into a ‘40s noir playground where Fudd’s a hitman hunting down Bruce Wayne. A humanoid analogue of Porky runs a dive bar populated by a host of other Looney Tunes characters, all rendered by Lee Weeks with shadowy depravity. It’s the only media that will ever portray childhood icons as bottom-shelf-liquor-swilling lowlifes, and bless the Warner. Bros exec who said why not? The plot borrows the story structure of both superhero team-ups and classic noir, and works far more tightly than many other titles in this line. It wraps up when the jokes may have started to wear thin, yielding many laughs and making us ask why DC editorial isn’t taking more wrong turns at Albuquerque. Sean Edgar
Beautiful Canvas #1
Writer: Ryan K. Lindsay
Artist: Sami Kivela
Publisher: Black Mask
Beautiful Canvas #1 is a wonderfully disorienting first issue: a hitwoman discovers her conscience when assigned to murder a child within days of finding out her own girlfriend is pregnant, an interesting-enough plot that soon adds human/animal hybrid assassins and the tease of much more combustible abilities on the way. Like We Can Never Go Home before it, Beautiful Canvas melds the classic comic-book complication of unusual abilities with the moral murkiness of real-world adult storytelling. Writer Ryan K. Lindsay plumbed similar depths alongside artist Owen Gieni with the award-winning Negative Space, an underwater-alien story about depression and suicidal thoughts. Lindsay and frequent collaborator Sami Kivela, who also teamed up on the sharp-toothed “surf noir” Chum, clearly have ambitions for this book beyond straightforward genre entertainment. Kivela has stepped up his skills with every project, and his work with colorist Triona Farrell on Beautiful Canvas shows off visual storytelling that places him in good company with fellow Black Mask surprises Tyler Boss and Eric Zawadzki. Steve Foxe
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