Why look! It’s all of our nifty friends from the internet. Did you have a nice weekend, nifty friends from the internet? We’re going to assume that you said “yes”. Because come on, why would you wanna bring us down by telling us your weekend sucked. Why would you…

…oh. They did? Yikes. Very, very sorry to hear about that. I’m pretty sure where ever they are, your parents are still in that sex pile. But in a good way, and not, you know, in a dead way. Let’s uh… let’s talk about some comics, mmkay? Specifically, which ones were the raddest.

FAREWELL, SWEET PERVERTS

Out of all the series that won’t be surviving the DC relaunch, at least initially, Secret Six is probably the one I’ll miss the most. It’s funny, considering I only finally decided to start reading the series because the new issue at the time had Bane riding a T-rex and I don’t pass that kind of thing up as a rule. However, despite my baffling hesitance, I immediately fell in love with this group of murderers and assholes and the series became one of the ones I began looking forward to most every month. And because of that, it’s hard not to be sad at the end of both the team and the series.

Not that the ending wasn’t perfect, though. It was. As much as it’s tempting to want the series to end with a scene right out of Magnum, P.I. or The A-Team, where everybody celebrates after a final job pulled off, chomps a cigar and laughs (and in Secret Six-talk, these are all euphemisms for horrible, disgusting sex acts) as the scene freezes on Bane looking proudly at Scandal Savage, that’s not these guys. Like Catman says, they don’t win. They’ll fight to the end, but they’re never the favourites and that’s gonna have to be good enough. So the ending, with its blaze of glory, unspoken words of friendship, refusal to go softly and aw-shucks lesbian polygamy, is exactly what I’ve grown to love and expect from the series, even if I would have wished that Ragdoll got to chomp a big ol’ cigar just once.

For everything Gail Simone has given us, we’d like to award her the first ever Golden Gail award, which is basically a giant gold statue that shoots fire. Unfortunately, we don’t do international shipping. (J)

KARMA-KARMA-KARMA-KARMA-KARMA-CHAMELEON

Man, I sure do love that David Bowie song. About Ziggy Stardust. What, did you think I was talking about Karma Chameleon? Please, I know that song was sung by Rick Springfield. Anyway, let’s talk about the Punisher, shall we? Just for a second?

The Punisher is not a character I ever thought I would enjoy. Not really. Everything about him is pretty much opposed to how I like my superhero comics. But then, certain things happened, and they happened like this. First, Rick Remender turned the guy into a Frankenstein monster and had him riding the back of a dragon mowing down undead zombie Nazis with a machine gun on his way to kill a steam punk monster hunter and his cadre on kamikaze warriors. And then Jason Aaron arrived and had the guy fight an amish dude who ran him over with a horse and cart and proceeded to beat him with a hammer.

And then… then there’s this book, by Greg Rucka and Marco Checchetto. It is absolutely nothing like the other Punisher books that I have read and enjoyed. It’s terse, it’s fierce, and the Punisher barely says a word. Not even within the confines of a caption box. He just shows up - water colour wash trickling the skull on his shirt. He shows up, and you lose your fucking mind because the god damn Punisher is here.

The entire first issue of this new Punisher series is fascinating. With a combination of stunning art and an economic use of words, its just a beauty to behold. It’s everything I don’t like about superhero comics - but that’s fine, because it’s not a superhero book. It’s a hard book, about a hard man, attempting to bring his form of justice to those who escape the law. And it’s great. And thus, it earns the second ever Concrete Jungle Where Dreams Are Made of Award.

That was a David Bowie song, right?

I’m going to be honest, people: there were so many fantastic comics out this week and I didn’t have a chance to read all the ones I wanted to before it came time to write this article. I can’t tell you if Roger Langridge‘s Snarked is as brilliant as the first few pages make it seem, though I’ll be able to tell you as soon as I get home tonight. I don’t know if Herc or S.H.I.E.L.D. were as awesome as the rest of their issues have been. Mystic was amazing, but I talked about that already!

PS: Buy Mystic, everyone!

So, totally uncomfortable with picking a Best of the Week, I’m officially taking the easy way out, which is to say that I’m picking a trade paperback collecting previously published material that was completely awesome:

It’s the Best of Archie Comics, everybody!

Why is this the best? A few very simple reasons:

1. It goes all the way back to the beginning. Remember The Blue and Gold, Brandon’s initial foray into the world of Archie for this site [Ed Note: This is a purely mercenary move to get Brandon to write more of those]? Remember how in his original incarnation Archie was a crazy-lookin’ dude who liked to be called Chick? Maybe not, because that was SEVENTY YEARS AGO. But it’s here!

2. The book includes all the credits that were missing from some older stories, so now you can know forever that Dan DeCarlo created Josie and the Pussycats, then immediately celebrate by watching Josie and the Pussycats, which is basically playing 24/7 in my head.

3. Pure nostalgia. Looking through the book, I saw stories that I remembered reading when I was a kid and my mum would get my sister (and, by sibling proxy, me) a big bag of digests and double digests from the used book store. It was like a time machine to being 10 years old during the middle of the 90s - the greatest decade - in the back of the RV as my dad drove down the highway, or sitting at the lake in the summer reading Archie by the fire like Norman Rockwell painted all those pictures of until he got sued for showing Veronica nude.

I look forward to your letters, Rockwell Estate.

4. It’s nine-dollars-and-ninety-nine-damn-cents for over 400 pages of Archie! If you can find a better deal out there, I’d like to hear it. What’s that? You can’t? This is the best deal out there? You’re goddamn right it is. (J)

This is Comics! The Blog. We now commence our broadcast week.