Every week, Comics! The Blog goes through the list of new releases and we tell you which comics to plug into your mindhole. Your mileage may vary.

PRETTY DEADLY #1 (Image Comics)

“Death’s daughter rides the wind on a horse made of smoke…”

That’s a line I pulled from the solicitation text for this issue. Elsewhere in the text is the promise that this series will marry the magical mysticism of Sandman with the western vengeance of Preacher - a bold claim, but one that seems to be completely true. Every tiny morsel of information that has seeped onto the internet from writer Kelly Sue Deconnick and artist Emma Rios emboldens my sense of anticipation, and having just started my journey through Sandman (yeah, you heard me), I can see how the comparison can be made. This book looks and feels lush and lyrical, DeConnick’s scripting matching Emma’s liquid-brush line in sense of flow. It’s definitely the book that I am most excited to read this week - and considering the lineup, that’s saying something.

VELVET #1 (Image Comics)

Image is hitting stores with a double blast of premieres this week as Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting reveal Velvet their new cold war spy thriller.

Beyond Criminal where Brubaker tends to focus on celebrating the genre and its tropes without many twists or variations, much of his recent work has taken genre and pulled something new from the typical. With Fatale, he and Phillips added a strong horror element to the idea of the femme fatale. In Incognito they played with pulp elements from the standpoint of the villain. Hell, even near the end of their last Criminal they tossed in elements from Archie Comics for giggles. Here, Bru and Epting are approaching the spy genre from outside the typical “good-looking-and-slightly-boozy” male lead, focusing on a “Girl Friday” who is anything but. A strong concept that I can’t wait to dig my hands into. Hopefully stores have enough to go around, but if not, ComiXology is always a good option.

FABLES ENCYCLOPEDIA HC (Vertigo/DC Comics)

Fables has been running for over eleven years now. There are days where I’m sure it hasn’t been that long - however a quick glance over to my collection shows 30 plus volumes of stories to the contrary.

With Fables, Bill Willingham, Mark Buckingham, and a cadre of other highly talented writers and artists have built something strange and wonderful. Borrowing from tales long told and sometimes long forgotten, they’ve created something new and whole. They’ve been doing it for so long that they have a long storied history of their own. Now, comes a volume that marries that storied history with context from tales gone by.

The Fables Encyclopedia promises to be a fascinating read. The volume is being written largely by Jess Nevins, noted gadabout and the comic industry’s unofficial foremost academic scholar. His name alone sells this volume for me, especially considering how Alan Moore seriously began sliding in weird literary references into his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen stories just to fuck with Nevins after Nevins had started writing annotations for the series on his own. Lately, he’s been contributing to Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ books where he writes incredible essays about the history of pulp fiction - which is to say, he’s a guy who knows his stuff.

Boasting contents that include the complete history of the characters both within the Fables universe, as well as anecdotal historical notes about their existence in general, this volume should be great Christmas fodder for fans of the series.

 

SEX CRIMINALS #2 & SATELLITE SAM #4 (Image Comics)

It’s a good week for sex crime comics.

It hasn’t occurred to me until I started setting up this week’s post, but damn, Fraction is writing an interesting pair of comics exploring different facets of sexual identity. In Sex Criminals, he’s really digging in from the ground up, starting from awakening and stumbling, fumbling towards some sort of relative ease and acceptance as a sexual being. In Satellite Sam, he’s diving head long into the advanced studies, taking people who have discovered what they think is their realm of sexual comfort, and pushing those boundaries outwards in a similar stumbling and fumbling manner. If I were to try and peg a through line, I would probably stab somewhere around the idea that sex is an ever changing, ever evolving beast, and just when you think you have you various peccadillos pegged, things shift and change. Or hey, maybe they don’t. The fact is, sex isn’t a thing that’s easily understood. It’s amazing, and confusing. It can make you feel great, make you feel empty, make you feel something and nothing. It can change your reality, and stop time. That said, whatever your flavour, Fraction has a book for you, with some incredible collaborators. Check these out this week.

These are some of the many great books being released this week! You can find the full list of comics being released here. If you have any other recommendations, let us know in the comments below.