Welcome, “dear” readers, to another week of comics and commentary at Comics! The Blog! We kick things off, as always, by handing out awards for the Best of the Week - beginning with the two Award postings yesterday, followed closely on Tuesday with this past week’s Best, which you are reading now. Like, seriously right this second.

Hey, at this point, what more can we really say about Umbral #1? Brandon wrote about it last week. I wrote about it a day later in our weekly buy-these-books column. You can read those below:

Brandon’s thing

My thing

Obviously, we stand by both those things, because I am sitting here again telling you that Umbral #1 was really good. In fact, I’m sitting here telling you that Umbral #1 was the best comic of last week, by whatever nebulous, shifting standards we go buy. To pull back the curtain on our sham of a site just a little bit, what sometimes happen is that if we’ve given a book a lot of attention the previous week, we might not call a book that we both loved a lot the best, because we ran out of original thoughts. But this week, I just couldn’t bear to do that, because I keep coming back to this book and how much I loved it. I reread it earlier today on my lunch break and loved it even more than when I first saw it, and so here I am, two hundred words into explaining why I haven’t written anything new yet. Hey, you don’t pay me.

A week later, Umbral #1 still blows me away with the scope and fine detail of its world, one that feels, like the best fantasy worlds do, like they existed before the authors started talking about them and will continue after they’ve stopped. It’s little details like the way Petor and Innaline talk about their predecessors, or how Rascal talks with her elder, or the songs that pop up during the course of the issue. Pro tip: a way to get me to immediately buy into your fictional universe is to:

(a) Have songs;

(2) Include a world map;

(+) Contain Beorn;

And you know what? Two out of three ain’t bad. Not when there’s humour and even a whisper of whimsy appearing from behind Chris Mitten‘s terrifying depiction of shadow monsters or John Rauch‘s disconcerting purples and oranges. It’s the humour, the songs and the sense of history that give this world its breath, that drive the whole narrative. Things are usually fine. Now they’re not. But in a world that’s usually fine, that just means it’s all the more important that the crisis get averted. And it probably will, because this world has such immediate heft to it.

In my head, I can already see countless stories set in the Kingdom of Fendin, and that, along with my eagerness to see them all based on what I’ve gotten so far, is the highest compliment I can give this series.