Welcome to Image Rundown!
Here’s a quick look at everything Image Comics is releasing this week, with highlights and quick reviews for new series and collected editions as well as good jumping-on points for new readers. Let’s get started!
New Series and Arcs:
Barrier #1 (Collector’s Edition) & #2 – Brian K Vaughan and Marcos Martin’s brilliant sci-fi epic about immigration comes to print! If you missed the Free Comic Book Day edition of #1, you can still pick up this special edition along with #2. And from what I still hear, there are no plans to print this in a hard or soft cover collected edition, so get these while you can! The rest of the series can also be read at Panel Syndicate.
Medieval Spawn/Witchblade #1 – Together again for the first time in decades!
Port of Earth #5 – Second arc begins here! The imminent threat neutralized, the Port opens back up for business. But there’s more going on than the agents first realized, and what it could lead to could change everything for the citizens of Earth. If you missed the first arc, pick up Vol. 01 this week (for only $10!). It’s a well thought out story in a grounded world, realistic “what-if” scenarios, and one of my favorite new series from last year.
Analog #2 – Okay, not technically new this week, but if your local shop still has issue #1 I recommend checking this out. After “the cloud opens” and everyone’s personal information on the internet is exposed to the public, the only way to share sensitive documents is the old fashion way; by paper and courier. Of course, anyone using this method must be keeping some dark secrets, and some will pay anything or kill anyone to get their hands on it: that’s where experts like Jack McGinnis come in. Written by Gerry Duggan with art by David O’Sullivan and Jordie Bellaire.
Isola #2 – Also not new, but a cool and gripping fairy tale of a young woman and a tiger’s search for a fabled land of Isola, a place of some extraordinary magic that can revert the tiger back to her former royal self, the Queen Olwyn. Written by Brenden Fletcher (Motor Crush) with art by Karl Kerschl (Gotham Academy). If your shop still has it in stock, it’s also worth a read.
Continuing:
- Black Cloud #9 – “No Escape” part four.
- Dissonance #3
- Maestros #6
- Monstress #16
- Oblivion Song #3 – After the action-packed debut issue, some readers seemed to be disappointed in the slower-paced character-building follow up. From what I can tell, there is plenty of action to be had in this story, so I have no doubt we’ll be in store for more soon, if not now in the third installment.
- Outcast #35
- Prism Stalker #3
- Rose #11
- Sleepless #6 – First arc finale! This has been another favorite of mine recently. Lots of world and relationship building in this first arc, some action of course but it’s not an action story. It’s a royal fantasy/romance story about finding your place and fulfilling promises with a little twist of mystery.
- Southern Bastards #20 – Fourth arc finale, and the last issue solicited for now. The irregular schedule these last few issues has me a little thrown off, but it’s still as great a series as it ever was.
- Youngblood #11
Collected Editions:
Angelic Vol. 01 – A heart-warming but harsh tale about finding your place in a society you don’t feel part of, and a world in a continuing all-out species war. Long ago, humans cruelly fused animals with technology and pitted them against each other to fight their wars. But after the humans are gone and the animals remain, the animosity holds so long no one remembers what they were fighting about in the first place. Qora is a young and innocent monkey who doesn’t understand her religion or the need for fighting, so she embarks on a mission to discover the truth. One trick this series employs is creating a language and lingo for it’s time; people are referred to as “The Mans”, monkeys are “Monks”, and several words common today take new meaning or are rephrased in a clever way, and it’s done so well I never found it distracting. I’ve only read a handful of Simon Spurrier’s work, but this has shot to the top of my favorites of his. And though I checked out the first couple issues of Limbo, this is the first full story of Caspar Wijngaard’s artwork I’ve read and I was blown away.
Dark Fang Vol. 01 – When I first read the pitch for this series, I worried it was going to be a bit too preachy about global warming. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for preserving our planet Earth but I’m always cautious about politics in comics. But after reading the first issue, all worry was abandoned and I was on-board for an eco-activist vampire. Valla had been living at the bottom of the ocean for over a century until an oil spill kills her under-sea friends and overtakes her home. Now she has resurfaced to discover how the world became this way and exact revenge on those who made it so. I found the art to be a bit “cheesecake” so if that’s not your thing I’d be aware of that going into this series, but I found the idea of a classic monster fighting global pollution an original and fun story. And considering where the last issue left off, I’m interested to see what comes next!
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Happy reading, everyone, and see you next week!
