Were Money No Object on Nov. 16th

The Books I Think You Should Buy:

Skullkickers Vol. 2:  Five Funerals and a Bucket of Blood

by Jim Zubkavich, Edwin Huang, and Misty Coats; Image, $16.99

I’m often surprised that I’m reading Skull Kickers.  I’ve never been a Dungeons and Dragons type, and don’t usually go looking for comedic comics.  There is, however, something so charming and amusing about Jim Zubkavich’s series, that I keep reading despite the fact that I normally hate books like this.  Can you give a book higher praise than that?

In this second volumeof the series, the two ‘Kickers’ are taken to a local big town to be celebrated by the local royalty for their heroic actions in the first volume.  The problem is, the assassin who got the first volume off to its start has designs on the city, and uses our two bumbling heroes as her vector to begin killing nobles and preparing the city for the return of nature.

This leads to our friends being wanted for murder, and having to hide out among the thieves of the town.  Of course, it goes without saying that hilarity ensues.  This comic is very funny; my favourite scene involves the local guards handling Baldy’s gun, which is unique in this world.

Who is Jake Ellis?

by Nathan Edmondson and Tonci Zonjic; Image, $16.99

Anyone who has enjoyed Edmondson’s take on Grifter in the DC Relaunch should be checking this trade out.  There are a lot of similarities between the two comics, but this one is vastly superior in just about every way.

Who Is Jake Ellis? is about a man, Jon Moore, who woke up in a laboratory a couple of years ago, to find that he had a voice in his head.  That voice belongs to Jake Ellis, an apparition who seems able to see and know what is happening around him at a superhuman level.  For example, when Moore tries to infiltrate a lab owned by the people who abducted him, Jake can see when a guard is going to approach a door, and can tell if security cameras are being monitored or not.  As you can imagine, this skill set is very handy for someone who wants to stay hidden, and Jon and Jake have made a decent living for themselves working in the shadier areas of international crime.

Now, though, the lab people are on Jon’s trail, and they need to either go deeper into hiding, or try to figure out what happened to them.

This is an exciting and intelligent comic, with fantastic noir-ish art by Tonci Zonjic, who should be on the way to becoming a comics superstar.  His art is a cross between Peter Snejbjerg and Michael Lark, and it works very well.  Get this – you won’t be sorry.

So, what would you get Were Money No Object?