I'm sure you've heard of Saga, which is all over the place with buzz. It's by Brian Vaughn, who brought us Y: The Last Man. I enjoyed a lot of things about that series, but I found the story to be kind of flawed on a couple of levels. It's hard to tell at this point what's going to happen with Saga, but the characters are so, so wonderful. The teenage ghost half-nanny, the troubled bounty hunter and his truth-scenting cat, the romance novel-reading soldier.I almost didn't give it a shot, because the first issue contained a rather off-putting sex scene (really, the idea of characters with TVs for faces is kind of heavy-handed to begin with), but that was fortunately not indicative of the overall tone of the series. I am SO on board for this ride.
Locke & Key has sold me on Joe Hill. I don't know why I haven't read Joe Hill yet--everyone tells me how great he is. The first volume of Locke & Key is one of the creepiest things I've ever read, and now I have to read a bunch more. I'm only on number two, but I'm already getting twitchy for the point at which our protagonists realize that there's something going on. Because right now they're just wandering around having their strings pulled left right and center and not even realizing, and this is going to get really depressing until they start fighting back.I'm going to skip Angel & Faith; my relationship with that series is incredibly complicated and based on a long and weirdly passionate emotional history with the Buffy franchise. I hate Angel; I like Faith; I hate Eliza Dushku; I like David Boreanaz; I'm trying to follow the Buffy comics and I need to keep the dream alive. But I can only watch the same characters learn the same lessons so many times over before I despair of them. So that's all I'll say about that.
Bone, though! Let's talk about Bone. Adam and Mike have almost finished it, but I'm still on volume 5. It's just so charming. It's got all the elements of epic fantasy, with the adorableness of a Sunday comic strip. And you're reading about this aw-shucks little non-human character having a crush on the gorgeous girl, and it's like Opus the Penguin all over again, but then there are all these hints of backstory, all these echoes of incredibly rich world-building that you're just getting these tastes of but that point to something rich and wonderful.I'm really glad to be reading the recently published color versions. I've tried to read them before in black and white, but I found that the art was a little too complex to take in easily that way. Mike tells me that ex post facto coloring is usually bad, but this is really excellent work; you would never know it wasn't meant to be this way.
More comics coming up!
2 comments:
I loved Bone, too! I think the other series everyone is obsessed with are Fables and The Unwritten.
I am RIGHT UP ON TOP of Fables, to the point where I'm on the library waitlist for volumes that have not come out yet. I wasn't able to get into Unwritten, though--I really find large blocks of text in my comics to be off-putting. Also, I like Harry Potter and all, but I'm not THAT much of a fan, so the kind-of-homage is a little lost on me.
Isn't Bone just a charmer, though? I just love Smiley; I think he's my favorite.
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