Gannibal is the latest English translation for the under-represented genre of horror manga from Japan that's not about cute, big-eyed teenagers in high school. It's a realistically drawn and naturalistic horror story that has more in common with classic R-rated horror movies than anime or disposable jump-scare soft horror. Creator Masaki Minomiya has said that […]
Resident Evil is that horror franchise cobbled together from every zombie movie you can remember into a series that never seems to end. The video game series has so many installments and spinoffs that they managed to spin off into manga, Pachinko game machines in Japan, English language novelisations, animated TV series, animated feature films, […]
The Prism is a Science Fiction comic series where rock music and outer space unite. Do you know how astronauts are often considered rock stars? In this Sci-Fi future, the astronauts are literally rock stars. It begins with a pair of astronauts on a distant planet, seemingly on a routine mission of exploration, before one […]
Let's get this out of the way: Get Schooled is an insane comic series. In a good way? A bad way? Well, it depends. It's a popular Korean manhwa series serialized as a webtoon about government-sanctioned school inspectors who can legally beat up and punish school bullies, whether they're students, teachers, or even parents. Get […]
We're close, very close to the return of Doctor Who to TV, starting with the Children in Need mini-episode on November 17th, then "The Daleks in Colour" on BBC4 on Thursday the 23rd before the first of the 60th Anniversary specials "The Star Beast" premieres on Saturday the 25th on BBC One and Disney+. But […]
Why I Adopted My Husband has a self-explanatory title. Manga and Light Novel titles are good for that. Yuta Yagi's autobiographical "essay manga" (as they're called in Japan) does precisely what the title says, which is a story of how he met his partner, lived with him for twenty years, and how they got married […]
Rare Flavours, the next miniseries Ram V and Filipe Andrade debuted in August. Kind of. Boom released an ashcan (black and white only comic, with lettering from Andworld Design) called Rare Flavours #1 Tasting Menu Ashcan of the first couple scenes from the first issue, plus designs for $3. It shouldn't surprise anyone that the […]
Doctor Who: Doom's Day continues the show's multimedia 60th Anniversary event with a two-issue comic book crossover event in the Doctor Who comic series published by Titan Books. This is the third part of the event after the first prose story on the Doctor Who website and the extended comics story in Doctor Who Magazine, […]
Conflict of interest siren: I backed Fast Times In Comic Book Editing on Kickstarter. Shelly Bond's comics memoir (or is it an autobiography, drawn primarily by Imogen Mangle and secondarily a host of guests?) evokes the feeling of a time gone by. Specifically, thirty years ago, when comics editors weren't an endangered species, and Vertigo […]
Terror Man starts with a bang. A masked, costumed terrorist named Terror Man (who else?) shows up in the middle of the city and warns everyone to get out of there before he blows up the area. Then the story flashes back to a teenage orphan named Min Jung-Woo, who has a unique psychic ability […]
It's tough not to feel bad for Pete Woods, the artist of The Metabaron Book 4: The Bastard & The Proto-Guardianess. No matter how detailed or well-choreographed his work, it'll inevitably be compared to Juan Gimenez when he got five days to paint one page or Valentin Secher or Niko Henrichon. The comparison isn't respect […]
Gun Honey Blood For Blood reunites the Gun Honey team of writer Charles Ardai, artist Ang Hor Kheng, colorist Asifur Rahman, and letterer David Leach. The plot is still Ardai's strong suit, as each issue keeps up the dizzying pace of the story. Short version: A mysterious female assassin frames the main character Joanna Tan […]
Doctor Strange #1 faces stiff competition from the get-go. It must sit next to Doctor Strange: Fall Sunrise by Marvel's artist of the moment Tradd Moore. Doctor Strange #1 ties directly into the 616, so it has more toys to play with. Writer Jed McKay gives artist Pascal Ferry plenty of cool things to draw […]
The Mighty Barbarians is a comic that is exactly what its title declares, a fast, unfussy axe-to-the-head barbarian series updated to feel new again. Barbarian fantasies are deceptively simple. All you need is burly, musclebound men and women with swords and axes hacking away at other swordmen, monsters and magical or supernatural creatures and you're […]
Richard Sala's The Chuckling Whatsit is a witch's brew of monsters, sinister grotesques, and noir. It's also my introduction to the (now dead) artist's prodigious Fantagraphics bibliography. The Chuckling Whatsit's plot is probably too complex for its own good. Someone's killing astrologers, and the bodies pile up. There are monster men, insane asylums, and assassins […]
Matt Kindt's other labyrinthine series about apolitical spies returns in Spy Superb #1 with a new twist: Comedy. Spy Superb #1 also features Kindt doing interior art for what feels like the first time in years (if you don't count the Kickstarter comic he did with Brian Hurtt and Marie Enger called HEK). The story: Presumably […]
Guardian of Fukushima is published just in time for the twelfth anniversary of the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima power plant due to an earthquake and a tsunami that caused a meltdown and mass evacuation of the towns in the region. The guardian of the title is Naoto Matsumura, a local farmer who decides to […]
Golden Record by Rosemary Valero-O'Connell is an opulent poetry chapbook (written in English and Spanish) published by Silver Sprocket Bicycle Club, which makes Golden Record difficult to review normally. Bleeding Cool doesn't have a poetry critic this reviewer can punt the work over to. Valero-O'Connell is a Harvey, Ignatz, and Eisner-winning comics artist of Laura Dean […]
Carmilla is a fine vampire story set in New York City's Chinatown 30 years ago. It's similar in some concerns to Image's The Good Asian in that it's also about diaspora and identity, but that's roughly as far as it goes. Largely, Carmilla moves briskly. It's roughly 100 pages and never overstays its welcome. Amy Chu […]
Orc Island is a four-issue miniseries by Joshua Dysart, Alberto Ponticelli, and Matt Hollingsworth. Bad Idea published the series, which means it's only available in single issues and must contend with the publisher's contentious PR. Depending on your kindness to Bad Idea, contentious can be replaced with effective or exasperating. Or "probably illegal," depending on […]
