What should you read over the summer? Here are my six picks so that you can have some good reading. Tim Truman is illustrating CONAN by Joe Lansdale and is also becoming the writer of the regular series from DARK HORSE. If ever there were a marriage made in heaven, it is the property of CONAN the BARBARIAN and Tim Truman. EXPATRIATE is a spy noir sci fi thriller brought to comic form. B Clay Moore and Jason Latour deserve credit for doing something new, in a world happy with cliché. Alex Robinson’s TRICKED is brilliant and is a character study of flawed humans. It is really worth a 5 hour sitting and reading. DC’s SHOWCASE books are all really good buys, 500 pages and for 17 bucks or so. With Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray kicking butt on the regular series of Jonah Hex, I found the SHOWCASE version of JONAH HEX to be quite fun and welcome. The black and white pages actually showed the quality of art for the work nicely. Over at Marvel MOON KNIGHT came out in monthly form, and it is a beautiful looking book. The service to a distant but powerful Eqyptian God has left Moon Knight disabled and depressed. Will he come back? Probably but you know... once in a while a book looks so nice I forgive whatever flaws might be in the writing. This is fortunately not one of those. While issue one was perfect and issue two less so, I am prepared to accept a slow start up for the book because if you prepare the readers well, everything thereafter will have greater impact. Artist David Finch and writer Charlie Huston have me looking forward to more. Finally it should not come as a surprise but I love the book MORA by Paul Harmon and it has come out in TPB format. It is a work that is difficult to describe as a far as genre, but perhaps a dark fairy tale would be appropriate. Mora is a young powerful being who will become a great sorceress. The first chapter of what I hope will be a much longer and greater story is reminiscent of Gaiman’s Sandman, Sim’s Cerebus and Naifeh and Valentino’s GloomCookie. And by no means is that bad company to keep.
SUMMER MEMORIES
Summer comic book memories are the best. I am someone who has always found the moments of my life of extremes to be memorable in the whole range of senses. I remember the aromas, the sounds, the temperatures and views. For instance, when I broke my leg in 6th grade while riding my bike and got hit by another bike rider and flew 20 feet, its hot, muggy, morning, cut grass, and the sensation I had was flight and fear. When the neighbors brought over dozens of comics to read, my mom doted upon me, I had tons of pepsi or rather, Jolly Good soda, my room was warm but not so humid as to swelter, and the sun made for a beautiful pattern on the wall, a wall that had just been painted but was soon covered by King Kong, Tony Oliva and on my brother’s side of the room Farrah Fawcett Majors with the major nipplage. Between comics the sultry weather and the white noise of the fan, I would take numerous naps, and it was a rather glorious time. Despite the injury, there was a moment, it felt perfect, and I was in it.
Another time, much better and more fondly remembered happened in the summer of 1985. My bestest buddy Russ drove down from his rural summer residence (his parents’ home) to my temporary summer residence (my cousin’s family’s home) and we bought tons of cheap comics. Then we drove up to rural Minnesota and drove all over heck. It was a blast. And then we went off to the lake with beer, his large somewhat dumb dog Stanley, comics, and Dorito Chips and went to the hill crest, and set out a blanket. We read comics, offered chips to Stanley, and talked about our lack of females in our life (and generally bemoaned that fact). A storm rolled in eventually, but watching it roll was magnificent. And Stanley was such a loyal companion. It was another moment, a moment of peace, and<
