It will be nice if even a sliver of those reading Whedon's Buffy comics check out his work on Runaways, which he took over writing this month.
Launched in 2002 by writer Brian K. Vaughan (Y: The Last Man, Pride of Baghdad), the book features a group of teens who discover their parents are actually horrible supervillians, and who all run away together, forming a sort of super-team (albeit one that doesn't wear costumes and only has ironic code names, which they never use anyway). The book features pretty peculiar dialogue, with the characters speaking almost exclusively in a pidgin of pop culture reference and smartass remarks.
So it's a comic book about a group of teens with superpowers that fight evil and speak in Whedon-esque dialogue. Whedon couldn't be a better match for the book if it were called The Real-Life Adventures of Joss Whedon.
This first issue of his is perfectly structured for newcomers, reintroducing the cast of almost comically diverse characters—alien lesbian couple, Asian goth witch, super-strong little white girl, Hispanic android, white kid with a telepathic link to a dinosaur—while bumping them up against two long-time Marvel antagonists.
The Unusual Suspects
Top Cow
Writer Dan Wickline makes good use of a dozen or so half-formed ideas for comics, and uses them for a good cause in new graphic novel The Unusual Suspects.
The set-up involves two friends, Bob and Eric, meeting for dinner at a diner. Eric is a comic book writer, and over the course of 90-some pages, he tells his friend about his many attempts to get books published, with each anecdote leading to a short four-page sequence drawn by a different artist.
Through Eric, Wickline savagely (but lovingly) skewers the modern comic book industry, and as one tale of creative frustration leads to another, Bob suggests maybe Eric should take all of these failed pitches, have his many artist friends illustrate them, publish it as a graphic novel and give the proceeds to a charity like the Hero Initiative, which provides assistance to older comics pros.
To which Eric responds, "Who in their right mind would buy a book like that?"
The diner portions are all illustrated by David Hedgecock, and are rigorously uniform—two panels per page, the exact same composition, our protagonists in profile, with only slight changes between panels, making for a sort of hypnotic stasis (I've been in diners like that).
As for the comics within the comic, they're drawn by Ben Templesmith, Chis Moreno, Billy Martinez and a dozen others, and range from zombies to superheroes to romance to horror to mythological office comedy to Amish vigilante exploitation.
Best Editorial Cartoons of the Year, 2007 Edition
Pelican Publishing Company
I suppose "some editorial cartoons" doesn't sound quite as grabby as Best Editorial Cartoons, but it would have been a more accurate title.
This annual collection of a year's worth of American editorial page 'toons is missing plenty of political cartoonists that should belong in any book with such a title, and it's hard to believe some of the ones contained within should qualify at all.
Don't get me wrong—there's plenty of good stuff in here (particularly those rendered in Mike Luckovich's rough, inky lines or Michael Ramirez's explosive designs). But there's also a lot of bad stuff, adhering to all the negative stereotypes of political cartoons, like the lazy assemblage of random images in the box, with each element labeled with a word telling us what it symbolizes (think a snake with the word "terrorists" on it). And, you know, if you have to explain a joke that thoroughly, it's probably not much of a joke in the first place.