East Coast Rising Vol. 1
Tokyopop
If you think New Jersey is bad now, just wait until the near future, when it's covered by 30 feet of Atlantic Ocean and East River, patrolled by man-eating monster turtles and home to scurvy pirates.
That's the world imagined by writer/artist Becky Cloonan in East Coast Rising, a swashbuckling punk-meets-pirate manga. Cloonan shrewdly identifies the overlap between old-school pirate culture and modern hipster culture—tattoos, piercings, dreads, nontraditional families—and extrapolates from it an action-packed pirate tale with hints of comedy and romance.
Human flotsam Archer is being pursued by maniacal pirate Lee and his Jersey pirates of the bad ship Hoboken when he's rescued by the heroic Cannonball Joe, captain of the fastest ship on the East Coast. What makes Archer so valuable is that he's carrying a map to the legendary treasure of the last mayor of New York City, which launches a race between the two rival ships.
Cloonan, who's better known for her more serious work on American Virgin, has a nice command of a sort of East/West fusion style—her storytelling is pure Japanese manga, but her design sense is very American, with more than a hint of Paul Pope influence to it.
Global warming may lead to dramatic environmental cataclysms and mass extinctions, but at least pirates will survive.
Fiends of the Eastern Front
2000 AD/Rebellion
War is hell, and in this new graphic novel, it's full of devils.
Our hero, or the closest thing to a hero here, is Hans Schmitt, a German soldier fighting the Russians on the Eastern Front in WWII. Caught by the enemy in a botched scouting mission, Schmitt is saved by a troop of mysterious Romanian soldiers who have thrown in with the Axis.
These Romanians only fight—or are seen—at night, they are impossible for the Russians to kill (even with tanks), they often disappear completely only to be replaced by bats, wolves, or mist, and their leader looks an awful lot like Vincent Price.
You probably see where this is going.
Schmitt, the only one who realizes that it's a platoon of vampires, reluctantly fights side by side with the monsters until 1945, when Romania switches sides and joins Russia. By then, the war between the Allies and Axis is completely forgotten, replaced in urgency by a war between one human soldier and 10 undead monsters.
The story was originally told in chapters in British anthology magazine 2000 AD, and this graphic novel collects and represents them. The results are somewhat stilted, as most episodic comics are, but Carlos Ezquerra's beautiful black-and-white art make this trashy war/horror genre mash-up well worth a read for fans of either genre.
Civil War No. 2
Marvel Comics
The most talked-about comic book of the month has been the second issue of Marvel's seven-part series Civil War.
For weeks, if not months, Marvel has been hyping the ending of this particular issue as being one of the biggest things to happen in a Marvel comic in almost 40 years, hype that was easy to tune out. After all, the company was built in part on its original creator, writer and editor Stan Lee's carnival-barker personality and half-serious self-promotion. Today, Editor-In-Chief Joe Quesada proudly carries on that tradition, acting as hype man for everything Marvel does.
But they weren't just blowing hot air this time.
Tony "Iron Man" Stark, who is representing the government's side in a coming war between federally sanctioned superheroes and masked vigilantes, publicly revealed his secret identity at a press conference last week, and schedules another one in this issue.
Spider-Man swings onto the stage, takes off his mask in front of the assembled national media and says, "My name is Peter Parker, and I've been Spider-Man since I was 15 years old. Any questions?"
Just the one: What the hell is Marvel thinking, outing Peter Parker? Now that's a cliff-hanger.