Eternals no. 1
Marvel Comics
For artist Jack Kirby, the '60s were an era of incredible creative output, during which he co-created just about every lasting Marvel Comics character and re-created superhero comics in general. Creative differences with his boss/collaborator, Stan Lee, ultimately sent Kirby across town to work for DC in the early '70s, where he created less-well-received heroes, some of which never quite caught on.
One such footnote was The Sandman, a goofy superhero who monitored children's dreams and saved them from nightmares. Twenty years later, British fantasist Neil Gaiman would take little more than the character's name and turn it into a 10-volume, 1,000-page epic deconstruction of the concept of "story" itself, creating one of the most popular and important comic books of all time.
So why didn't anyone think of having Gaiman rework another lesser late-Kirby creation?
Credit Marvel for having that particular brainstorm and handing the graphic novelist-turned-prose novelist The Eternals, an ancient race of godlike superhero types that Kirby created in the late '70s, when he returned to Marvel for one last fit of character creation. The Eternals were pseudo-mythological types who seemed cribbed from Kirby's own previous pantheons, like the New Gods, The Mighty Thor's Asgardians and Fantastic Four Foils the Inhumans.
Gaiman's take is typical Gaiman, which is both good and bad—good because typical Gaiman is pretty brilliant, but bad in that it's nothing we haven't seen from him a half-dozen times before.
Mark Curry is an intern in a hospital who is approached by a man claiming that they're both million-year-old beings. Naturally, Curry thinks the guy's a nut, but there are clues that the story he's spinning may be as real as the everyday world around Curry.
The artist on the series is an inspired choice—John Romita Jr., one of the few artists still working at Marvel whose style reflects that of the original house style influenced by Kirby (JR Jr.'s dad was a Kirby contemporary).
The results of these two creators resurrecting The Eternals feel perfectly Gaiman and yet still perfectly Kirby, no small feat considering how vastly different the two creators' aesthetics are. It's not as radical a reinvention as The Sandman was—Gaiman has never been able to repeat that feat—but Eternals is still the work of a master craftsman working with strong raw materials.
Flight volume 3
Ballantine Books
The previous two Flight anthologies have been veritable breeding grounds for award nominations, topping best-of lists and generating a rather daunting reputation for any future volumes to live up to.
But this third volume may even surpass that rep. The 26 short stories that make up this 345-page anthology range in quality from masterpieces to darn good yarns, all of them told in various animation, comic-strip and storybook-influenced art styles. In fact, most of the stories read like children's books that have a greater illustration-to-word ratio than usual.
There are very few graphic novels that you can recommend to anyone, regardless of their age, tastes, background or experience with comics, but this volume of Flight is one of them.
x-isle no. 1
Boom! Studios
These days people just love tense dramas about survivors marooned on uncharted islands where strange things occur. So new series X Isle should be very well-received. And deservedly so.
When a large, unidentified animal washes up on a Hawaiian beach, completely baffling scientists, a team is formed to find out what it is and where it came from. They seem to find the animal's stomping grounds, but only after a freak electrical storm, bizarre instrument failure and an explosion on their boat that strands them on the mysterious island. It may call to mind a certain ABC drama, but it reads like a comic book that thinks it's a Hollywood movie.