#December2012

Buy These F**king Comics! – Dec 12, 2012: Fetish Objects, Fanboys, and Glazed Thighs

Welcome to Buy These F**king Comics!, the weekly column where we share the various sequential treats we’re gobbling up off the shelves. The wonder of this column is audience participation. No shirts, no shoes required! Just sit there in your dingy underwear, your sweat, and seminal soaked (oh man am I typecasting our lot or what?) t-shirts and recommend a slurry of titles for me to check out. Don’t know what being snapped into brown plastic bags this week?  Hit up Comic List.

Read the rest of this entry »

Buy These F**king Comics! – July 25, 2012: Zen and the Art of Underwater Welding

Welcome, welcome, welcome, to the funny book column at the end of the Internet. Or perhaps more specifically, at some abandoned asteroid-mining station spiraling into terminal descent. We here aboard the rickety ship don’t have much to comfort ourselves outside of the weekly comic book drop that comes courtesy of the spectra-gryphons sailing the solar waves. Drunk on cheap bathtub fermented moon juice and delusional from the vertigo, I admit my picks for worthwhile comic books can strike the bow a bit askew.

That’s where you come in, friends. Pull down the the blast shield long enough to bark out your finds in staccato bursts, before retiring to your dimly lit crevice in this here rotting rooster of a spaceship.

Don’t know what’s coming out? Pivot sharply and race down the cyber-wells towards the glowing info-cube. Comic List.

Read the rest of this entry »

Buy These F**king Comics! – May 16, 2012: Mainstream Big Two Fanboys Abandon Hope, Aiight?

It’s approaching midnight and I sipping liberally from a recently-cracked open two-liter of Pepsi Max. This can only mean a few things. Diablo 3  has launched, my semester is over, and I may very well be dead by the time you read this. Slouched over all fucking South Korean internet cafe Starcraft  stylee. Should I continue sucking wind into the meatier part of this Wednesday, I shall be snagging some comic books. These are the ones I’m digging on. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to tolerate my stupidity and then augment my list with the titles you’re going to procure for an exorbitant sum. Especially if I don’t list your little binky title. I’m willing to riff on anything should you suggest it.

Don’t know what’s dropping? Hit up ComicList.

Read the rest of this entry »

Comics We’re Buying This Week: Holy Sh*t, A Paul Pope Sighting!

The name is the game! Welcome to Comics We’re Buying This Week, the communal comic book welcome wagon where we all share the hotness we’re snagging from the funny book farm on a given Wednesday. Per usual: my taste is shite, and I’m always looking to broaden my horizons. Don’t know what’s dropping? Behold ComicList.

Read the rest of this entry »

Variant Covers: Xombis Ate My Neighbors!

Ride me with! We have ourselves a rootin’ tootin’ motherfucking pull list to spit about. This is Variant Covers, the weekly column where us of the nerd predilection spout off the comic books we’re snagging tomorrow.

After a hiatus last week in which I graded final exams, wrote my own bullshit papers, and generally wept at the Sky Gods for forging such an unfavorable existence, I’m stoked to be back. There is a good goddamn backlog of comics I haven’t gotten to, and I’m using the semester break to tear gleefully into the ass of my Stack’o’Funnies. I’m coming for you, Detective Comics, Cowboy Ninja Viking Vol. 2, Black Hole, and hopefully others.

But this week, let’s gab about this week.

Read the rest of this entry »

Variant Covers: Sue Storm Wants Cthulhu To Move His Tentacles.

The skull threatens to crack. Athena surely rests inside. The caffeine isn’t cutting it, and I have a mental list to transcribe into a word box. This is Variant Covers, the column where I tell you the funny books I’m buying on a given week. This is also Caffeine Powered, exhausted, with a splitting headache, cursing the Christian guilt that won’t let him skip a week. I can detach myself from the Bearded Floaty Guy, but I can’t remove myself from the morals drilled in by the indoctrination process.

Save me.

In the interest of saving my rotting synapses, I’m going to be succinct this week. A mere one-week trifling attempt to counteract my raging verbosity. Shit, I’m blowing it already.

—-

Finder Library Volume 1.
When Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder: Voice came out this year, I became aware that I was missing out on something fantastic. It happens a lot. Never stops me from feeling shitty about myself, or from feeling surprised. Gasp! I missed something else? I’m a philistine, man. Anyways, this may be the place for me to start. Finder Library Volume 1 collects the first four Finder books. It’s a massive motherfucker. For $25, you can snag 616 pages of what is purportedly awesomeness. I’m being vague as fuck, I know. Caffeine interested! Caffeine want!

Want a premise? Boom!

The series is set in a vastly depopulated far-future Earth where numerous hunter-gatherer cultures, some human and some not, surround densely overpopulated domed city-states of recognizably modern urbanites functioning at a high technological level. Our own civilization and its considerably more advanced successors are lost to prehistory save for a few twentieth-century pop cultural artifacts conveniently recovered by well-paid psychics.

I’m sure it’s generalizing a lot. But when  Laura Hudson of Comics Alliance calls the series “one of the best comics ever“, I pay attention. Smarter minds with sharper opinions garner my intrigue.  Martyn Pedler also has an awesome interview with McNeil over at io9.

—-

Future Foundation #1.
I never thought I’d live in a universe where the most hotly awaited title of a week would be a Fantastic Four-based comic. Such is the power of Jonathan Hickman and Steve Epting. Fucking Hickman, man. Dude is a philosophical warrior, somehow managing to plot roughly a thousand arcs at once, while mixing in utilitarian philosophy, the Negative Zone, and outstanding emotional moments starring a dude who has been one-dimensional for god knows how many years – yeah, I’m still weeping over Johnny Storm.

This is the fucking title I want. I want it tomorrow. I want it now.

If you’re not down with the cosmos, the First Family of Marvel, or Sue Storm in a skin-tight minimalist costume, I don’t know. I respect your opinion, but I’m positively losing my cool over it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Variant Covers: The Red Skull Vomits On Tony Stark.

VARIANT COVERS, the comic book column that fucking adores caps lock and funny books. VARIANT COVERS, the comic book column that covers all the new releases that I’m giggling over with wet panties and glassy eyes VARIANT COVERS, the column that encourages you to share your own picks of the week.

—-

The Arctic Marauder [Graphic Novel].
These are several things I hadn’t heard of until today when I was browsing various columns on tomorrow’s comic book releases: icepunk, The Arctic Marauder, and Jacques Tardi. I realize this makes me a philistine. I apologize. This graphic novel is a rerelease of a 1972 work by the aforementioned Tardi, and it has me intrigued.

Published by Fantagraphics, the concept sounds fucking outstanding, “Jérôme Plumier, whose search for his missing uncle, the inventor Louis-Ferdinand Chapoutier, brings him into contact with the sinister, frigid forces behind this – and soon he too is headed towards the North Pole, where he will content with mad scientists, monsters of the deep, and futuristic submarines and flying machines.”

Color me ignorant but trying desperately to correct the problem.

Sold.

—-

Fear Itself: Book of the Skull.
This would be the one-shot that is leading up to Marvel’s next event, Fear Itself. Normally I lob dung bombs at what I perceive to be obvious money-making measures in the comic book world. I know. However, I am also an  unprincipled  son of a bitch, and a huge Brubaker fanboy. What exactly is going to happen in this title? I don’t have a goddamn clue. But it does feature the Red Skull puking up Captain America and Namor, so there’s that.

If you’re really wondering, it has something to do with Red Skull’s daughter having all the dastardly secrets of her father, and she’s planning on doing…something also dastardly with them.

Also From Marvel: Uncanny X-Force 5.1. If you’re not reading this series, True Believers, this pig will catch you up. Trust me, it’s worth it.

Read the rest of this entry »

Variant Covers: The Stench Of Latex Crotch, Zounds.

Ah, labor pains. The tremendous abdominal liquidations that come from strenuous exertion. It’s the middle of the semester for Seminal Idiot turned Teaching  Assistant  right here, and I’m ready for a break. I read a couple of comic books last weekend, and but for a moment, the skies opened up. Yes, I thought to myself. Perhaps it will get better. Here I am, though. It’s Tuesday, and I’m blasting through this column with little regard for grammatical form or editing. Per usual. I know.

This is Variant Covers.  Here are the comics I’m excited for this week.

Read the rest of this entry »