There are good Transformers comics, well worth a used search on Amazon. As J. Caleb observes, there are also some truly godawful ones. Here’s a list of which ones are worth reading, which ones to avoid, and which ones are so damn bad that you have to read them.
The first story– “If Looks Could Kill”– feels like one of those episodes. A little tawdry and a little obligatory. When we open with a splash page featuring a sexy lady in naughty underwear holding a bloody cleaver, we can be pretty sure what’s coming. And it does play by those numbers.
The comic Bayou follows a time honored fantasy tradition of young girls exploring other worlds — think Alice and her journey into Wonderland, Wendy traveling to the stars with Peter Pan, Dorothy being swept to Oz in a tornado, and more modern incarnations such as of Helena from Mirrormask and Ofelia from Pan’s Labyrinth. Lee is another young girl in that tradition, swept into another world to compete with supernatural forces she knows little or nothing about, but Bayou carries an additional socio-political layer.
Lee is a little black girl in American South in 1933. Her life is complicated by the huge social and political problems of her time. Her world is one of pain and prejudice, of being unfairly accused because by virtue of her skin color she’s considered less than human, a world where black boys are hung while grown white men gather to watch him swing, a world where a little girl is the only hope is saving her father from that same fate. The ongoing webcomic is hosted and free to view, along with many others, at Zuda Comics, the online branch of DC. Bayou has gotten so much commercial and critical praise that DC is releasing it in print form — the first trade paperback is due in June.
A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a pair of Jedi knights are sent to negotiate a trade agreement. In the course of their investigations orbiting a small planet called Naboo (probably not landing there), they’ll discover the Lost Orb of Phantascoria, and will have to decide whether to allow the Galactic Empire to continue using it as a power source, or return it to the Gungans, its original owners.
Wait, what?
Welcome to Darths and Droids, a webcomic by the creators of Irregular Webcomic and following in the footsteps of DM of the Rings. In their own words, “the essential conceit of this comic is that Star Wars as we know it does not exist. The whole thing is the invented campaign of the GameMaster, and the players don’t know anything about the story or the setting in which it happens, until it arises in the course of the game.” In other words, the course of the Star Wars saga, played out as some group’s DnD Game, complete with manic fighting, in-group jokes, and inventive new ways to piss off the GM.
Comic Book Tattoo — an interstitial smorgasbord that clocks in at nearly 500 pages and has a list of contributors that span from established to up-and-coming — is undoubtedly one of the most interesting anthologies to come out in years. Each comic is based on a song by singer-songwriter Tori Amos and choices range from her most recent album, the rock-influenced American Doll Posse, to the hard-to-find early synthpop group album, eponymously titled Y Kant Tori Read.
The reason you should buy this anthology is simple: it’s awesome. The diversity of art styles in the book range from stark lines to photo-realistic to “cartoonish” to the avant-garde. And the plots are just as diverse. Almost every genre is represented — science-fiction, romance, paranormal, dark thriller, fantasy, and slice of life. The true thrill of the book is how none of these differences detract from the stories or seems jarring. They just flow from one to the next until you find yourself on page 300 without realizing it. You don’t go from a story of joy directly into one of pain; instead, you’re led in a slow wave of emotion from depressive to euphoric and everything in between.
The Ten Doctors is an unofficial Doctor Who comic drawn by Canadian artist Richard Morris. It brings together each of the Doctor’s 10 incarnations (plus many of his companions) in a complex, engaging adventure that will interest fans of both the new and classic Who series. After the 10th Doctor loses Rose to a parallel [...]
