2014 in Review has ended, but there are still tons of things Multiversity’s staff loved in comics from the year. As we approach the end of the year, Multiversity’s staff will share one thing a day they loved from the year, highlighting anything from a comic, creator, cover, comic shop, app, or anything really. As long as it involved comics, it can be featured. We hope you enjoy.
When I discovered comics, I did so in a rather conventional way. When I was younger, I first discovered the multimedia franchises surrounding characters like Spider-Man and Batman through cartoons and films and action figures before I realized “Hey…these are comic book characters.” However, because I grew up in a small town in the middle of Scotland, there were no comic book shops that were less than a train journey from me. That meant I didn’t really get into reading comics – initially in collections, but eventually in singles – until high school. But the one thing that stayed the same was that I stayed confined to the universes of Marvel and DC. I felt safe there. They felt comfortable.
What I soon came to realize, though, was that comfort was artificially created by having short but widespread changes to major characters or publishing lines before reverting back to the status quo and only keeping what was popular from the change. Once I figured that out, some of the magic of those universes disappeared and I went off in search of stories in comic books I could still find that magic in. That lead me to the creator-owned boom of Image comic a few years ago. Since then, Image has really been at the forefront of not only allowing to creators to tell the stories they want to tell in the ways they want to tell them, but also provide comic readers with a wide array of stories.
For a while, they seemed unbeatable. Until now.
This time last year, Boom! Studios were barely a blip on my radar. I thought of them, rarely unfairly, on the same level as IDW in that they main provided licensed comics and they hadn’t really caught my eye. Then, over the past few months, Boom! started putting out book after book of rather fantastic creator owned series that really changed how I thought about them as a publisher. “The Woods”. “Hexed”. “Day Men”. “Evil Empire”. “The Empty Man”. “Deep State”. “Black Market”. The list goes on. Even their licensed titles like “Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes”, “Robocop” and “Escape From New York” have been stellar. Not to mention their all ages imprint kaBoom! putting out gems like “Adventure Time” and “Lumberjanes” (which I don’t, unfortunately, read at the moment, but I’m well aware of my mistake, trust me).
I honestly cannot tell you what happened. I took on this article to try and examine where this turnabout came from, where this publisher who had, to me, always kind of lingered in the background found these fantastic titles to put out. Perhaps it’s an industry thing. The fact that Image has been so successful in pushing the envelope in creator-owned comic books has buoyed the efforts of other publishers in their wake. I honestly don’t know, I’m not inside the industry well enough to know. All I know is that Boom! Studios has increased their output of fantastic titles by a thousandfold in a very short time and it looks to be getting better. Their 2015 lineup is already including titles shaping up to be very interesting: “Curb Stomp” by Ryan Ferrier and Devaki Neogi, “Cluster” by Ed Brisson and Damian Couceiro, and “Burning Fields” by Michael Moreci, Tim Daniel and Colin Lorimer already look like stellar titles.
So if you haven’t checked out any of Boom!’s recent output, now is the perfect time. For my money, “The Woods” is a title everyone should be reading. And the best part is that they don’t seem to be going away any time soon. Nothing would make me happier than Boom! being a Publisher Of The Year contender this time next year.
Let’s make it happen, people!
