July has come and gone and now we’re in the dog days of summer. I think? I’m not sure what that phrase means, I think Florence + The Machine jut made it up. Anyway, we had some fun comics, San Diego Comic-Con, and a whole bunch of news that came with it. Check out our highlights for this past month and let us know what you’re looking forward to in August in the comments.
Best Issue: “Snotgirl” #1
With all due respect to Bryan Lee O’Malley, Scott Pilgrim is a hard act to follow up. I wouldn’t blame anyone for putting out arguably the most important comic of the 2000’s to just immediately peace out to Valhalla. But after recently reading Scott Pilgrim, I found it to be a little dated. That’s not a knock on O’Malley, as much as it is a testament to how fast culture, especially the youth culture that “Snotgirl” and Scott Pilgrim share has accelerated. Hell, Scott Pilgrim takes place in 2004-5!(?) That’s a whole different world. And it’s fascinating to see the same kind of youthful energy that propelled Scott and his friends land in the land of selfies, followers, and models in “Snotgirl”. While Scott Pilgrim was a pretty grungy series at times, “Snotgil” is one that mixes up the messiness of real life with the supposed glamor of Instagram models. And that’s before the blood starts spilling.
Best Writer: Gene Luen Yang
Stop me if you’ve heard this one. Superman’s been dead and been replaced by four duplicates. One’s ostensibly evil as all hell and we’re cool with it, the other’s sort of like the last Superman but not really, there’s a guy in a suit. and the final one is a cool kid with attitude. Now it’s twenty years later, Superman’s dead, another guy who’s ostensibly evil as hell and we’re cool with it also happens to be the guy in a suit of armor. There’s still the cool kid with attitude but this one’s different. He has absolutely no relation to the last Superman and is in fact a Chinese teenager who’s kind of a jerk. The kind of jerk that gets sucked into a government project that makes him China’s new Super-Man. In just one issue, Gene Luen Yang introduced DC Comics readers to a fully fleshed out character and turned his life on his head in record time. I’ve sort of been ambivalent about this whole new “Death of Superman” but Gene Luen Yang is bringing such a fresh voice to a corner in DC that’s desperately needed one that I don’t care how many supermen we lose. Plus, look at how sick that cover by Viktor Bogdanovic is. Consider that our Cover of the Month.
Best Artist: Leslie Hung
I already talked “Snotgirl” #1 up and down but here I am again. I kind of talked about “Snotgirl” in relation to Scott Pilgrim‘s legacy but I’d be remiss not to point out how perfectly Leslie Hung’s art in “Snotgirl” captures the gross fashionable world its main character, Lottie, lives in. There’s a gelatinous quality to Hung’s art that’s kind of reminiscent of the mucus pouring out of Lottie’s nose. I mean that in a good way. It’s beautiful, but the thin mucous membrane that every character is standing on could break at any moment, like it does when things do south in the bathroom. I know some folks might be disappointed to not see O’Malley’s art but I really can’t think of a better artist for this type of story than Hung.
Best Comeback: “Bone: Coda”
Story time! Bone was my favorite comic series as a kid and arguably one of the most important books I ever picked up. Yes, it was originally published in the 90s way before my time but the Scholastic reprint from the 2000’s is what got and kept me into comics. Jeff Smith’s a master of comics and that’s something you can spot when you’re eight or when you’re forty-eight. “Bone: Coda” reunited us with the Bone cousins for a “superfluous adventure” in the desert. And even if it’s not the sweeping epic the original series was, it’s a wonderful source of nostalgia for readers who first met the Bones five, fifteen, or twenty-five years ago.
Continued belowBest SDCC Trailer:
Fun fact: Wonder Woman would’ve won this if it hadn’t involved Chris Pine.
A Luke Cage trailer dropped at San Diego Comic-Con and we’re all in. It might not have been as big as Wonder Woman or Justice League but Luke Cage plowing through a hallway of goons with a car door and Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” is all we needed to get a vibe for what Netflix’s next Marvel series is going to be like. September 30th can’t come soon enough.
Best SDCC News:
Have you been reading “Deadly Class”? If not, you’ve been missing out on a private school of assassins killing, smoking, and screwing their way through the 80s while learning the brutal art of murder. It’s one of Rick Remender’s strongest works and a book that’s completely defined by the aesthetic Wes Craig set for it. Wes Craig’s look is so imprinted onto the comic that I actually can’t imagine it looking like anything else. It should end up looking pretty good though, considering that The Russos (those guys behind the good Marvel movies) are going to produce it. So here’s hoping we get a very stylized new TV show when Deadly Class when it drops some time in the near future.
