Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips have a staggering run as a creative team. From the superhero espionage story Sleeper to the gritty pulp Incognito to the Lovecraftian noir of Fatale to the dark-side-of-Hollywood tale The Fade Out, they’re a team whose work is always worth reading. Kill or Be Killed (Image Comics) might feature their most intriguing premise yet, one that allows for an expertly balanced mix of vigilante drama and horror folktale.
Dylan, our protagonist, is a mess. He’s suicidal, in love with a woman he can’t have, and, at 28, has the emotional maturity of a 14-year-old. One night, he attempts to kill himself and, through a miracle, survives with a new outlook on life. Said outlook comes courtesy of the demon he starts seeing who says Dylan owes him the corpse of a “bad person” every month, or Dylan himself is a dead man. Brubaker, as a writer, walks a fine line here, never quite explicitly asking the question the reader asks right from the start: Is Dylan really paying blood rent to a demon, or has he just finally lost his mind? It’s a question for which not even Dylan has an answer.
Phillips, meanwhile, offers some absolutely beautiful work in his signature style. Despite working together for years, Phillips always pushes his work to new places in his Brubaker collaborations, and here he faces the challenge of balancing the straightforward, wintry mundanity of Dylan’s life with his homicidal night job. Phillips designs some bold layouts with stripes of white that emphasize Dylan’s isolation, even in his own mind. It’s compulsively readable even though this title is on tricky ground. Any book about a possibly mentally ill man with a gun is going to have to tread carefully. But if anybody can make it work, it’s this creative team.
Art Ops #10, DC Comics
Shaun Simon’s hall of mirrors, built entirely out of art theory and genre tropes, has been one of Vertigo’s strangest, and yet most consistently fascinating books. While the first arc was largely concerned with simultaneously discussing and mocking pretentious discussions about the nature of art, the second has lingered on what happens when art is pressed into service for money, or political causes, or outright erased for both. But Simon anchors it all in the real, emotional story of a lousy dad trying to reconcile with his adult son, and screwing it all up despite his best intentions.
It’s an almost gleefully bizarre comic. Matt Brundage packs the layouts with a riot of colors, art school references, and the deliberately bland yet somehow scary Neighborhood of Dads, and the book itself seems unsure if Simon and Brundage are interrogating clichés in storytelling or letting the book collapse into them. But it’s such a fun ride that in the end, it doesn’t matter.
Daredevil Annual #1, Marvel
This book comes in two parts, both straight-up superhero comics. The first features Charles Soule’s story of a supervillain exploiting Daredevil’s greatest weakness, and it’s a fun throwback to the plot-driven stories of yore. Vanesa Del Rey, on art, offers some dynamic, thoughtful layouts riffing on the theme of sound that are a joy to read, as well. It’s a nice contrast to Soule’s equally good, but much grittier, ongoing story.
The second part is a treat for old-school fans, as former Hornhead writer Roger McKenzie returns for a few pages to riff on the classic Daredevil villain the Gladiator. Ben Torres’ art similarly riffs on Frank Miller’s work on the book from the 1980s, with thick inks and panels with light, or even no, backgrounds that make the action pop.
Lady Killer 2 #1, Dark Horse
Joelle Jones and Michelle Madsen mix ’60s glam with over-the-top gore in the story of a perfect housewife/serial killer. The first volume of this series struggled a bit because Jones, serving as both writer and artist, tended to fall into the trap of writing herself gorgeous things to draw instead of a story. It was a beautiful but unfocused book. Jones strikes a much stronger balance, here, though, with a strong thread of black comedy and a tighter plot. Our hitwoman’s biggest enemy is her mother-in-law, it turns out, a detail the book mines for both plot tension and more than a little comedy.
Similarly, the art is gorgeous, but not done for its own sake, Jones’ detailed period research is all over the book, and her ropy, kinetic figure drawing is in full force. Madsen, as a colorist, pays tribute to ’60s design as well, but adds plenty of little touches that offer a sharp contrast to the seemingly cheerful proceedings. Don’t make the mistake of assuming you know everything about this book just from the title; it’s got plenty of surprises.
James Bond #8, Dynamite
Warren Ellis and Jason Masters deliver a strikingly different Bond in this intriguing arc. In some ways, it’s the old story of the spy out in the cold: Bond has no weapons, no intelligence, and no idea what’s going on. But Ellis gives it enough twists — ranging from political intrigue to international spy agency squabbling — and Masters loads it with enough action, especially a dynamic and unnerving fistfight in an elevator, that the pages breeze by, feeling very much like you’re watching a Bond movie in the theater.
Giant Days #17, BOOM! Studios: John Allison, Max Sarin, and Lisa Fleming continue one of the most irresistible comedies in comics, as the team of coeds at the center of the book discover the joys of terrible professors and well-paying academic fraud.
Long Night of The Soul #3, Image Comics: Howard Chaykin’s tribute to classic noir has a plot that gets more tangled by the page, and one that’s thrilling throughout.
4001 AD: War Mother #1, Valiant: Fred Van Lente and Tomas Giorello deliver a fun one-shot that serves as a tribute to the Heavy Metal comics of yore.
Bounty #2, Dark Horse: Kurtis Wiebe and Mindy Lee’s snarky SF series fills in some fascinating backstory on our heroes in its second issue.
Suicide Squad: Rebirth, DC Comics: The relaunch of this superhero book, featuring Rob Williams and Philip Tan, focuses on Rick Flag, and explains just how a decorated war hero winds up leading a bunch of supervillains on insanely dangerous missions.
This Week’s Collections
Jim Henson’s The Storyteller: Dragons, BOOM! Studios (Hardcover, $25): These retellings of mythology and folklore are great all-ages comics, and a great tribute to Henson’s underrated attempt to retell the classics in new ways.
Slash and Burn, DC Comics (Softcover, $15): An arson investigator who happens to be a pyromaniac investigates the possibly demonic murders plaguing her and the orphans she grew up with in Vertigo’s unusual thriller.