Cory Walker returns to Invincible!

Holy Stromboli! Look at this pure awesome…

Head here for more of my thoughts on this…but the press release follows below…

G4 TV’S ATTACK OF THE SHOW ANNOUNCES INVINCIBLE CO-CREATOR CORY WALKER’S RETURN!
Cory Walker to illustrate an upcoming two-issue arc setting the stage for the future of INVINCIBLE!

Image Comics is a comics and graphic novels publisher formed in 1992 by a collective of best-selling artists. Since that time, Image has gone on to become one of the largest comics publishers in the United States. There are currently five partners in Image Comics (Robert Kirkman, Erik Larsen, Todd McFarlane, Marc Silvestri, and Jim Valentino), and Image is currently divided into four major houses (Todd McFarlane Productions, Top Cow Productions, Shadowline, and Image Central). Image comics and graphic novels cover nearly every genre, sub-genre, and style imaginable, offering science fiction, romance, horror, crime fiction, historical fiction, humor, and more by the finest artists and writers working in the medium today. Visit www.imagecomics.com.

‘Tiny’ Tune, or “Why I LOVE ‘Tiny Titans’”

This was a super fun little write-up I got to do for the Trade Show section of Wizard #209. Essentially, as one of the office’s most vocal supporters of this all-ages comic, I was asked to sum up in 150ish words what is great about it….here’s what I came up with/what ran in the mag…

‘Tiny’ Tune
It only takes about 12 pages before the realization kicks in: Comics are ridiculous. As readers, we love poring over the exploits of our favorite superheroes, but every diehard cape and cowl fan takes the spandex in stride. However, our willingness to buy into the outrageous plot points of our favorite superpowered adventures is exactly why the all-ages title Tiny Titans—DC ships the first collection, Welcome to the Treehouse, on Feb. 4 ($12.99)—can be enjoyed by even the most grizzled comic enthusiast. Whether observing that Dick Grayson’s original Nightwing costume looks like a disco suit or that changing his codename puts the former Robin in an awkward position as leader of the club of bird-themed Titans, it’s poking fun at the silliness we’ve overlooked that makes Franco Aureliani and Art Baltazar’s send-up a must-read. Take your pull list home and indulge in all the far-fetched yarns you want, but save time to laugh along with Tiny Titans. • JG

Check out ‘Killer of Demons!’

Hey folks, just dropping in to give a quick recommendation…you should all check out Killer of Demons from Image Comics!

Written by Chris Yost with super-rad art by Scott Wegener, it’s kind of a combo of “Office Space” and “Buffy,” and it’s darn fun and totally awesome! It’s also a three issue miniseries, so you know they’ve gotta get right into the good stuff—and with this first issue, they already have! If you’re only going to read one book this week, make it Killer of Demons (and that is saying something as Jonathan Hickman’s awesome first issue of Dark Reign: Fantastic Four came out this week)!

Also, just a general WU.com update, I’m dropping this recommendation here because Thursday Morning Quarterback is going through some tweaks right now (under construction, so to speak) and I wanted to give a good book some props. So, stay tuned to The Loudest Monkey for more little snippets of stuff from me, and stay tuned to WU.com for a brand-spanking new view of TMQB soon!

One helluva Hellboy image!

Easily the single most stunning panel I’ve seen in any comic this week, John Severin delivers an amazingly awesome shot of Hellboy in B.P.R.D.: War On Frogs #2 written by John Arcudi.

Try and tell me that isn’t breathtaking! Just try!

She-Hulk: The Coolest Chick in Comics!

So, last week’s She-Hulk: Cosmic Collision by Peter David and Mahmud A. Asrar solidified the green goddess’s position as the Coolest Chick in Comics!

First, Dan Slott’s semi-recent run with the heroine showed that She-Hulk could hold her own in the courtroom, in a brawl and in a quip-fest with villains and other heroes alike.

Then, Peter David had the jade giantess make a “Battlestar Galactica” reference in his World War Hulk prologue story with artist Gary Frank.

And this past week, ol’ Shulkie laid down a double-whammy of super coolness…

She’s upset she might be dead because that would mean she can’t use her tickets to see MY FAVORITE BAND! Awesome!

And she’s well versed in my favorite action movie franchise of all time! EVEN MORE AWESOME!

Props to PAD on those two rad references. I love when you pick up a one-shot and get great little character moments that make reading it an extremely rewarding experience!

Once more, I declare She-Hulk the Coolest Chick in Comics—and that’s it for now folks!

Lil’ Batman and Superman bring hilarity to the DCU!

This week’s Superman/Batman (Issue #51) by Michael Green and Mike Johnson, with art by the completely awesome Rafael Albuquerque (Click here for a post that link sto tons of rad Rafael art from Blue Beetle), is a must-read this week just for the pure fun factor it delivers.

Bringing back the Lil’ League from Superman’s hallucinations on Magic Kryptonite from Superman/Batman #46, the issue sees the full-sized heroes meeting up with their pint-sized counterparts, and it’s a real fun read.

Here’s a taste…

I love Albuquerque’s art as much as a Bat-man loves his strawberry ice cream, so seeing him doing art on this super fun issue was just a blast. Go pick it up, you won’t be sorry.

Spider-Man explained in an adorable and hilarious nutshell

If you didn’t check out the King-Size Spider-Man Summer Special two weeks back, well you missed a ton of web-slinger fun courtesy of Paul Tobin, Colleen Coover and Chris Giarusso (not to mention a cool Spidey/Falcon retro team-up from Keith Giffen, Rick Burchett, Wil Quintant and Nate Piekos)!

However, fun as the whole super-sized issue was, the simplest yet most hilarious moment may have come on the intro page in a single-panel strip by Coover.

It’s the the wall-crawler’s origin in a silly six words! Good stuff, just like the rest of the issue, so go pick it up!

Catching up on comics: late July’s best of the bunch!

Hey Folks! I’ve been absent from the blogosphere for a week’s vacation (Hey, it’s summer! I gotta get some fun in the sun in some time!), which led to much relaxing and quite a bit of catching up on comics. I managed to pound through all the books from the last two weeks of July that had been piling up on my desk, so I figured I’d drop my top recommendations from the past half month now that I’m caught up (ok, ok…I’m actually still a week behind after missing last week, but give me a break and just read the recs!)…

Ambush Bug: Year None #1 (of 6)
It’s Keith Giffen—have I mentioned I’m a big Keith Giffen fan? No? Well, I’m a big Keith Giffen fan!—and it’s some good, irreverent fun, with some snazzy, old school interiors to boot!

Joker’s Asylum: Scarecrow
Wicked cool interiors from Juan Doe alongside a classic slumber party horror scenario make for a classic and spooky look into the Bat-rogue’s world. With this issue added to Jason Aaron’s Penguin story and J.T. Krul’s Poison Ivy tale, this series is doing justice to the one of the main things that make the Dark Knight one of comics’ top sellers: his villains!

The Exterminators #30
This book has been one of my favorite reads for a while and it’s conclusion two weeks ago was amazingly bittersweet: I’m bitter because I want more, but man, what an ending! If you haven’t checked out the story about city pest control bad asses and their battle against a killer swarm of bugs bent on bringing back an evil Egyptian insect god, now you can go scrounge up all 30 issues and indulge! Get on it!

Blue Beetle #29
Jaime Reyes is hands down my favorite character in the DCU, so I was super pleased to see his book pick up again with a larger storyline after Will Pfeiffer’s one-shots (they were fun, but one-shots…not much gravitas). Now, if you read the cover, you might have expected not only the return of the radical Rafael Albuquerque on art, but also writer John Rogers (the man responsible for The Reach story in BB, known for its massive amounts of pure awesomeness), and if you didn’t read the internal credits you would never have guessed the series has a new full-time scribe in Matthew Sturges. Take the one-shots out of the picture and it easily could have been mistaken for a continuation of Roger’s run—and that’s a distinctly good thing!

The book’s definitely got a new voice on the insectoid-monnikered hero with Sturges, but one so inline with everything that Rogers did that I’m really excited to see where Sturges takes things. He’s already got the most important part—the characters—down, so I’m psyched for the rest of his stories.

The bottom line: if you haven’t read Blue Beetle before, there’s no better time to start enjoying the adventures of El Paso’s superhéroe numero uno (but seriously, go back and read everything from issue #1 onward if you have the time and funds—you won’t be sorry)!

Teen Titans #61
It’s a Blue Beetle and Kid Devil-centric issue (more importantly Blue Beetle, read above), need I say more?!

Ok, Sean McKeever’s got a good handle on this team. It may not be the coolest incarnation or the most-seminal run ever, but it’s darn fun and it’s got my boy in blue rockin’ alongside Robin here and there, so you know I’m in!

Black Panther #39
One of my favorite writers, Jason Aaron, takes the reigns on the king of Wakanda’s book for a three issue tie-in to Secret Invasion.
And. It’s. AWESOME!
It’s war epic meets superhero story mashed together with a classic sci-fi alien invasion, and it features plenty of Skrull decapitation, so yeah…awesome!
(I chatted with Jason recently—mostly about Wolverine: Manifest Destiny but a smidge about BP’s SI tie-in—so check that out here if you feel so inclined!)

Skaar: Son of Hulk #2
If you saw my review of Skaar #1 then you not only know that I am a huge fan of Greg Pak’s Hulk work, but also loved issue #1 of the third part in his big, green epic! Issue #2 just keeps things rolling on what is set to be one of my favorite weekly reads for a long time coming!

I also really enjoyed Fantastic Four: True Story and Immortal Iron Fist #17, but you can read more about my thoughts on those books here (FF) and here (Iron Fist)!

Well, that’s it for this round of “Best of the Bunch!” Hope those recommendations help out a few of you readers in need of some comicky goodness!

Why I’m loving Paul Cornell’s ‘Fantastic Four: True Story’

Week in and week out, as comics stream into Wizard HQ, I end up reading quite a few books each week: the good, the bad and the ugly.

So after all that reading, when I end up finding a writer that constantly delivers for me as a reader—in this case Captain Britain and MI 13 scribe Paul Cornell (go read his Marvel Max mini Wisdom for a great intro into the crazy goodness he’s been bringing to the 616)—I get really excited to see their names attached to a new project.

On top of that, I am always drawn into a comic that has an awesome and original premise. Hearing Cornell was doing an FF mini got me pretty psyched. Then I read the solicit text, which explained that the book would be an in-continuity tale where Marvel’s first family has to venture into the world of fiction to battle evil alongside characters from the works of Jane Austen and Mary Shelley—among other famous authors—well…yeah…I’m sorry, do I even need to explain how awesome that is?!

Now, that would normally be enough to have me raving (and so far, it is!), but Cornell’s humor and handle of the FF in this super self-aware tale is just a joy to read. So, here are a few of the moments that led to the gush-fest that is this blog post:

Instead of being yet another writer working with the FF trying to write new—and usually stale—dialogue between Ben and Johnny when they’re fighting/arguing, Cornell takes a completely different and hilarious route and gives a cool nod to anyone who’s ever read a Fantastic Four comic. No need to say what’s already been said 700 bajillion times, ya know?

And six pages later…

Ok, maybe I found this funnier than most as I’m possibly the only comic fan out there who shamelessly has the soundtrack to the Rachel Leigh Cook, Rosario Dawson and Tara Reid-starring “Josie and the Pussycats” on his iPod, but the idea of Earth’s biggest brain being a big fan of that flick is definitely worth a good laugh either way.

Another fun little nod as these “real world” heroes—from a fictional work, obviously—enter the world of fiction and can see their own speech bubbles. It’s the only way—as readers—we’ve ever seen them talk, so just seeing them get a kick out of it is fun (and when was the last time we saw a Reed Richards just having fun with discovery and not fretting about Skrulls or ruining his marriage with too much work? It’s great to see the guy in good spirits again!). Plus, it helps establish how crazy things are set to get if “talk bubbles” are just the tip of the Fictoverse iceberg.

Really, really enjoyable writing aside, how can you not get giddy for some amazing Niko Henrichon covers?!

Not enticed to check it out after all that?

First, that’s crazy!

Second, check out my interview with Paul Cornell for more on the series that should turn you around if I haven’t made a believer of you yet.

It’s my pick of the week and I highly recommend any fans of truly imaginative tales give it a shot. It’d be near impossible to be let down by this story, and it’s only issue #1!

The New, More ‘Mortal’ Iron Fist!?

So, I just checked out Duane Swierczynski’s first issue of Immortal Iron Fist.

Being a huge fan of Brubaker and Fraction’s relaunch and run on the book, I was as bummed as everyone else to hear they’d be moving on. But, when Marvel announced the Swiercz would be taking the reigns, I had this quiet hope that the book would continue it’s radness. Sure, he only had one or two issues of Cable under his belt when the announcement was made, but something told me he had the chops to rock this chop-socky book in a way that would live up to what came before while taking the book in a whole new direction.

I’m happy to say that after one issue, as far as I’m concerned, the Swiercz is on target and kickin’ this book like a kung-fu foot through a few planks of wood!

Seriously, don’t be deterred by the change of team. If you liked this book before, you’re still going to like this book. There is no drop-off at all, which is saying something as the book was definitely of a high-quality before, and the story is super cohesive with everything that was set up in the previous arc. I don’t want to say to much, because you should really read it…ok, there’s a dragon-man who hunts down and kills Iron Fists, an old west Iron Fist flashback story and some Danny Rand/Misty Knight sexiness! It’s pretty awesome!

My only real gripe is David Aja’s not on art duty anymore. New artist Travel Foreman’s style takes a little getting used to, and while his more talky scenes aren’t really to my liking, when the guy can draw actions scenes like these…

…well, that’s really the most important aspect of drawing Marvel’s Immortal Weapon!

So—as if it weren’t already obvious—my recommendation is to go pick it up!

Also, we ran an interview with the Swiercz yesterday over on Wizard Universe proper, so go check it out if you’re craving more info on the book.