Previews! (September 2015)

Here are some recommendations from this month’s Previews catalog for product shipping mostly in November.

Dark Horse

If you missed the Midnight Society miniseries, you can get the trade collection. I was pretty surprised by a turn of events in the second issue, and I was already interested in the story I thought I was getting.
Westerns seem to be making a comeback or sorts (if only to try to mimic the success of Sixth Gun), and Kingsway West is one of those. The preview art in the catalog shows what look like mutated jackalopes and a small dragon. This ain’t your Daddy’s Old West, son.

DC Comics

Erm. Dark Knight III is here y’all. Yippee? I talked about this a bit in episode 87 of the podcast, but I’m not too excited about this, though I’m very certain it will be a huge money maker for DC.
What I am excited to read is Superman: American Alien. Writer Max Landis made an empassioned plea for his story on Twitter, and that tipped me in favor of preordering this limited series.
Despite Jim Lee’s involvement in issue 1, I won’t be getting Batman: Europa either.
Wow, Scooby-Doo Team-Up #13 features some ghostly DC characters: Deadman, Spectre, and Phantom Stranger. Ruh roh!
If you’re a fan of Neal Adams’ Batman art, then DC has an omnibus for ya with over 1000 pages!
I want to get that Demon: Hell’s Hitman trade featuring stories by Garth Ennis.
Lex Luthor gets the 75 years omnibus treatment. I still hate the DC won’t tell us what issues are in these 75-year celebratory tomes.
Ok, I highly, highly recommend the Superman: Secret Identity deluxe edition HC. It’s a great Kurt Busiek and Stuart Immonen story. Get it, read it, love it.
Because DC knows that I’m a sucker for all things classic Titans, I’ll be gladly paying for the DC Comics Presents: Titans Hunt 100-Page Super Spectacular. At least I’ll have better quality versions of the early Teen Titans stories.
Of the new Vertigo books (which all sound interesting), I’ll be spending my money on Red Thorn because, you know, Scotland.
Capitalizing on the success of the iZombie tv show, DC is giving us the titular comic in omnibus form.

IDW

Do not pass Go, do not collect, er, wait, DO get this wonderful collection of Infinite Loop. It’s probably going to get my vote for best limited series of 2015.
If I wasn’t already at my budget limit for this month’s comics, I would be buying Alex Robinson’s Box Office Poison and his new trade Our Expanding Universe.

Image

Jason Aaron has become a comic book creator like Mark Waid, Grant Morrison, and Brian K. Vaughan where I will seriously look at, if not preordering, anything that he is involved with. Case in point, The Goddamned. It also does not hurt that the artist from Scalped, R.M. Guera, is back with Aaron on this series.
When Monstress was announced at the Image Expo, I really liked the cover image. The preview art also looks good, though darker (in composition, not tone) than I expected (despite the title).
Mark Millar’s Jupiter’s Circle gets a volume 2, delving into the past of the characters introduced or mentioned in Jupiter’s Legacy. I enjoyed both Legacy and Circle volume 1 a great deal, so getting this was an easy choice.
And Millar is trying really hard to clinch those movie deals by giving us another new series that sounds pretty interesting: Huck. It’s about a superpowered guy who tries to do good deeds anonymously. You can imagine that things don’t go his way. The Rafael Albuquerque art looks amazing.

Marvel

This will mostly be a list of those All-New, All-Different series that I’m adding to my pull list. Case in point: Avengers. It’s mostly for Mark Waid, but I like many of the characters on the team, including Thor, Vision, and Spider-Man.
I really like alternate universe stories, and Web Warriors gives me a bunch of Spider characters, including Spider-Girl and Spider-Ham! C’mon!
I like Tom King, but this take of the Vision as a family man with his synthezoid family (based on the cover image) has got me wondering (if I’ll like it or not). Is this a comedy or parody? I guess I’ll have to read and see (see what I did there?!).
The Ultimates and Illuminati seem to be flip sides of the same coing, but either way, I’m interested.
More of Jason Aaron writing Thor? Yes, please. Take all of my monies.
Interesting. Marvel is releasing a prose adaptation of Civil War, but it also has illustrations. Hmm, if they added more illustrations, they could rerelease a trade collection of the comic book. (I don’t get this–who wants to read a prose version of Civil War?)
I will be getting the second complete collection of Christopher Priest’s Black Panther series.

Other publishers

Will Eisner is celebrated by Paul Levitz in Will Eisner: Champion of the Graphic Novel book.
Terry Moore is releasing a trade collection of SIP Kids. If you haven’t read these stories and you’re a fan of Strangers in Paradise, you are missing out.
Action Lab is trying its hand at an event series with Actionverse. I’m mostly getting it for the Molly Danger inclusion.
I don’t know why, but the Mother Russia trade from Alterna Comics keeps catching my eye.
I love Grant Morrison, but I don’t know about his take on Santa Claus in the new Boom miniseries Klaus. Maybe I’ll ask for it for Christmas.
James Bond returns in the new series by Warren Ellis and Jason Masters (and right before the new film that I’m dying to see!).
Finally, don’t forget to order the newest Alter Ego and Comic Book Creator magazines. The former features an interview with Jim Shooter, and the latter spotlights Gil Kane.