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[Thad]

You know what I'm enjoying?  Resident Alien, by Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse.

It's another Police Procedural with a Twist.  The setup is this: an alien ship has crash-landed; its owner is living incognito in a small town called Patience.  His cover story is that he's a retired doctor named Harry Vanderspiegel.  He's got mild psychic powers; he can pick up on people's emotions, and mentally fool them into thinking he looks human, but nonetheless he keeps to himself.

But then Patience's only doctor is murdered, and so the mayor comes and asks him to serve as town doctor until they can find a suitable replacement.  Harry tries to refuse, but ultimately agrees to take the job, both because it would seem suspicious if he didn't and because it's the right thing to do.  So now he's no longer a recluse, he's in town serving as doctor, and he's also helping to try to solve the murder.

The series debuted in Dark Horse Presents; that material is reprinted in issue #0 (which I think is a great way of doing things; people who read it in the anthology can start at issue #1 without having to buy the same material again, while people who didn't read it in the anthology have a #0 they can pick up so they don't miss anything).  There's a preview of the comic on that link, and you can download the full issue for $2.

Weirdly, the digital version of issue #1 is $4, which is 50 cents more than the paper version.  I think Dark Horse might drop the price later on; I suspect the idea is to give comic stores preferential treatment at release time and then drop the digital price once it's been on sale a couple weeks, but that's just a guess.

[Thad]

Tor's got a preview of Hope Larson's upcoming adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time.  It looks wonderful.

[Büge]

AAAGGL WHAT HAPPENS NEEEEEEXT

[Thad]

Snarked is over and I honestly could not have asked for a more satisfying ending.  This is a great, great book and recommended for everybody.

Bit of background for those who don't know what it is: it's a Lewis Carroll pastiche, featuring a Walrus who acts like WC Fields and a Red Queen who bears a certain resemblance to Lucy van Pelt.  It's written and drawn by Roger Langridge, who did the truly excellent Muppet Show Comic a few years back (whose final issues are just now being published due to the transition from Boom to Marvel).  It's a great all-ages book; Langridge's art is really expressive and charming, and it's funny stuff.  His words aren't half-bad either, and the book doesn't suffer from the decompression you see in most modern comics -- it typically takes me significantly longer to read one of his comics than your average DC/Marvel superhero book of the same page count.

If you missed the series, buy the trades.

[Thad]

Tor's got a preview of Hope Larson's upcoming adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time.  It looks wonderful.

And BoingBoing's got Chapter 2.  Meg!  Calvin!  Charles Wallace!  Sandy and Dennys!  Go read.

[Thad]

If you are not reading Dial H by China Mieville and Mateus Santolouco, you may be missing the best superhero comic currently being published.  (Though I hear Daredevil's pretty great right now too.)

For those unfamiliar with the concept, Dial H for Hero is an old '60's comics series about a dial that allows its user to turn into a superhero -- a different one each time he dials.

In the new series, the dial is found by a schlubby guy, Nelson, who's trying to help his friend who's fallen in with some bad people.  And, as you might expect, the highlight of the book is the sheer range of oddball characters Nelson turns himself into.  Characters like Boy Chimney and Battle Snail.

I'm really enjoying the hell out of it and recommend it.  It's technically a DC New 52 book, but as yet it has shown no sense of continuity with the other books.  I do not think it is a coincidence that all my favorite DC books are the ones that are off in their own little corner not being shoved into some big editorial narrative.  And presumably Mieville is a big enough name (and Dial H is a small enough one) that he can do whatever he wants.

[Zach]

Since Animal Man started dragging its feet, Dial H has been my favorite monthly book. Maybe Animal Man's big crossover event will speed things up and have the thoughtful character moments that I so crave!

Adventure Time
All Star Western
Animal Man
Batman Inc.
Demon Knights
Dial H
Frankenstein

Trade Waiting
Unwritten
6th Gun

Have you read any of the previous iterations of Dial H? Are they worth tracking down to see what's being adapted?

[Thad]

I thought JMS's one-off in The Brave and the Bold, which teamed Dial H with the Metal Men, was fantastic, but I haven't read the '60's or '80's iterations.  I love the premise, though, and it sure SEEMS like it'd be right up my alley.

I think Animal Man really lost something when Travel Foreman left.  He left for personal reasons -- his mother had just passed away and he couldn't deal with drawing creepy shit in a horror comic anymore -- and I can't blame him, but it's unfortunate he had to go so soon.

I'd love to see Lemire pencil it himself but he's still got a few issues of Sweet Tooth left.  Have you been reading Sweet Tooth?  Another of my favorites of the past few years.  Post-apocalyptic book; everyone's dying of a plague and human/animal hybrid children are being born.  At its core it's a story about two characters, Gus and Jeppard; Gus is a naive child who doesn't know anything about the world, and Jeppard is a bitter, jaded man who's lost everything and just does not give a fuck anymore.  It goes about how you'd expect, with each learning from the other.  And I love Lemire's art.

Haven't been reading All-Star Western (though I bought about the first 50 issues of the Palmiotti/Gray Jonah Hex) or Sixth Gun, but totally agree with everything else on your list.  Great shit.  Tough call as to whether I'd put Batman Inc on a "for people who don't read comics" list; it's a great book but SO reliant on existing continuity.

[Zach]

Haven't been reading All-Star Western (though I bought about the first 50 issues of the Palmiotti/Gray Jonah Hex) or Sixth Gun, but totally agree with everything else on your list.  Great shit.  Tough call as to whether I'd put Batman Inc on a "for people who don't read comics" list; it's a great book but SO reliant on existing continuity.

Whoops! I just posted my entire list. It's interesting that I consider myself an avid comics fan (not that I'd win any contests for it), but pretty much every book on my list meets the "all right for non-comics reader" criteria. There's a slam on books that depend too much on continuity and shock somewhere in there, but it's all been said more eloquently elsewhere. Part of it, I think, is I want comics that I can share with people. My girlfriend has been working her way through my collection, after having only previously read Sandman and Transmetropolitan. I'd love to slip Morrison's Batman into the to-read pile eventually, but there's really no good starting point going back more than five years and several series.

I've read the first two trades of Sweet Tooth and enjoyed them both. I've put following it on hold for a while so a sufficient backlog builds up.

All-Star Western is a top-quality book. At first, I felt like it was a bait-and-hook Batman book in disguise, but even though so little of it is actually spent Out West, it feels like a Western.

[Ted Belmont]

The Groupees Be Mine Bundle 5 gets you the first trade of The Sixth Gun in PDF format(along with some pretty good to pretty terrible games) for a minimum of $5.

[Thad]

Dial H #6 is the funniest "two superheroes sit around arguing while nothing happens" comic I've read in ages.  It kinda reminds me of the Booster Gold episode of JLU.

So, okay.  For those of you just joining us, Dial H is about a dial that gives the hero a different superhero identity every time he uses it.  Some are cool, some are not, and all of them are pretty much Mieville and Santoluoco (and cover artist Brian Bolland) going nuts with crazy one-off ideas.  (It kinda reminds me of X-Statix, except in that book new heroes showed up, died, and got replaced; in this one, new heroes show up for one issue and then go away.)

Anyway.  This issue Nelson dials a racist stereotype Indian Chief character, and Roxy insists that he can't go out like that unless it's a real emergency, so mostly they just sit around in her apartment arguing while he watches emergencies happen on TV and then other people come to the rescue.

Maybe that sounds boring?  I dunno.  I love superhero stories that just go totally mundane.  This was a legitimately funny example of that.  I'm loving this series.

MEANWHILE:

Sweet Tooth is all over but the crying.  If you've been waiting for the trades, well, the last one should be out in just over a month, because there's only one issue left.

It's been a good ride.  No big surprises, I don't suppose, certainly none in this issue's big climax.  All the things that happened here were inevitable.

But it HAS been a great character piece.  I've come to really like the cast.  Gus's journey toward adulthood and Jeppard's toward redemption -- it's been satisfying.  And I love Lemire's art.  Hopefully he'll be drawing something else soon.

Not sure what he'll do with the final issue.  But I'm hoping for a full-on "50 years later", something along those lines.  I'd love to see Gus as an old man, looking at the new world he's helped build.

Maybe it won't be that.  Maybe Lemire will surprise me.  But again -- this series hasn't been about surprises.

[Thad]

Not sure what he'll do with the final issue.  But I'm hoping for a full-on "50 years later", something along those lines.  I'd love to see Gus as an old man, looking at the new world he's helped build.

Maybe it won't be that.  Maybe Lemire will surprise me.  But again -- this series hasn't been about surprises.

And it was, in fact, exactly what I expected.  And that's a good thing.  It was a double-sized final issue that didn't feel decompressed -- as the years, decades, generations flew by, it felt like Lemire showed and told just enough -- some characters only got a sentence or two, but it was just right.

This was a damn fine series; one of the best I've read in the past decade.  Jeff Lemire has become one of my favorites; I'll try anything with his name on it, as writer, artist, or especially both.

His next series -- aside from the, what, four or five DC superhero books he's doing now -- is called Trillium.  I'm onboard, sight unseen.

[Büge]

http://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20130315/roscoe-village/cps-bans-persepolis-at-lane-tech-protest-planned-for-friday

[Thad]

Via Robot 6, the school system is now claiming this was a misunderstanding -- the CEO asked that the book be removed from the seventh grade curriculum, and somebody down the chain interpreted this as "remove the book entirely".

After directing principals to have seventh-grade teachers remove the book from their classroom, Byrd-Bennett said that “due to the powerful images of torture,” she has asked the Office of Teaching & Learning to develop guidelines so educators “can be trained to present this strong but important content.” The district will also decide whether, “after appropriate teacher training,” Persepolis should be included in the curriculum for grades eight through 10.

“These are not photos of torture. It’s a drawing and it’s one frame,” Satrapi told the newspaper. “I don’t think American kids of seventh grade have not seen any signs of violence. Seventh-graders have brains and they see all kinds of things on cinema and the Internet. It’s a black and white drawing and I’m not showing something extremely horrible. That’s a false argument. They have to give a better explanation.”A CPS spokeswoman told the newspaper the initial directive was sent by district staff following concerns raised by teachers at Austin-North Lawndale, but it didn’t reflect the intent of the administration.

It's not as bad as a full ban, but I'm still inclined to think it's bullshit.  Satrapi's right: the notion that seventh graders have never heard cursing or seen violence before is fucking asinine.

(Not for nothin': the movie version of Persepolis -- which is pretty much a straight-across, word-for-word-and-panel-for-panel adaptation -- is PG-13.  I know it varies state-by-state, but here in Arizona the typical age of a seventh grader is, yes, 13 years old.)

[Ted Belmont]

4thletter is doing a guide to the DC Universe for non-comics reading people who want to play Injustice, but don't necessarily want to wade through decades of continuity just to understand what the hell is going on.

In one of the weirdest comic book moments, a zombie Aquaman appeared during the big Green Lantern event Blackest Night to haunt Mera. Mera had been empowered by a Red Lantern ring, building on her intense rage. When Aquaman held up his zombie baby to taunt her, Mera vomited napalm blood onto them both while yelling, “I never wanted to have children!” At the end of the story, this mysterious force of white light resurrected a dozen dead DC characters for its own cryptic reasons. One of them was Aquaman. After that, Aquaman had the ability to control dead and decaying marine life.

[Thad]

But I'm preeeeetty confident Injustice is non-canon.  Inasmuch as its premise involves Joker tricking Superman into murdering pregnant Lois.

[Büge]

I read the Harley/Green Arrow episode and thought that the rest of the series would be at least that good.

Oh how wrong I was.

[Ted Belmont]

But I'm preeeeetty confident Injustice is non-canon.  Inasmuch as its premise involves Joker tricking Superman into murdering pregnant Lois.

Oh, it absolutely is. However, it's an alternate universe based on pre-Flashpoint continuity(so that should tell you how long it's been in development), even though the costumes are the New 52 versions(with a couple of exceptions). So this is intended as more of an amusing primer for folks who probably have a passing familiarity with DC, but who might not know anything about the DC version of Ares, or why Bane is a hulked-out guy in a luchador mask, and not a guy with a weird accent in a Darth Vader mask.

[Thad]

Or why Green Lantern is a white guy?

[Ted Belmont]

Or that, yeah.