DC: The New Frontier—Absolute Edition
Creator: Darwyn Cooke
Publisher: DC Comics
Price: $100/$75 US (Hardcover)
**** 1/2
DC: The New Frontier was a labour of love for writer/illustrator Darwyn Cooke and one look through this well-deserved Absolute Edition proves it.
Cooke, born and raised in Toronto and now living in Nova Scotia, takes more than 400 pages to tell a sprawling tale that spans 1945-60 and bridges comics’ Golden Age with its Silver Age.
Painstakingly nuanced and featuring darned near every DC character (and their vehicles/ pets/sidekicks/etc.) from the era, The New Frontier is an epic crossover story that rivals or bests any “crisis” or “war” book around. It is also features a terrific integration of political and social history of the times.
It’s no wonder the original series won Cooke both an Eisner Award (comic books’ top honour) and a Joe Shuster Award as Canada’s most outstanding cartoonist.
The New Frontier will also be featured as a direct-to-DVD animated movie available next year.
As good as the original series is, DC takes it up a notch with this stunning Absolute, which features new story pages, Cooke’s fascinating page-by-page annotations, sketches and extras galore — all in a slipcase featuring an original image by the creator.
12 Days
Creator June Kim
Publisher TokyoPop
Price $12.99/$9.99 US (Paperback)
****
It’s like some bizarre Forest Gump scene gone wrong: ashes with wine, ashes with juice, ash smoothies…
Jackie Yuen’s life is devastated when she finds out the former love of her life Noah has been killed in a car wreck. In an effort to make peace with the loss, Jackie recruits Noah’s brother Nick to steal his sister’s ashes — so that Jackie can consume them over the course of 12 days.
OK, so it sounds strange, but it’s actually an idea based upon Queen Artemisia, who ruled Halicarnassus in 480 BC. When her husband died, she consumed his ashes so she could be a living mausoleum for him.
Writer/artist June Kim, best known for illustrating JET’s debut album cover, has created something touching and original in her first full-length graphic novel.
With a tender touch, Kim uses Artemisia’s show of devotion to examine love, death, friendship, loss and a score of other emotions that quickly help readers push past the yuck factor of a person scarfing down an ex-person.
American Virgin: Head
Steven T. Seagle & Becky Cloonan
Vertigo/DC Comics
$13.50/$9.99 US (Paperback)
****
Never has a virgin been so screwed.
Adam Chamberlain, the 21-year-old leader of a highly successful national virginity movement, seems to have everything going for him.
Sure, his family is a little dysfunctional (featuring a pot-smoking little brother and disowned step-sister), but Adam’s a bestselling author, thousands of people turn out to hear him speak and his soul mate Cassandra is coming home from two years in the Peace Corps. in just a few days.
All this perfection is thrown out the window when Cassandra is decapitated by an African terrorist organization – leaving Adam questioning God’s plan for him and what he’s supposed to do next.
To help deal with his girlfriend’s death, Adam and his stepsister Cyndi hop on a plane to Africa and try to find out how this horrible crime could have happened.
But the answers Adam finds lead, of course, to more questions and his quest becomes a search for both Cassie’s head and her killers.
Writer Steven T. Seagle (It’s A Bird!), along with artist Becky Cloonan (Demo), has laid the foundation for an interesting conflict between morality and desire and has created an instantly complex and conflicted protagonist to mess with.
American Virgin is one of the best of a hot new wave of Vertigo books and shouldn’t be missed.
Girls Vol. 3: Survival
The Luna Brothers
Image Comics
$14.99 US (Paperback)
*** 1/2
The battle against hot, naked babes wages on.
The people of Pennystown are still trapped inside an impenetrable sphere that has cut them off from the outside world. Even worse, the beautiful and mysterious nude ÒgirlsÓ, who can each recreate dozens of themselves after having sex with human men, are in there with them and are continuing to target all the women in town for death.
But things get really interesting as the body count continues to pile up and the surviving women decide to take no more chances with the men knocking up anymore ÒgirlsÓ and take them all prisoner.
Oh yeah, and that giant sperm monster is up to no good.
Yeah, I guess this series has progressed to the point were you’ve really got to read every issue (or all three trades) to make sense of it, but believe me it actually does.
This are looking really bleak for our survivors and since the Luna Brothers have already revealed that issue #24 will the series’ last, there’ll be one last arc to come and it promises to be a doozy.
Star Wars: Empire Vol. 6 – In The Shadows Of Their Fathers
Thomas Andrews, Scott Allie, Adriana Melo, Joe Corroney, Michael LaCombe
Dark Horse Books
$17.95 US (Paperback)
*** 1/2
Being Darth Vader’s son must be tough to take, but before Luke Skywalker found out about his parentage, he was forced to deal with the horrible consequences of being the son of Anakin Skywalker.
After accompanying Princess Leia on a mission to offer Rebel Alliance support to the world of Jabiim, Luke quickly finds himself a prisoner for crimes committed by his father during the Clone Wars. It turns out Anakin, on orders from above, pulled all Republic support off Jabiim, leaving it to the mercies of the Droid army.
Luke, with Leia’s help, must prove he’s not the villain Anakin has been made out to be by the Jabiimi, even as the Empire, led by Vader himself, close in on them.
This story, set just months after the events of Star Wars: A New Hope, is one of those compelling pieces that only works now that George Lucas’ whole six-film series has been told and the creators do a fine job of tying together all those years of continuity into something original and compelling.
jonathan.kuehlein@metronews.ca
