A Month of Wednesdays: July 2026

BOUGHT: 

Now That We Draw Vol. 5 (Seven Seas Entertainment) The previous volume ended with a pretty big cliffhanger, with high schooler and aspiring manga artist Uehara Yuu overhearing the other two points of the series' emerging love triangle discussing him in the hot spring next to the one he was soaking in. His cute childhood friend turned sensei (and successful manga artist) Love-chan asks his classmate, crush and manga muse Miyamoto point blank: "How do you feel... ...about Yuu-kun?"

Overcome with emotion, and not wanting to hear her answer, he plunges his head beneath the water. And stays there. For four minutes! 

He needn't have bothered, as her answer was far from conclusive. "I don't know," she said, and then went on to explain that in elementary school, there was a boy that all the girls liked, but her reaction at the time was simply, "What's so great about him? Manga characters are way cooler." That didn't change much as he grew up, and, despite Uehara's virtues, he couldn't be farther away from the "super-sadistic arrogant jerks" of doujinshi that turn her on...although she doesn't share that last bit with Love-chan.

Holding one's breath under hot water for four minutes is, it turns out, not great for one's health, and so Uehara passes out, waking up sometime later with his head on Miyamoto's lap...and with one of her breasts in his face. (When he realizes where he is, he jumps up...but bounces his head off of Miyamoto's big and, apparently, bouncy breast).

Uehara and Miyamoto's research trip with their respective senseis thus comes to an end in the first chapter of this volume, and they return to their normal-ish lives of high school and trying to break into the manga industry. Here, Uehara has the opportunity to get an eight-page fill-in published in a widely-read manga magazine...if he could only find the inspiration to tell a compelling story (Once again, Miyamoto inadvertently acts as his muse, a simple moment between them inspiring such feelings in Uehara that he is able to capture and covey it in a story good enough to make the cut for the magazine.)

As for Miayamoto, she gives herself a practically impossible deadline for an entry into a contests, driving herself to the absolute brink as she tries to make it...and ultimately only does so with the encouragement (and help on backgrounds) of Uehara. 

This volume mostly focuses on the pair of them, with Ren-chan barely appearing, and this volume's plots and reactions revolve around the pair as comics creators, which of course gives the series more punch for those of us interested in the art form and the industry, punch that it would lack if the characters were trying to break into basically any other industry.

It can be a bit difficult for me to remember exactly how some things felt as a teenager, but I am consistently amused by what seems like Uehara's shyness and prudery when teased by often scantily clad Miyamoto (a trait he shares with other manga characters I can think of, like Don't Toy With Me, Miss Nagatoro's Hachiouji Naoto). I'm not sure if it's embarrassment or overcorrecting efforts to not appear like a pervert, but he recoils from Miyamoto in sometimes amusing ways. 

There's a particularly over-the-top example here. When he calls her to share an amazing development about his budding manga career, she receives his call as a video call, even though she's in the bath ("Don't worry! I'll only show my face!", she says, and then slowly tilts the phone a bit lower. "Unless... ...was there more you wanted to see?  You know. Like thiiis?🩷")

When he later drops the bombshell about the fill-in, she's so excited she jumps out of the bath, her dialogue balloon and a sound effect covering her nipples, so that she's temporarily exposed to Uehara (But not, of course, the readers).

And how does he react? 

His eyes go wide, his face turns red and he...throws his phone away as if it were a grenade about to go off:

As with the first few volumes, this was a lot of fun and, like the previous volume, it ends with a hell of a dramatic cliffhanger. 

Skip and Loafer Vol. 12 (Seven Seas) A couple months back, the co-worker who had recommended Haikyu!! to me mentioned that she was reading this series and really liked it. I had never picked it up myself before because I disliked the title so much (And, having now read it, I see that title has nothing to do with the content at all; Skip and Loafer is the best comic with the worst title I've ever read). But given how much I ended up liking Haikyu!!, I trusted her tastes and gave the first volume a try. 

It didn't take long to fly through the first ten volumes of the series that our library system had, and, when I saw that volume 11 was still listed as "on order" in the catalog, despite the fact that it was released last September of 2025 (and volume 12 was due in the next month or so!), I bought volume 11. 

So, this twelfth volume is the first one I bought brand new, which is why I'm including it in my monthly "Month of Wednesdays" column. (And this is the precise reason that the manga series on those bookshelves I've been showing you once a week are always so incomplete; in this case, the first volume I bought was the eleventh, so when my nieces and nephews have to deal with my comics collection after my death, they will find the first ten volumes of this series missing.)

If you haven't read Skip and Loafer at all, but are someone who enjoys teen drama, I would highly recommend the series. For a manga that makes it to North American shelves, the premise seems remarkably simple and ordinary: Mitsumi, an ambitious girl from a tiny seaside town, gets accepted into a high school in Tokyo, and must navigate a big, new school full of strangers for the first time in her life.

And that's pretty much it, really. In the first few volumes, manga-ka Misaki Takamatsu introduces us to new characters, and a co-ed friend group quickly coalesces around Mitsumi. The slice-of-life manga mostly concerns itself with fairly typical school stuff: Hangouts, crushes, dates, school festivals, student council, tests, college ambitions and so forth.

The other main character is Sousuke, the shaggy haired blond guy on the cover with Mitsumi. Good-looking and popular, he is the first person Mitsumi meets at in Tokyo, and the two form an almost instant and curiously strong bond. Initially, there doesn't seem to be a romantic component to their relationship at all: He thinks of her as a baby duck in need of his help, while she thinks of him as a big, friendly dog...in large part because his hairstyle reminds him of her family dog back home. 

Their friendship quickly evolves into a sort of attraction or crush, maybe even love, although, by this point, the pair don't seem to have figured out exactly what they mean to one another, nor how a relationship between them might work (This, despite admitting to themselves that they love one another, and even briefly attempting to date and then breaking up when they realized they were happier when they were friends). 

Interestingly, they seem to be soulmates to us readers, but struggle with their feelings and the expression of those feelings. This is, perhaps in large part, due to Sousuke's troubled inner life. He's a former child star who survived a media scandal before giving up professional acting, and he has a strained relationship with his mother. As nice a guy as he is in all respects, he holds almost everyone at arm's length, and doesn't seem to know what he thinks or what he wants. These sequences offer the occasional patch of darkness in an otherwise bight and sunny school romance/comedy.

That it is all so engaging is thanks to the strong characters Takamatsu has created. They are all easy to like and root for; even those that seem to act in negative ways in the early volumes are quickly painted in a more sympathetic light, and we come to see why they acted the way they did. 

Takamatsu also spends a great deal of time on the fact that everyone has problems—even the best-looking, most popular characters find themselves burdened socially by these virtues—and plenty of panel-space with the characters discussing matters of love and relationships that make for interesting meditations (Not as much panel-space as Blue Flag, though, where such conversations can go on for tens of pages at a time). 

More than once I caught myself pondering what the characters were saying about relationships and how it might apply to my own life...only to remember that these are fictional teenagers in a manga series, while I am a real adult man in his forties. 

As for this particular volume, Sosuke and Mitsumi have a kinda sorta date at the end of their class trip, we learn the specifics of the media scandal involving Sosuke and his friend Ririka when they were kids, Mitsumi's family comes to Tokyo to visit and to attend her last second-year school festival and Sosuke plays the monster in a school stage adaptation of Frankenstein and there's an awfully dramatic cliffhanger ending. 

TMNT: Journeys Vol. 1 (IDW Publishing) This is a comic book collection I absolutely did not need to buy. Mirage launched the fourth volume of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles title 2001, reclaiming the book after Image Comics' 1996-1999 stewardship (that was the third volume, of course, which IDW later branded in its collections as Urban Legends) and with co-creator Peter Laird and longtime artist Jim Lawson at the helm. 

I started buying the series and read it for a while back then, but gradually lost track of it within the first ten issues or so. I would later go back and buy most of it—and much of its sister series, the 2004-launched Tales of the TMNT—from Mirage's website, which was then selling a bunch of its backstock. Still, I didn't get all of this volume of the series.

So, I was pretty excited to hear that IDW was getting around to collecting it—adding the Journeys sub-title to distinguish it from their ongoing series, I guess—so that I could finally read the whole thing in order. But, like I said, I didn't need this particular volume, which collects the first five issues of the series, as I know I definitely have those issues in singles. Still, if there are comics I don't mind having multiple versions of, it's Mirage's TMNT comic, and if I was going to avail myself of the future collections in the series, I figured I might as well have the first volume for my shelf, too.

Now, there are a few noteworthy aspects of this particular Turtles series. 

First, it is very much a Mirage book. I knew that Laird had written it and Lawson had drawn it, but I guess I had forgotten the specifics of what each did, and the involvement of other creators. In addition to writing, Laird also inked and toned Lawson's pencils and handled the lettering. Lawson is credited as both penciller and layout artist here (I guess that means he and Laird worked "Marvel method," right?). Eric Talbot took over inking on issues #3-5. And Michael Dooney finished (painted?) the covers, the first issue over Laird's pencil art (note how much the Turtles on this cover look like the "real" Turtles), and then over Lawson's on later issues. And while all of these guys would return to do future Turtles work later—even Laird doing a rare cover here or there—this era was the last time we would see them all doing Turtles work of such significant size and working together.

Second, this isn't any sort of reboot along the lines of IDW's TMNT or a discrete continuity like the old Archie Comics Adventures comics, this is a continuation of the story of the Turtles, from Mirage's first issue in 1984 through the conclusion of volume 2, taking into account the continuity and characters that they met along the way (but ignoring the Image Comics volume, which did follow previous TMNT continuity, but went off in its own weird directions that aren't at all reference here). 

And third, something I don't think I quite appreciated 25 years ago, but the Turtles here have apparently been aging in something close to real time...or, at the very least, a lot closer to real time than the heroes of most long-lived comic books (Actually, doing the math, there might be a bit of a fast-forward involved here, as Casey and April's adopted daughter Shadow, who was a baby 1992-1993's "City At War" storyline is here a teenager). 

That is presumably why this book is entitled TMNT rather than Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Although there is a scene in issue #1, echoing the original TMNT #1, where we get a double-page spread of the Turtles retaliating against a street gang who have backed them into a corner, where the words "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" appears along the bottom fourth of the image).

After their first round against this gang (named "The Madhattan Maulitia"), the guys take a breather, and Michelangelo (spelled without the "a" here...for the first time...?) braces himself against a wall and says, "Is it just me... Or was this a lot easier 15 years ago...?). The implication seems to be that this is set 15 years after their first appearance, battling the Purple Dragons...that, or, perhaps, since we last saw them in a Mirage comic, as baby Shadow is now a teenager herself. 

So, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are no longer teenagers, but somewhere in their late twenties or early thirties. 

Long before The Last Ronin, then, Laird began a story about the Turtles as adults, grown-up enough to start dealing with conflicts particular to adulthood that will be unfurled in later issues, but here, at least, we see the guys talking about being uncles to Shadow, and their human friends Casey and April are struggling to have a child of their own. While "Adult Mutant Ninja Turtles" obviously doesn't have the same magical marketing ring to it, that's where we are with the characters in this particular series, and I think that makes it particularly interesting, even special, given that all of the other comics and mass media adaptations have featured the guys as teenagers (In fact, the latest movie, 2023's animated Mutant Mayhem really leaned into the teenage aspect of the characters in a way I don't think any other iterations had previously). 

The first of the 32-page issues establishes the current status quo. The Turtles live in their sewer lair, fighting crime in New York City. Casey and April are together in the city as well, and as mentioned, trying to have a baby. Shadow lives in the North Hampton farmhouse with Splinter, where she trains with her "grandfather"...and friends like Metalhead from the superhero team Justice Force (Introduced in Laird and Lawson's 1988 TMNT #15; several Justice Force characters pop up in this volume, in which the Turtles co-exist with various superheroes; they also name drop Radical, from Lawson and Ryan Browne's Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #5, also from 1988). She moved there for safety's sake after an incident involving werewolves (I think that story eventually gets told in Tales...maybe in #7, which, at the very least, has Shadow and werewolves on the cover...?)

Meanwhile, something weird is happening on the moon, something involving a huge robot and the Utrom aliens, a storyline that will play out in the background for a bit before coming to the foreground in the final issues of this collection, presenting a world-altering event that will change the old status quo for the Turtles and push the premise of the franchise into new, unique territory. 

As this volume proceeds, the characters get various side stories, perhaps the most interesting of which involves an injured Michelangelo being taken to a secret super-hospital for superhero types, The Kurtzburg Memorial Hospital (Named for its founder, a man who a member of Justice Force tells Michelangelo was "a great visionary...some of the super-types call him 'The Father of Us All'").

Eventually we find out what the Utroms and their robot friend are up to. In scenes that echo the then-fresh memories of 9/11 to an extent, with relatives frantically calling one another and the whole world seemingly glued to their television sets, alien ships openly arrive on Earth, establish a base in the Atlantic offshore of New York City and then openly establish contact with the world. 

The Utroms are, they say, not here as invaders but as visitors, and they have come to welcome Earth to the universe of worlds inhabited by intelligent life and share their amazing technology. Because they realize their presence will prove controversial, they will give the world one year to either accept or reject them.

This is then followed by a time jump of a few months, during which the Turtles, welcomed to the Utrom island base by their old friend Fugitoid, are now able to walk the world openly, as now that aliens of various types are known to be real and are now a regular, if not common, presence in New York City, everyone just assume the Turtles are themselves aliens. 

It's a pretty good place to close the volume too, with our heroes finding themselves in the middle of a radically changing new world.

The comics are black-and-white, as they should be, and first Laird and then Talbot do so much work inking and toning Lawson's art that it feels rich and textured, giving the book the same famously "gritty" work of the original Mirage volumes. 

Laird fills the book with bizarre visuals for Lawson to draw, including during a mysterious scene set in the jungle where a cryptozoological expedition encounters a Kirby-esque alien with Kirby-esque technology among the superheroes, aliens, robots, spaceships, advanced technology and, near the end, even The Foot Clan, who end up involved as the Utrom wants a security force that doesn't need to rely on weapons of any kind. The artist handles it all with aplomb, his style providing connective tissues between this then-new work and the TMNT story that it is building off of. 

I didn't find it as engaging 25 years ago as I do now, which I think has a lot to do with originally reading it in the drips and drabs of chapters every month or so (or longer, if there are delays), while now read in a big chunk of almost 200 pages, the text feels denser and more cohesive. As Laird was writing a consistent story here, rather than the sort of sometimes serial, sometimes standalone stories of he and Kevin Eastman's original series, this feels like a graphic novel in a way those comics didn't and is thus better read in trade, I think. 

This volume includes the original covers, but, because IDW is apparently republishing it as single issues too, there are also plenty of new variant covers. There are new coves by Lawson (which are interesting, as they provide a contrast with his 2001 art, and one can see how much more stylized it has become over the years), a couple by Talbot (whose art is great and so distinct I really wish IDW would hire him to do his own one-shot at some point instead of just the occasional cover), one by Eastman (which seems somehow wrong, as this series originally came out during a time when he wasn't involved with the Turtles at all) and a rather weird one by Laird and A.C. Farley (which looks rather old, based on the Turtles' over-bite, and they are drawn wearing their space wrestling costumes from Archie's 1989 TMNT Adventures #7; also, it's hard to see any Farley in the image, and he has a pretty distinct take on the Turtles). Steve Lavigne, Ken Mitchroney, Josh C. Lyman and Khary Randolph and Emilio Lopez provide covers as well.

So, what happens next...? 

Well, the back cover says that TMNT: Journeys "will collect all 32 currently available issues in six total volumes," which is somewhat odd phrasing. I am curious what, if anything, IDW plans to do with the companion Tales of The TMNT series (and some other comics tied to volume 4, like the miniseries Raphael: Bad Moon Rising). 

While Tales was very much an anthology series, with different creative teams tackling stories from throughout TMNT history, if I recall correctly, quite a lot of them were rather closely tied to the ongoing storyline of Laird and Lawson's main series, and, in fact, Lawson did a lot of these, too. I don't know if these issues are necessary to what I guess we can now call the Journeys storyline, but I think they are at least significant (Also? Many of them are damn good). Clicking around covers on the Grand Comics Database, it seems like some of these have already been collected by IDW in Tales collections, though, so I'm not sure if the publisher will follow Journeys with some Journeys specific collection of Tales or not.

Anyway, at the very least, I am excited about the next five volumes of Journeys and, as I've said many times before, I wish IDW would commission some new TMNT comics from Lawson, Talbot, Dooney and the like, comics in which they let them do pretty much whatever they want, in whatever continuity they like...

BORROWED:

Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead Vol. 20 (Viz Media) Given that Akira and his friends just recently had a short adventure in outer space a few volumes ago, it seems strange to say that this volume stretches credulity, but, um, this volume stretches credulity.

That is in large part because of Akira's determined self-assuredness and bravery when facing an impossible task which, given how big the task is and how unlikely it is that he and the gang can actually achieve it, feels like delusional recklessness.

The plan for a while has been that, once their scientist friend creates a successful vaccine for the zombie plague sweeping the world, they would take it to the military base in zombie-free Okinawa for distribution.

Unfortunately, it seems that Okinawa is now being overrun by zombies and is in danger of falling; if that happens, all hope for getting the vaccine around the world seems to be lost. And so, Akira resolves to save the still-living holdouts there. How? Well, um, I'll let him explain: "How about we have Mr. Kosaka fly us there... ...and come up with a plan to save everyone on the base along the way?"

When he's questioned, he simply smiles and poses, along with all of his friends, who seem similarly confident, and gives a little speech: 

I don't care about a zombie army.

I won't let that... 

...stand in the way of me reaching my goal...

In fact, I'd rather be eaten by a zombie than give up!

Now, Harao Aso and Kotaro Takata's zombie apocalypse comedy has never been realistic, and volume 20 is no place to start, but it has always been believable, or at least suspension-of-belief-able, so this passage struck me as a little odd. It wouldn't have been hard for writer Aso to come up with a slightly more palpable way to sell their mission, like, for example, having Akira and company going to scout the situation out, rather than declaring their intention to save the day while completely winging it.

As to how they are planning to get to Okinawa, well, Akira meets a couple of friends from the past, one of whom was a retired pilot. Inspired by Akira, they have made a list of their own—"100 Places We Want to Visit Before Becoming Zombies"—and have been traveling in their little plane. They offer to fly our heroes there.

Unfortunately (or, perhaps, fortunately), with abandoned airplanes scattered willy-nilly all over the air strips and abandoned cars filling the roads, there's nowhere to attempt a landing, so our heroes will have to either give up or parachute into town. And what do you know, skydiving happens to be one of the relatively few items left on the bucket list...! (This is what they are doing on the pretty great cover for this volume.)

During their dive, the boys and girls get separated by a strong wind, presumably because the girls are lighter than the boys. This means the girls land in the city, which they find eerily abandoned. But, after doing some shopping for new bathing suits, they meet a new character, who is apparently the last surviving person there, and then quickly find out where all the zombies are...they've gathered into one massive horde that seems to go on forever (During a tense scene where the girls hide from the zombies, Aso and Takata spend a series of three consecutive double-page splashes to depict the horde passing them by.

That new character is Yui Yonamine, a bespectacled young woman who seems to have a superpower: The ability to predict where a zombie might next appear to attack.

I love this.

Yui's "power" is actually just that she has always suffered from extreme anxiety and has thus has always expected the absolute worst to happen in each and every situation. During a zombie apocalypse, of course, there's a lot more to be anxious about, and the chances are good that the absolute worst actually will happen.

So, for example, when she and the girls are running from part of the horde, Izu suggests they escape into the alleys, but Yui responds, "But there could be... ...zombies in the alley!" Two panels later, the alley is filled with zombies. Shizuka suggest they duck into the sewers, Yui says there could be zombies there, and then the manhole goes flying as a quartet of zombie try to squeeze their way up and out of it. 

With her anxiety disorder-turned-zombie radar, Yui has managed to find a way to survive, coming into the city for supplies and retreating to a nearby island in a clever way (that checks off another item on the bucket list, at least for the girls). She keeps going in hopes of finding her long lost friend.

Coincidentally, the boys, who land on the beach and end up trapped atop a hotel, meet a guy who I suppose is supposed to be Yui's friend. The two parallel stories become explicitly so by the split-panel ending, as Akira and Shizuka, who by this point thinks a lot like her boyfriend, inspire the two survivors with the exact same language: "We've got to find each other again... ...and no zombie can stand in the way of that goal!"

One of the many fun aspects of this series has been seeing Aso and Takata address interesting aspects of a zombie-plagued world and I for one am happy to see someone finally address what a person suffering from anxiety might be like in these circumstances. The results are fun and funny, although after so many months of finding her worst-case scenarios constantly coming true, it's probably going to take a lot more than the standard meds and cognitive behavior therapy for poor Yui to deal with her anxiety going forward. Of course, this is fiction, and Akira and friends have always been able to inspire the people they meet to succeed, so I'm sure she'll be okay...

REVIEWED: 

Aurora and the Orc (First Second) This new book from Lewis Trondheim is a weird one. At the beginning, it reads like a gag strip with an interesting premise (and some seemingly arbitrary rules governing aspects of it), but it rather gradually evolves into a continuity strip, and then something of a graphic novel. This makes the reading a bit challenging, as the gags can be a bit hit or miss, and I was tempted to give up early, but I'm glad I hung in there. Beyond the interesting format and approach to the storytelling, there's an (unfortunately) always relevant, evergreen moral...and, of course, plenty of jokes about Tolkien-esque fantasy settings and stories. More here. 

Offside (Graphix Scholastic) By complete coincidence, I read this graphic novel about young soccer players learning to work together as a team the same week I read the first volume of Blue Lock, which is also about young soccer players, but, um, the complete opposite...? This is well made, but I don't know that it has much to offer older readers like you guys. More here. 

Orion (DC Comics) Well, after reviewing Ngozi Ukazu's second original graphic novel based on Jack Kirby's New Gods characters and concepts for Good Comics for Kids and then sharing my favorite parts in this blog post, I'm not sure I have much more to say about it today. 

Spider-Man: Mighty Mayhem! (Abrams Fanfare) In Mike Maihack's fourth "Mighty Marvel Team-Up" graphic novel, the cartoonist has Spidey, Thor-in-the-shape-of-a-frog, Heimdall-in-the-shape-of-a-key-fob and two pigeons travel the Nine Realms searching for Asgardian characters and artifacts transformed by the magic of The Enchantress. 

Yes, that's right. I said Nine Realms. Nine. After all, that is how many realms there are in Norse mythology, that's how many realms there were in Marvel's version of the various Thor comics mythology and that's how many worlds emanate from "YGGDRASIL, the world tree" in Valkyrie's explanation on page 56 of this graphic novel

As for the tenth realm Heven, introduced in 2014 as the realm occupied by Neil Gaiman and Todd McFarlane's old Spawn character Angela, well, I assumed Maihack would just ignore that, in part because these books seem to be inspired as much by the Marvel Cinematic Universe as the comic book one (Here, for example, both Valkyrie and Heimdall have dark skin, as in the movies rather than the pale skin of their original comics appearances) and, in part, because reminding people of the name "Neil Gaiman" while they are trying to enjoy a comic book now is fairly fraught. (We certainly don't want anyone from this comic's target audience learning more about this Neil Gaiman person, do we?)

But I was wrong. 

In a sort of comic book "after credits sequence," a three-panel page that follows both the last page of the comic and an "About the Creator" page featuring a headshot and bio of Maihack, we see Loki-in-the-form-of-a-crocodile laying atop a sign that reads "Welcome to Heven". In the first panel, Loki says, "Brother? Hello? Tenth realm, remember?"

When I got to that point, I went back to page 56, on which Maihack drew Yggdrasil and the nine realms...and notice that he also included the tenth realm Heven there, although it's much smaller than the other nine, and semi-hidden in the upper boughs of the tree, a branch cutting across the cloud it seems to consists of and obscuring part of the "N" in "Heven."

That's odd, I thought, as the three panels focusing on the "Welcome to Heven" sign also obscure the name "Heven"; in fact, you can only see the very tops of the letters that make up the word "Heven", so that if you didn't already know that it was the name of the tenth realm (and/or notice Heven on page 56 and match it to this image), you wouldn't know what it was meant to say.

So that made me curious: Did Maihack, Marvel and/or Abrams Fanfare not want to make the fact that there was a place named Heven populated with angel-like beings in Marvel's cosmology explicit, even while telling a joke referring to the existence of the tenth realm? And was this a religious consideration, made so as not to offend some Christians...?

Anyway, here's a review of Mighty Mayhem! (Although, given that this is Maihack's fourth Spider-Man book, you should probably already know that it is good.)

A Month of Wednesdays: June 2026

BOUGHT:

Nancy For All Seasons (Fantagraphics Books) So look, I spent some time off-and-on over the course of the last few weeks wondering if there was anything that I personally have to say about Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy, history's most perfect daily gag comic strip, that hasn't been said better dozens of times before by more insightful critics with more impressive resumes. 

Now that my self-imposed deadline for this post about all the new-ish comics I read in June has arrived, I still can't think of anything.

So, suffice it to say that Nancy For All Seasons, Fantagraphics's second recent collection of Bushmiller's Nancy (following last year's Nancy Wears Hats) is filled with 300 strips from 1953 to 1954. 

If you're already a fan of Bushmiller's and/or Nancy's, you should have it for your shelf. If you're not yet a fan, you should definitely pick it up and check it out; there's an awfully good chance you will end up being a fan by the time you get a few pages into it. 

Uncle Scrooge: Lost Beneath the Sea (Fantagraphics) The latest volume in Fanta's Carl Barks Library contains various Uncle Scrooge comics from 1963 and 1964, ranging from the sorts of big adventure stories that we tend to think of when we think of Barks and Scrooge to a couple of face-offs with Scrooge's perennial enemies Magica De Spell and the Beagle Boys (and both at once, in one story!), and from comedic, Duckburg-set stories to one-page, space-filling gag strips

The title story is one of those adventure stories, a 22-pager in which Scrooge's lucky dime is lost at sea...and in danger of falling prey to an unlikely salvage operation by four-armed Martians, a story bookended by Donald's attempts to make it as a newspaper reporter, even if he has to make up outlandish stories on slow news days. (Despite being the length of a standard modern comic book story, this one feels much longer, thanks to how many panels there are per page, and how much Barks packs into each one.)

That's followed by "The Status Seeker," in which Scrooge finds himself in a race to recover a particular jewel that resembles peppermint candy, his opponent being one of those mustachioed anthropomorphic pig villains discussed in a prose piece in the recent "A Little Something Special" and Other Tales of Fiendish Foes (The pig man villain design resurfaces in a second adventure in this very volume, wherein he is named "Foulcrook", is teamed with a dog man named "Slyviper" and tries to steal the discovery of a lost city out from under Scrooge and his nephews in an attempt to make it into an archaeological society).

As for Magica, she uses catastrophic weather events and magical disguises to try to break into the money bin in one story, later hires the Beagle Boys in an attempt to beat Scrooge from acquiring a flock of geese that lay golden eggs and later still comes up with a bizarre—but quite visually interesting—potion that transforms one's face into that of whoever he has last looked at. 

In addition to all of the Scrooge stories, this volume contains a couple of shorts starring Gyro Gearloose and his mechanical helper, Helper, none of which did much for me personally; I guess I'm so used to seeing the inventor used as a sort of plot device in Scrooge stories that it's hard to find him too terribly compelling a star in his own right, even if each of his stories here are rather short ones.

Interestingly, among the usual generous amount of backmatter discussing each story and its history, and the original comics covers, there's a double fold-out poster of a Gyro image Barks drew. 

As with Bushmiller's Nancy discussed above, I don't know that I have anything to say about the quality of Barks' duck comics that hasn't already been said before, but I'm aways happy to add another volume of Fantagraphics' Carl Barks Library to my bookshelves.

BORROWED: 

Batman Vol. 1: Daylight (DC Comics) This is a technically very well-made comic. Artist Jorge Jimenez is as skilled an artist as any that has ever drawn a Batman monthly, and he's quite adept at every part of comics-making, from distinct character designs to an occasionally Breyfoglian sense of dynamism when it comes to Batman in action (Check out this kick from Batman #4; I know that pose is from a Breyfogle-drawn comic, but I'll be damned if I can remember which one.)

Similarly, writer Matt Fraction's plotting is strong, and, with one glaring exception I'll get to in a bit, he has a solid grasp on all of the characters, who all seem to be and sound like themselves, and his presentation of Bruce Wayne on a maybe date with a scientist whose work might be behind some strange goings-on involving Arkham inmates is an inspired blast of flirty dialogue and action sequences.

Despite the considerable, even obvious talents of the creators though, this first volume of the new Batman series still left me kind of cold. I could appreciate most of its component parts, but I couldn't really personally connect with the book, let alone get lost in it.

That likely has to do with the sense that we've seen all of this before, even as the comic takes the pose of giving us something new (Check out that dramatic new Batman costume, for the most obvious example, with Batman back in blue for the first time in over 30 years!). 

So, there's a supervillain in a position of governmental authority and using his resources to target our heroes, something I complained about as feeling tired when Jason Aaron introduced villainous New York City District Attorney Hieronymous Hale in his 2025 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Vol. 1: Return to New York (reviewed in this column).  

Batman is on the outs with the Gotham Police Department, as he has been off-and-on from Batman: Year One to James Tynion's IV's 2020-2022 run and, I think, beyond. 

Militarized law enforcement specialists are brought in to deal with vigilantes and supervillains, again as in Tynion's run. 

Killer Croc is apparently devolving and becoming more bestial, with a newer, scarier design featuring a long, Venom-like tongue, as in the 2002-2003 "Hush" storyline. 

One of Tim Drake's loved ones notices that when Tim spends time with Bruce Wayne, he tends to get injured, and je blames Bruce, as was the case in Chuck Dixon's 1990s Robin run. 

I realize that this might not be a Batman problem so much as a Caleb problem. Maybe human beings just weren't meant to read that many Batman comics over the course of a single lifetime, and that even if so much of this seems recycled to me, well, perhaps many of the other readers of this Fraction/Jinenez run are seeing these things for the very first time (Although, given how recent Tynion's run was, and the fact that so many Batman arcs like "Hush" remain in print forever now, I kinda doubt that). 

Even the villains are, for the most part, ones we've seen more or less constantly for decades: Killer Croc, The Riddler, The Penguin, Hugo Strange. An upcoming appearance by The Joker is foreshadowed. There are two exceptions, the mysterious masked Minotaur, presumably a new character, and, disappointingly, an anime-coded woman with glowing swords who can transform into a flock of birds; she seems like a brand-new character but, once defeated, Robin Damian Wayne dismisses her as "Lady Death Man", so apparently this otherwise strikingly different character is connected to extant IP (Oddly, Damian doesn't mention Flatline, one-time sidekick of Lord Death Man and his ally/friend/love interest here at all). 

In Daylight, Fraction and Jimenez have Batman, sporting a new blue and gray costume (it's not simply a return to that of the one he wore before "Knightfall"; you'll note the bat-symbol on his chest is quite different), Batmanning around, despite the fact that the Gotham City Police Department, now bizarrely run by Police Commissioner Vandal Savage, not only doesn't sanction his freelance policeman status, but are now actively targeting him with arrest or worse.

Batman encounters a series of old foes—first Croc, then The Riddler—who both escape from the current incarnation of Arkham (the sky-scraping Arkham Towers, rather than the old asylum) and act strangely out of character, presumably because their minds have been messed with by "The Crown of Storms", a new invention of Wayne-funded scientist Dr. Annika Zeller who, conveniently, appears to be both rather young and pretty hot, so she can also function as a love interest of sorts for Bruce Wayne...maybe. 

Meanwhile, the masked Minotaur has organized crime in Gotham City, including Commissioner Savage, The Penguin and others, into a fine-tuned, money-making machine that's so behind-the-scenes no one seems to know their organization even exists, including the Batman.

Damian Wayne and Tim Drake are both active as Robin, although after an issue or two spotlighting how awesome he is, Tim seems to go into semi-retirement, spurred on by catching a stray gunshot from a Gotham police officer (Given how many bullets Tim's dodged over the decades, it's perhaps a little convenient that he gets shot here at all in such a fashion) and his boyfriend Bernard's worry that hanging out with Bruce somehow endangers Tim.

James Gordon, Harvey Bullock and Alfred are all around. Jim's a beat cop now, and Alfred is either a ghost or a hallucination of Bruce's. Indeed, Alfred pops up in here about as much as he always has and, at first, I thought he might be some kind of programmed holographic AI Batman had built, but instead he seems to be a figment of Batman's imagination, as he talks to him about his current cases and conflicts, often receiving admonishment or advice in return. 

I actually haven't read a regular Batman monthly since Tynion's climactic "Fear State" arc, so I'm not up on what's going on in the DCU's Gotham City at the moment, but Batman seems to be spending most of his time at "Pennyworth Manor," which looks to be a sizable mansion within the city limits. Bruce Wayne still seems to be very rich and to be running his company, so I assume he's recovered his fortune but lost Wayne Manor somehow...?

Fraction's take on the character is very gadget-heavy, with Batman and his Robins employing all sorts of high-tech gear throughout, including toyetic flying and stealth suits, and, charmingly, every time they use one, even something as simple as a grappling line, there's a little box introducing and explaining the gadget in question. 

Now I don't want to rain on anyone's parade here. Fraction and Jimenez's Daylight represents good, solid, entertaining Batman comics. I am interested to see where this is all going, if The Minotaur is someone we know (or who I suspect it is) and if Fraction later justifies choices like the use of Savage in this story or why Anarky Lonnie Manchin suddenly seems like an idiot (Again, more on that in a bit).

It's just not great, and, at this point, I want really great comics, not just really good ones. 

You probably think I've gone on long enough at this point, but here are a few bullet points regarding particular gripes of mine from these otherwise quite solid comics...

•Okay, I give up: Why is Vandal Savage the Gotham City police commissioner now...? Is this an original idea of Fraction's, or a holdover from a previous Batman or Detective Comics writer's run? 

Now, if you're reading this blog, then you are probably a longtime DC Comics reader, and therefore probably already know all about Vandal Savage, an immortal caveman who has been menacing various DC superheroes since he first appeared in a 1943 issue of Green Lantern, from back when the only GL was Alan Scott. Though he and Batman have obviously crossed paths repeatedly over the decades, Savage is generally a Justice Society or Justice League villain, with world-ruling ambitions, and to see him show up in Batman at all, let alone as a government official, seems...weird, to say the least. (I work in a library, and they ran a background check before they hired me; does Gotham City not check to see if their new hires have criminal records, have ever been part of a team of super-villains or tried to conquer the world?)

Making it even more odd, in these first few issues of Fraction's Batman at least, he doesn't do anything that required the character to be an immortal caveman supervillain. He is anti-Batman and, presumably, opposed to all of the other Gotham vigilantes. He frames Batman for a murder. He threatens to kill a subordinate...and then perhaps kills or has him killed off-panel later on. All stuff that, like, any bad actor could do, whether it was an original character, or another supervillain taking at random. 

Like, why Savage, and not The Ventriloquist or Captain Cold or Amazo or Starro? I just don't get it. (Also, in the scene of The Minotaur having a sort of staff meeting with various crime heads, Savage seems to very much be that character's lieutenant, which doesn't seem very Vandal Savage-y, does it? )

•The biggest misfire in this book is, I think, Fraction and Jimenez's treatment of Anarky (That is, believe it or not, Lonnie Manchin getting kicked in the face in the panel at the top of this review). Now, I'm a huge fan of writer Alan Grant and artist Norm Breyfogle, one of the best Batman teams to ever do it, and I similarly love their character Anarky, one of a handful of original characters they added to the mythos during their time managing it. 

Anarky started as a one-off vigilante in the mold of What-if-Batman-was-more-hardcore-and-worked-to-change-the-world-rather-than-just-fought-to-uphold-the-status-quo?, tackling pollution and corporate greed in addition to the prevalence of illicit street drugs, which Grant's Batman seemed to spend most of his time dealing with. As Anarky became a recurring character, he quickly developed into a sort of anti-Robin and, by the time he earned a miniseries and a short-lived ongoing, (in 1997 and 1999), he was a full-fledged superhero, with a secret base of his own in Washington, D.C., and coming into conflicts with characters as various as Etrigan, Darkseid and Green Lantern Kyle Rayner.

He was also brilliant, constantly quoting philosophers and lecturing his dog and/or readers about political and economic theory. Breyfogle originally costumed him in a wide-brimmed hat, cloak and face mask patterned after the lead character in Alan Moore and David Lloy's V for Vendetta. 

He is completely unrecognizable here.

Jimenez's radical redesign has him wearing what are essentially street clothes, a big, puffy red jacket with a tilted A-for-Anarchy symbol (spraypainted) on the front of it and wearing a gold mask that looks nothing like his usual one, with bright red eyes and a jagged, zigzag along the lower half as if to suggest pointed teeth.

When we first meet him, he and two henchmen, both wearing gold masks, are trying to hijack or rob a semitruck for some reason. Why does Anarky have henchmen? The scene provides a reason why he shouldn't; one of them shoots the driver dead, and Anarky berates him: "You moron-- --This wasn't the job!"

I was just sort of assuming this was a new, second (or third, I guess) Anarky, until Batman later tracks him to his hideout, throwing two more random guys through the window—apparently more of Anarky's men—and addresses him as Lonnie. Batman catches him easily (the best fight Anarky can put up is spraying Batman in the face with something, which slows him down for a panel).

Tell me, does this sound like Anarky Lonnie Manchin?

Just before Batman arrives, he's talking to himself:

Dammit, dammit, dammit. 

Okay. Be cool. Come on.

Be cool, grab your gear and get-- 

AAAHH!

And then, after Batman has caught him and tied him upside down, we get this dialogue:

I don't know man, I swear.

Guy paid me a grand to boost the truck and dump i into the river. That's it. That's all.

But everything went bad.

...

I-- I wanna turn-- Whatchallit-- --State's evidence.

Take me to the cops. The D.A. The Feds, I don't care. Just take me in.

"Whatchallit"...? Does that sound anything at all like Lonnie Manchin...? 

Now, both Croc and The Riddler were notably having trouble thinking, and were acting much, much dumber than usual, so I suppose it might later be revealed that Anarky has also had his mind messed with by The Crown of Storms, but, given that he has never been an inmate of Arkham, that seems extremely unlikely...and his relative lack of brains here isn't presented as an anomaly the way that Croc and Riddler's were (Other than Batman commenting on Lonnie's "friends" seeming "pretty stupid" and then later asking "What was the plan here, Lonnie? Because this one seems pretty weak", Batman doesn't acknowledge how out of character his old enemy is).

Remember, Lonnie wasn't just an ordinary genius like Batman, Tim Drake or Barbara Gordon, but he later used a "biofeedback learning enhancer" to make himself ten times smarter than he already was, as well as fuse the two hemispheres of his brain, giving him a uniquely brilliant mind. Lonnie Manchin should seem at least as smart as Batman or Lex Luthor or Mr. Terrific. He should use big words. He shouldn't say "Whatacallit". He knows the term "state's evidence".

•In general, I'm not a fan of killing off characters, as it just seems intuitively counter-productive for a storytelling "universe" like DC Comics to voluntarily reduce their cast and options for their creators...and, of course, as we know now, no one stays dead anymore. Not Bucky, not Jason Todd, not Bary Allen. Hell, even Uncle Ben has come back to life temporarily, hasn't he? So, killing off super-comics characters at this point in time just sets up some dumb resurrection story in the future...I mean, someone is going to have write a story where Alfred has been put in a Lazarus pit and then went into secret butler training for years before he shows up alive at Wayne Manor again in a year or three or ten.

So, killing off Alfred, something that actually happened during Tom King's run, sometime after I tired of it and dropped Batman...? Not a fan! I think Fraction's run helps demonstrate why. Clearly Fraction wanted to write Alfred into his Batman story, and he wanted it badly enough that he went ahead and did so despite the fact that Alfred was, you know, dead. Which means we get scenes of him as Batman's imaginary friend in this book, like that above.

The scenes aren't poorly done or anything, but they do serve as a constant reminder that maybe King and DC shouldn't have killed him in the first place...?

Birds of Prey Vol. 4: On the Run (DC) This book collects the final nine issues of writer Kelly Thompson's Birds of Prey run, and I'm sorry to see it go; this is the longest I've stuck with an iteration of the title since Gail Simone's first run, circa 2003-2007 and thus, obviously, the one I think is the best since. 

Now, there are basically two ways to conclude a series like this once the publisher decides to cancel it for whatever reason...and by "like this" I mean one featuring a team that has starred in various one-shots, miniseries and ongoings for 30 years now, and is thus all but guaranteed to return in a new book before too long. 

The first would be to simply end the series, wrapping up whatever plotlines were ongoing and maybe giving the characters a bit of a sendoff, while implying that the team will be staying together and continuing to have adventures, just off panel, rather than ones that are chronicled every month in a new issue of a comic book. The other would be to temporarily break up the team, scattering the cast so that they can be used elsewhere, and leaving it up to some future writer to reassemble some version of them. 

Here, Thompson does the latter, and I assume this has something to do with the fact that most of the cast she has been using have other comics in which they are appearing. I know Batgirl Cassandra Cain is currently in a so-so ongoing series, for example, and I have heard that Black Canary is appearing in Tom Taylor's current Detective Comics run (along with Green Arrow; I wonder if Sin will be as well...?), and Barbara Gordon will be starring in a new book in which she goes to jail (the events of which might prove a little challenging to reconcile with those of a Birds ongoing). 

The in-comic reasons given for the team's dissolution seem somewhat abrupt. Babs and Canary decide to break up the team simultaneously, which allows for a sharing of the blame and a demonstration of their co-leadership. 

Babs has realized that the team has essentially made themselves a target to bad actors who want to get their hands on all of the data Oracle has acquired over the years (and, in this case at least, powerhouses Big Barda and Sin/Megaera are targets for different types of possession by those same bad actors), something that Thompson has space and time to foreshadow. 

And Canary wants to spend some time with Sin that doesn't involve the constant pressure of a superhero team, something that feels more tacked-on (There's a sense that this particular ending wasn't necessarily originally planned for, and that Thompson might have had to wrap the series up a little more quickly than might have been ideal; there are other elements of these issues that would support that).

These nine issues are technically two different story arcs—"On the Run" and "Unreality"—but as both feature the team in conflict with the same team of evil opposites, and the bad guys' plot carries from one arc to another, it's essentially one big, novel-length adventure...although it seems to climax somewhere closer to the middle, at the end of "On the Run".

The Birds follow a series of over-obvious clues into a series of also obvious traps (the review at Collected Editions mentions that the connective tissue here isn't as strong as it could be, among other problems with the comics collected herein), the most spectacular of which involves shooting Barda into orbit, blowing her up, letting her fall back to Earth and, the New God thus weakened, allowing one of the bad guys to take over her body, resulting in a cool, menacing visual: A "blacked-out" Barda with a big, white, circular "eye" in the middle of her distinct silhouette. 

While under attack, the Birds must try to figure out who their attackers are and where they are, eventually taking the fight to them. These attackers call themselves The Shadow Army, and consist of Copperhead (who primary artist Sam Basri gives little skin "wings" under his arms, and draws as overall quite menacing looking), Velvet Tiger, Batman Beyond's Inque and new characters Golden Lion and Daemon Prime, the latter of whom seems to be a sort of anti-Oracle, and to have an intriguingly weird design, which looks kinda like...comfy Doctor Doom...? 

(He also talks in a font that suggests an electronic voice and, at one point, Barda crushes his windpipe but he recovers panels later; I would have liked to learn a bit more about his nature, as, by the end, I wasn't clear if he was a regular human guy, or a robot, or some kind of cyborg or metahuman. Maybe we would have learned moer about him had the series not been canceled when it was...).

When the Birds realize that they are in danger, this gives Babs the excuse to call and warn all of the past members of this particular team, all of whom get at least a one-panel cameo here (the only characters to have appeared previously in the series that are missing seem to be Xanthe Zhou, who briefly appeared at the end of one arc in an unofficial capacity, and Meridian, the Mia Mizoguichi from the future...although she will appear briefly in a flashback later in the trade, as it is apparently her tech that allowed Inque to time travel back from Batman Beyond time to the present of 2026). 

And then, when it comes time for a Birds vs. Shadow Army showdown, the good guys call in the reserves, so we see most of these characters join them for a battle...and then a post-victory dinner, during which we learn that John Constantine cannot use his magic to create noodles. 

Written a little differently, it wouldn't be hard to see how this might have been a climax of a decent final story, as it allowed for the whole cast, going back to the very first mission in the very first story arc, to reappear and then work and hang out together one more time.

But then it's time for "Unreality." See, The Shadow Army gets away at the end of "On the Run," and they have yet to use some of the stuff we saw them steal earlier in the arc. This plot involves the Birds going undercover in new "skins" to infiltrate "The Game," an apparently annual event in Gotham City where a super-smart influencer young woman hosts a hybrid game that seems partly online and partly IRL, with some technology involving a blending of the two. It is all a cover for her real goal, which is also a callback to earlier in Thompson's series.

Here, I concur with some of the points in the Collected Editions review, and it seems as if the arc might have needed a little more room to breathe...and/or that maybe Thompson and company found themselves having to rush or squeeze a bigger story into a smaller space. There's a point near the beginning where I felt like I skipped a page or a scene, as we jump into talk of The Game so soon, and then what seems like the set-up for a cliffhanger (All of the Birds subjected to a gas that seems to make them evil and threaten Barbara in the last panels of one issue/chapter), doesn't actually get picked up on in the next issue, but instead simply jumped over...I guess implying that the gas just wears off...? 

I confess that I didn't quite understand everything that happens here, like the precise mechanics of Barda's "big" idea.

That said, Thompson manages to sell this temporary "ending" of Birds of Prey, and, when Barbara and Canary discuss needing to rethink the team, Thompson seems to be commenting directly on the IP and a challenge for the next writer to launch a BOP series.

Here's Barbara explaining her rationale for dissolving the team: 

The Oracle data. It makes us too big a target. For the Shadow Army, for a corrupt GCPD, for Maia, still out there looking for revenge. And so many more enemies.

I think the world needs the Birds, but I have to think about how else we can protect ourselves...If every other mission is the Birds of Prey protecting ourselves, our data, then we're not really heroes.

At least not ones that are making much of a difference. I mean, how many times has our headquarters blown up? We have to find another angle.

"Is that possible?" Canary asks, and Barbra answers, "There must be a way."

If so, it's up to the next writer—or maybe Thompson herself, on a later BOP revival—to think of that way.

As always, the best part of the book is Thompson's strong grasp on the characters, the nuances she's found within them and expanded into her own particular takes on them, and the relationships between those characters, particularly those that don't seem to belong in the same panels, like Barda and Batgirl (Indeed, as the team shares a drink, and Barda attempts to name this era of the team, everyone rejects her first suggestion of "The Barda Era," but they are more accepting of her second attempt, "Big Barda and Small Bat Era".)

(I also liked a short exchange between Barda and Megaera near the end, as the two talk goddess to goddess.)

Like too many modern comics, I'm afraid that Thompson's run, even though it lasted just a little over two years, didn't have a single artist involved, but a whole series of different artists often working in quite different styles, and thus the book didn't have a consistent look and feel to it. Here, Basri draws the majority of the book—Vicente Cifuentes and Cliff Richards draw the rest—and there's really only a single section (the Richards one) where the style changes so dramatically as to kick me out of the narrative. 

I honestly can't say enough good things about Basri's art, though, and I hope to see more of it somewhere soon; it was good enough that I didn't even miss original series artist Leonardo Romero when Basri was drawing.

That said, there is one page that I found completely baffling, and I'm going to share it here with you guys, not to shame the creators, but because I honestly need help understanding what I'm seeing.

Here's the page in question:

This is the beginning of a new scene, so there isn't really any additional context. Batgirl approaches Copperhead as he's moving some nondescript barrels around a warehouse and muttering to himself, he notices her and calls her out, she jumps towards him while he grips some object in his hand that seems to spurt flame, and then he says he's going to kick her ass in the next panel, the mysterious object no longer in his hand or anywhere to be seen.

So, um, what happened in panel four there...? 

At first, I thought maybe he had some kind of taser weapon, but again, it's not there in the next panel. Did Batgirl throw some sort of flame or energy spurting projectile at him and he caught it? (The drawing of Cassandra doesn't really suggest that.) Did the colorist mis-color his drool as fire...? (But if that's the case, there's still the issue of the object itself.)

After turning the page, I returned to this one and pondered it for a while before eventually giving up; whatever is supposed to have happened in panel four, it doesn't seem important to what precedes or follows it.

...

You know, it wasn't until just now, a week or so after reading this book for the first time and trying to puzzle that panel out, and after having spent a while writing all these paragraphs, that I have another guess. 

I noticed that the font and look of the Copperhead's dialogue balloon changes from normal in the first two panels, to more jagged and rough in the second panels. 

Flipping ahead about a dozen pages to when previously mentioned sorta cliffhanger, in which the Birds expose themselves to a drug The Shadow Army was after to see what it does (after Oracle and Batman thoroughly tested it to make sure it wasn't toxic, of course), the affected Barda's dialogue appears to have the same font and balloon shape.

So perhaps Copperhead had some sort of handheld gas-dispensing device and then purposely dosed himself with the drug in order to fight Batgirl while under its effects? 

Readers wouldn't know it at that point in the story, but we will later learn that what the drug does is make people more aggressive. (Of course, if that were the case, then Batgirl should have an idea of what it does, shouldn't she? Because she doesn't mention Copperhead using it as Babs is about to expose them all to test it...).

The other problem with this theory, which I'm becoming more and more convinced is what really was meant to be conveyed in that sequence above, is that Richards draws it to resemble flame or energy more than gas in that panel, while it looks more gaseous when Basri draws it in the later scene and, for whatever reason, colorist Adriano Lucas gave it a degree of luminosity in the Copperhead scene, while it's a duller, flatter color later on. You can see the same drug being administered to the Birds in this later scene, by Basri. (Again, note the style of Barda's dialogue.)

Am I dumb, or is that page Richards drew featuring Batgirl and Cassandra not very clear...? Did no one have trouble making sense of it before it was published, or after? (Remember, I'm reading the trade, so presumably a few thousand people have already read this scene in the single issues before).

Anyway, back on topic: This was a really fun Birds of Prey series overall, and I'm sorry to see it go.

I hope Thompson gets to play with some of these characters, and in the DC Universe, as much as she likes in the future, same as Basri. (I do kinda regret that we never got an appearance by Mister Miracle, who Canary namedrops at one point here; the great fun of Barda in this BOP is, of course, that we get to see her without her husband and the other New Gods, which has so rarely been the case in her history, of course, but wouldn't mind seeing how Thompson's Barda interacts with her husband...) 

Brume Vol. 2: The Forest of Lost Souls (Hippo Park) I reviewed the first volume of this series for Good Comics for Kids, and I was intrigued enough by the cliffhanger that I wanted to find out what happened next, even if I wasn't writing about it for the site. It stars a little girl with mysterious origins who plays at being a witch...and then turns out to maybe actually be a witch after all (At the very least, she performs some powerful magic and defeats a dragon in the first volume).

In this volume, she and her friends—a bespectacled little boy with a crush on her and a very smart piglet—go looking for the village's lost witch, which involves exploring the very dangerous sounding location of the subtitle. 

They do not end up finding her here, but they find some important clues, and the series continues.

I wanted to share what spread from the book, as an illustration of just how good the storytelling is. At one point, Brume and her friends are set upon by a pack of huge black wolves. Just look at this scene! (I tried to scan it a few different times at different settings but it kept coming out looking poorly.)

The growling, roaring wolves fall at them like an avalanche, a roughly triangular mass, with their snouts pointed at their intended prey like arrows. The other panels in the layout are also sharp, pointed triangles, resembling the shape of dangerous blades, as the reader is shown important details—the shocked and panicked wide eyes of the children, the empty eyes of a wolf, and its fanged, drooling mouth.

Wow, what a spread...!

Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead Vol. 19 (Viz Media) While it hasn't come up in quite a while, it was established way back in volume 2 that the zombie virus could also turn animals, as we saw when Akira and Kenichiro faced off against a huge zombie shark in an aquarium, made bizarrely mobile by the legs of human zombies it had apparently gobbled up sticking out of the bottom of its body.

In this volume, the gang head to a zoo, so the fact that animals can be zombified is particularly relevant. They are there looking for ostrich eggs, which are needed in the creation of the vaccine their scientist ally has been working on...but, since "ride an ostrich" is on Akira's bucket list of things he wants to do before becoming a zombie himself, well, why not kill two birds with one stone...?

Of course, perhaps the ostriches have all been turned into zombies at this point. Akira is adamant that they have not, though, given their great speed, their ability to perceive potential predators and their all-around awesomeness.

Another thing to keep in mind? Porcupines absolutely cannot shoot their quills, but creators Haro Aso and Kotaro Takata come up with such an awesome scene involving a porcupine doing so here that it is well worth the perpetuation of that fallacy. (This book is not available digitally on Hoopla, or else I would totally take a screenshot of the spread on pages 70 and 71 and share it here, even if it did spoil one of the best parts of this volume, as it is so awesome that one cannot help but want to show it to others. Here's a hint, though: It alludes to a scene from Terminator 2, and Takataeven draws an image of Arnold Schwarzenegger in the background to make sure readers make that connection.)

Amusingly, the gang enter at the petting zoo, where they face a variety of what should be relatively small, harmless animals, although the plague has made them pretty menacing. If you've ever wondered what a zombified sloth or capybara might be like, this volume provides answers.

They also meet a zombified honey badger, which they are all apparently unfamiliar with (Perhaps they are all too young to have seen that honey badger video on YouTube from years ago...?), and would have totally ended them all...were it not for the timely intervention of a new, totally badass character who makes her entrance riding a tiger.

Despite her warnings, they proceed to the safari park part of the zoo, where all the really big, really dangerous animals are, in search of ostriches. Not to spoil things, but it turns out Akira was right: Not only have the ostriches managed to avoid getting bitten by any zombies up until this point, they are also pretty awesome, and end up saving the day...not unlike the pod of dolphins that saved Akira and Shizuka earlier in the saga. 

I obviously love this series, as I am still reading 19 volumes in, but I thought this volume was particularly strong, thanks in large part to the concept of a zoo full of zombie animals, something I've thought about off and on since the Hitman two-parter "Zombie Night at the Gotham Aquarium".

REVIEWED:

Iron Man: Super Smash! (Abrams Fanfare) After Mike Maihack's trilogy of "Mighty Marvel Team-Up" OGNs starring Spider-Man, Abrams started a new series by Dean Hale and Douglas Holgate focused on Iron Man (Maihack doesn't seem to be done with Spidey though, as a fourth one, guest-starring "Thor?! (And Friends)" is due out this month). Hale and Holgate's first one, Something Strange!, guest-starring Doctor Strange, was pretty good, of course, but this new one, in which The Hulk takes Tony under his wing and attempts to teach him how to smash properly? It's brilliant, and head and shoulders above the first. It's a great portrait of Iron Man, it's a great portrait of The Hulk (if a rather particular, somewhat idiosyncratic version of the big guy) and it features a veritable parade of various Marvel monsters from different creators and differing vintages (Although you can see Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's Fin Fang Foom, who appears sans shorts, on the cover above). I still think it's weird that I now read more comics featuring Marvel heroes from publishers like Abrams, Viz and Scholastic than I do from, you know, Marvel, but with results like this, it becomes more understandable why the comics publisher farms so much of their popular comics-making out to others these days. Anyway, more on Super Smash! here. 

Supergirl's Family Vacation (DC Comics) Although this all-ages original graphic novel was almost certainly commissioned to have another book with "Supergirl" in the title on the stands when the Supergirl movie came out, it could hardly be more different. In it, writer Brian T. Snider and artist Sarah Leuver send the Super-Family of Superman, Supergirl, Lois, Jonathan and Nat Irons on an outer-space road trip in a reconfigured Supermobile, only to have our heroes become embroiled in a plot to liberate a planet that looks a little too perfect from some bad guys, who come in the form of some surprise Justice League villains.  It's great stuff. I reviewed it for Good Comics for Kids, and then wrote some more about my favorite parts in this blog post. 

Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse Versus The Mouseton Society of Evil (Fantagraphics) I wouldn't be surprised if there are comics readers or critics who think differently but, as far as I'm concerned, when it comes to Disney, ducks > mice.

That said, there's no denying the old-school superhero comics appeal of this imported European adventure album, in which Mickey and friends (including Donald Duck, so at least there's some duck content here!) are faced with an evil alliance of many of Mickey villains of varying degrees of notoriety (You probably recognize a few on the cover, which includes a version of some of Scrooge's foes, The Beagle Boys). 

More here.