By Dustin Cabeal

I give the notion of killing Hawkman a 5 out of 5. Unfortunately, I won’t be giving this comic the same score. As far as comics go, this one is generic and lacks any real consequences. If Hawkman actually dies, that will likely be the only thing to happen in the comic. The main reason is the underdeveloped DC space line of books. What’s currently going on in them? Are there any? Nothing and no are the answers to those questions so being thrust into space to watch Hawkman die is almost as anti-climactic as seeing him alive at the beginning of the issue.

By Patrick Larose

There are some things I really like about the comic book industry right now. There’s still plenty of bad to go around. The single-issue market is still broken, the comic book movie boom didn’t save the industry, and nor has their business practices ever successfully adapted to the Internet era and while diversity's up, it's never quite as up as it needs to be. All that said, however, it’s got one thing going for it that I dig a lot. Now more than ever do comics have such wide breadth of tonal and genre variation.  There’s not just one perfect comic out there for somebody, there’s four or five.

By Patrick Larose

Intertwined is a comic that sells itself as a mash-up between the crime noir and kung fu genres, however, I think I’d offer up a different description. Rather, I’d argue that Intertwined is a comic that uses the machinations of Hong Kong action cinema to tell a story ultimately driven by the pathos of superhero storytelling.

By Dustin Cabeal

Madness is a challenging story to tell. It can be everything and anything, but giving it structure and keeping it feeling like madness… is a difficult task. That’s what this series is up against, and after reading the first issue, I can understand why of all the titles announced for DC’s Young Animal, that Shade had people the least optimistic about it. 

By Mike Badilla

Rise of the Black Flame #2 starts off on some crazy rollercoaster of which I can't even really say as to what is happening. We are in a German museum, and people are looking over all these relics of civilizations long past. We see a young man closely examine a picture, of which the picture talks to him, then they young man becomes an older grizzled man, then the face talks to him more, then he's flying through a void towards the face... then he is awoken by someone kicking him in the back. Our man, Farang, is awoken by the person that owns the house and told he has visitors. A man and a woman approach, and Farang recognize the woman as "Sarah," which appeared in issue 1. She pays the house owner to cover Farangs late rent and tells Farang that he is working for her now, which seems to upset him.

By Justin Wood

I mean come on. How could I not read this book with a title like that?

A Deadman spinoff with no canonical anchor to any current stories, 'Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love' is kind of exactly what I've been missing from superhero stories, not to mention horror stories, lately. Besides some overtly modern touches, 'Dark Mansion of Forbidden Love' feels like a comic from another time. Expertly paced, moodily atmospheric, and elegantly illustrated, this limited series takes the mic away from nearly everything being done at DC and teaches a class on what actual storytelling looks like.

By Chris Tresson

TMNT Universe #2 is out this week from IDW. I reviewed the first issue and it was a pretty good start from the creative team, so I’m heading into the second issue expecting more of the same… Let’s see, shall we?

By Justin Wood

Eric Powell wrote this? Big Man Plans Eric Powell? The Goon Eric Powell? The review copy I received was coverless and lacked a title page, meaning it took some faint Google research to dig up the basic creator info on Dark Horse's new miniseries Chimichanga: The Sorrow of the World's Worst Face. It's a comic with a subtitle; it must have had a preceding story, and I was curious how what I had just read had managed to be some sort of sequel miniseries from Top Ten publisher Dark Horse. And there it was. Written and created by Eric Powell.

By Laramie Martinez

Like its predecessor, episode two of Luke Cage moves at a slower pace. The simmering tensions between characters come to a head by the end of it. In a lot of ways, this episode coupled with episode one serve as the origin of Luke Cage as a hero. And while dramatic, the big bang at the end of this episode isn't the most surprising thing about the series' second showing. No, the most surprising thing turns out to be a little piece of character insight in the form of what I call the, "Pull the trigger" speech. To find out what that is and what I think of the show after the first two episodes check out my review below.