A sampling from the most recent Previews catalog of what looks like a winner in the month of March! All books are available for pre-order at your local shop (that’s us)!

War of the Green Lanterns – Well here it is the next big Green Lantern thing.  A crossover between all three Green Lantern ongoing books: Green Lantern, Green Lantern Corps, and Emerald Warriors.  If you’ve been reading any or all of these books since Brightest Day started you can put together what puts the Corps at civil war with one another. If not, this crew is pretty good at catching up the audience for the big story (i.e. Sinestro Corps War and Blackest Night).  Day-glo punches will abound!  Pgs 68-70

Jimmy Olsen #1 – This has been a most excellent back-up running in Action Comics the last few months.  With the back-up program kyboshed at DC they’ve done the service of collecting all that material with the unpublished strips here in this nifty 80 page one-shot.  Crazy, quirky, and always ready to swerve delightfully with its cliffhangers, this is a gem to look forward too. Pg 93

Butcher Baker, the Righteous Maker #1 – Joe Casey, bless his heart, is never afraid to be ambitious and never afraid that he’ll fall short on what he’s trying to say.  Dude has Ben 10 money and therefore carte blanche to make whatever comics he feels like.  With Mike Huddleston (vastly underrated), he takes on the waning years of a former patriotic superhero…like Dark Knight Returns and Captain America, just as violent and with way more sex.  It’ll be fascinating to see what he has to say about America and age among other things. Pg 168

Daniel Clowes’ Mister Wonderful: A Love Story – First serialized in the New York Times Magazine Daniel Clowes’ new story is finally collected here with new pages.  The story centers around your usual hopeless case Clowes protagonist and his blind date and the things they go through on that trying date.  It’s Clowes and if you’ve read Clowes you know what this is going to read like and if you haven’t why not give this a shot?  Pg 303

New Character Parade GN – Johnny Ryan is as raw and nasty as comics get. This is a new collection of his gag strips which will surely be as nasty, mean, and on-point in what it is saying as his past material.  I love it. Pg 303

Venom #1 – I’m surprised I am putting this here.  Kudos to Rick Remender for finding a new hook to the character, a black-ops weapon of the extreme variety, and God bless him for putting Tony Moore on it who draws monsters good and junk.  Remender did X-Force right, of all things, so he may be the savior of 90s properties here in the 2010’s. Marvel Pg 1

Fear Itself: Prologue – Comics didn’t hit the 100,000 orders mark a bunch of times this year and so comes the return of the line-wide event.  Ed Brubaker and Scot Eaton are kicking it off with a set-up one-shot set in WWII and about the Red Skull.  Marvel Pg 16

Captain America #615.1/616 – Of the slew of Captain America stuff hitting for the movie and the character’s 70^th Anniversary, it’s the main book that appears to have the most interesting material.  #615.1 is another of Marvel’s jumping on point issues with art by the amazing Mitch Breitweiser who was born to draw Cap.  Then #616 is a 104 page monster 70^th anniversary spectacular and it appears entirely new material by smorgasbord of really talented folk and a Travis Charest cover that’s so beautiful you’ll cry. Marvel Pgs 22-23

Annihilators #1 – Break it down:  the cosmic universe of Dan Abnett and  Andy Lanning is continuing here in a mini-series that’s half a 22-page story staring the likes of the Silver Surfer, Beta Ray Billy, and Quasar and half a 22-page story starring Rocket Raccoon and Groot (who are awesome).  The book retails for $4.99 and when you break that down into its two halves that’s $2.50 an issue for two very high quality products.  Veerrrrry nice. Marvel Pg. 42

Among the staff members at Heroes I’m likely the one with the least background in visual art.  My creative tendencies tend more toward music and the written word.  Strange then that my first review of 2011 concerns one of 2010’s most dynamic art books.  Denys Wortman’s New York is a fascinating book however you look at it.  For me, the real hook of this publication lies in its stranger than fiction backstory.  Noted cartoonist James Sturm (James Sturm’s America: Gods, Gold, and Golems) apparently came across a single strip of Wortman’s, grew curious, and set out to find out more about this largely forgotten artist.  As luck would have it Sturm was able to find Wortman’s son who had a shed full of his father’s art that was in danger of succumbing to the elements.  Sturm’s good timing led to our good fortune.

On one hand, the fact that an artist of Wortman’s caliber was nearly lost to the ages is a pox on the comics community.  How could the industry forget work like this?  On the other hand, it might be a simple case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  Just as you have to possess luck along with talent to break into this industry, I guess to some degree the same can hold true for cementing one’s legacy.  Wortman lived and worked in New York City in the ’30’s and ’40’s, and most of the strips in this book act as a document of those times and places.  There are sarcastic one liners being lobbed back and forth from women out on their apartment balconies, visages of streets with horse-drawn carriages and early automobiles packed together like sardines, and charcoal renderings of Coney Island’s Cyclone roller coaster. 

Was Wortman trying to consciously play the role of zeitgeist-catcher?  I’m not sure if any artist of any genre can really achieve that measure by his own will.  On the off chance that he succeeds, it usually falls upon future generations to determine the successes or failings of a work.  More likely, Wortman was creating these strips for his own pleasure as much as anyone else’s.  And somewhere between the conversations and the gags, the bricks and the pushcarts, we as readers in 2011 open up Wortman’s book as if it were a time capsule.  And like Canadian cartoonist Seth’s fictional story It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken, sometimes we inadvertently stumble upon the work of an artist that grabs us, sits us down, and instantly etches itself upon our consciousness.  So it has been for me in my encounters with Denys Wortman’s New York.