What could be funnier than uniting a Moose and Squirrel to fight the cold War villainy of Boris and Natasha (fresh from their triumphs in War and Peace) and their fearless leader, FEARLESS LEADER? What if you engage the comic book legend and current scribe of the vastly under-rated Garfield comic book Mark Evanier along with perhaps the finest big foot comic illustrator in the business Roger Langridge?  If that isn’t  enough to get you to try this 4 issue mini-series from IDW? Well…. Here’s one thing you don’t see everyday Chauncey–What’s that Edgar? A long overdue Jay Ward Studios cross-over as the denizens of Frostbite Falls, MN meet everyone’s favorite Mountie Dudley Do-Right! Will Snidely Whiplash co-operate with Boris Badenov? Will Natasha fall for Horse and make Nell jealous.  That’s kinda weird.  Anyhoo…  Perhaps a Quisp and Quake cameo? We can only hope.These comics are guaranteed to be a total riot.

SETH’S PICK :: ALL NEW GHOST RIDER #1: Admittedly, Ghost Rider has never been a book for those seeking multi-layered depth of character and plot.  It’s always been a fairly straightforward idea.  There have been exceptions to that – notably in the excellent, under-read run of Jason Aaron – but mostly, it follows a reliably simple formula:  a motorcycle rider gets inhabited by a spirit of vengeance and brings holy hell down on evils both supernatural and human.  This week’s All New Ghost Rider looks to build a new layer onto this formula.  No, it’s not just because this incarnation drives a ’69 Dodge Charger instead of the time honored motorcycle.  This Ghost Rider is an 18 year old gear head named Robbie Reyes, who is navigating the violence he’s grown up around.  I applaud Marvel for introducing another minority as a title’s main protagonist, but am also thankful that they brought this particular creative team together.  Felipe Smith and Tradd Moore’s collaborative designs for this character (in and out of the Ghost Rider form) represent a very modern aesthetic, which matches the new energy they seem to be aiming for.  While I’ve long appreciated the art of Tradd Moore, his work here not only looks more kinetic than anything he’s done before (and that’s saying a lot), but it looks like he really enjoys working on this book.  I love comics where the creators’ enthusiasm for the work seems to run off the page. 

FOUR! Four straight weeks with HUGE HeroesCon 2014 Guest List updates?! Get used to it! Check out today’s update and please tell your friends about the show on Facebook and Twitter!  Today’s update features the art-making gang from Essential Sequential plus a couple of our favorite old friends. Tickets for Heroes Convention 2014 are on sale now!

CREATORS! Artists Alley tables are still available but they are going fast! Reserve your space today!

MARK IRWIN – Inker: Future’s End, Justice League Dark, Uncanny X-Men

DAVE JOHNSON – Artist: Coffin Hill, Deadly Hands of Kung Fu, Batman

CASEY JONES – Artist: Fantastic Four, Excalibur, Birds of Prey

SUNNY LEE – Artist: Gen 13, Young Justice, Spyboy

DAN PANOSIAN – Artist: John Tiffany, Batwing, All Star Western

ANDREW ROBINSON – Artist: The Fifth Beatle, Dusty Star, Batman, Winter Soldier

TIM SALE – Artist: Captain America White, Batman, Spider-Man, Catwoman

MATTEO SCALERA – Artist: Black Science, Dead Body Road, Ghosted, Indestructible Hulk, Secret Avengers

Heroes Convention takes place in Charlotte, North Carolina, June 20-22 2014. Get your 3 day passes today! The full guest list (so far) is here.

Dark Horse celebrates the 20^th anniversary of Mike Mignola’s Hellboy, by designating Saturday March 22^nd HELLBOY DAY! To celebrate, Heroes Aren’t Hard to Find are giving away limited edition prints – featuring art by Mignola, Richard Corben, James Harren, Kevin Nowlan, and Ryan Sook – to any customer purchasing a Hellboy or BPRD hardcover or trade paperback! We’ll throw in other goodies while supplies last, like posters and window clings! Free-to-all will be a Hellboy sampler comic featuring two classic and two brand new Hellboy tales! We’re even pulling out the beautiful Hellboy print from HeroesCon 2010 to sell in the store, available signed or unsigned, all in honor of everyone’s favorite Beast of the Apocalypse! Needless to say, the freebies will be on a first come, first served basis, so come on out early Saturday and get your Hellboy fix!

ANDY’S PICK :: Nemo: Roses of Berlin is the newest installment in the League of Extraordinary Gentlemen and Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill do it again.  The creative team takes us back to 1941 and Janni–Nemo’s daughter (and current Captain of the Nautilus)– gets involved with the military action of WWII.  What makes this book along with all the other LoEG books stand out above other books is the ‘fictional’ world in which these adventures occur.  It is not just populated by the heroes of British Pulp fiction, comic books, radio and TV series, Moore and O’Neill add extra layers to their reality. For example, in the world of LoEG, the Beatles did not exist.  Instead it was The Rutles that changed the musical world in the MOD sixties.  So as we drift back towards Nazi era Europe, it is not Adolph Hitler in charge, but rather Adenoid Hynkel–the title character from Charles Chaplin’s farce The Great Dictator.  This looks to be something special.  Worth the money; worth the effort.

CRAIG’S PICK :: SEX CRIMINALS #5: In 1970s fandom, we used the term “groundlevels” to describe comics that combined fan genres like science fiction and fantasy with adult visuals and subject matter(s). “Groundlevel” refers to the middle position these comics occupied between the DC-Marvel “mainstream” and the excesses of Crumbian undergrounds. Dave Sim’s Cerebus was one early groundlevel comic, Wendy and Richard Pini’s Elfquest another, and nowadays, when I look at the artistic and commercial renaissance at Image Comics, I see the rebirth of the groundlevel aesthetic. Saga gives us adult science fiction–adult enough to precipitate an iPhone and iPad ban on the images of gay sex in Saga #12–while Pretty Deadly splices the Western to hallucinogenic storytelling à la Alejandro Jodorowsky’s cult movie El Topo (1970). These comics are weird and adventurous, but the genres are familiar.

A big part of the adult content of the groundlevels was sex. I bought Star*Reach #1, my first groundlevel, in 1975, when I was twelve years old and too young to know what sex was. Star*Reach #1 was edited by Mike Friedrich, the man who coined the word “groundlevel” and who convinced Howard Chaykin, Walt Simonson, Steve Skeates, and other pros to contribute to his comic and exercise creative freedoms mostly not available at the Big Two. One artist who ran with the freedoms Friedrich offered was Jim Starlin. His contribution to that first issue of Star*Reach have a lot in common with his trippy work on Captain Marvel (both feature Death as an actual character in their stories), but Starlin drew his green-skinned Star*Reach girls topless, something Stan “the Man” Lee never brought to the pages of the Fantastic Four. I paid a pricey 75 cents for Star*Reach #1, took my dirty book home, read it, and immediately grew hair where there wasn’t hair before.

The Image comic that would seem to carry forward that “dirty” groundlevel tradition is writer Matt Fraction and artist Chip Zdarsky’s Sex Criminals, a book with a highly-publicized high concept: it’s about a couple (Suzie and Jon) whose orgasms freeze time. The book gets funky quickly–the second interior page of Sex Criminals #1 is a full-page splash of our protagonists bangin’ in a public bathroom–but sex actually isn’t what this book is about. After the bathroom scene, Sex Criminals #1 shifts abruptly to a direct-address monologue by Suzie, who tells us about her troubled past (her father’s murder, her mother’s grief), her oddball adolescent school days, her early sex life, and her meet-cute with Jon. She also talks about masturbation, and her discovery of the magic properties of her orgasm, but even that deepens our sense of her as a character, as in the scene where Suzie  pauses reality so she can scream at her mother about all the emotions they repress and leave unsaid during the normal flow of time. Sex Criminals incorporates elements from many genres–pornography, crime, a cadre of “Sex Police” out of a Norman Spinrad science fiction novel–but the twin hearts of the book are its characterization and its focus on the emerging intimacy between Suzie and Jon. Sex Criminals is more a rom-com than any other genre.

(If you’re at least 18 years old, and want a more rough trade Fraction, read Satellite Sam, Fraction’s collaboration with Howard Chaykin. For me, Chaykin was there at the beginning, with his hard-R “Cody Starbuck” story in Star*Reach #1, and I’ll probably be ogling a Chaykin drawing of a woman in lingerie and garters when that anvil falls from the sky and pulverizes me. There are worse ways to live and die.)

One element that unites Sex Criminals, Satellite Sam, and almost all of Fraction’s writing is autobiographical passion. In “Avaritia,” the last (so far) volume of Casanova, Fraction’s ambivalence about his status as a star scripter/caretaker of the Marvel Universe inspired Cass’ horrible job as the guilt-ridden destroyer of a dozen universes and continuities. (Every time Cass eliminates a timeline, Fraction repeats like a mantra a hyperbolic, Stan Lee-esque phrase–“sound of spatiotemporal holocaust”–decorated at the panel margins with Kirby Krackle.) The pseudo-autobiography in Sex Criminals is less angst-y, and played more for comedy, with Fraction confessing (in the letter pages) that Jon’s sexual history in issue #2 “is verrry close to my own,” and that a Halloween egg attack came from an incident in his own life. Even as Fraction cannibalizes various genres for the Ballad of Suzie and Jon, he anchors his stories in personal experience.

In the visuals, Zdarsky likewise balances reality and fantasy. On his tumblr site recently, Zdarsky posted pictures of his real-life models for Suzie and Jon, and the resemblance between the models and the drawings is remarkable. The realism of Zdarsky’s figure drawing extends to subtle, highly communicative changes in body language, as in this sequence of panels from issue #3 where Suzie waits for Jon to text or call:

Yet Sex Criminals isn’t a kitchen-sink drama, and Zdarsky makes his pictures bizarre and funny too. The soft, colorful, swirling Photoshop effects that represent Suzie and Jon’s orgasms (and their transition to the frozen world that Suzie calls “The Quiet”) are lovely to look at, as are Zdarsky’s bold, monochromatic, almost-abstract covers. (More info from Zdarsky’s tumblr: each of the original covers for Sex Criminals #1-4 is designed around a single color from the CMYK model, and this week’s #5 incorporates all the CMYK colors: cyan, magenta, yellow and key/black.) Maybe my favorite element of Zdarsky’s art, though, is the incidental detail (or in comics slang, “chicken fat”) he sneaks into his picture backgrounds. When a teenaged Jon stops time to sneak into a sex shop in #2, Zdarsky packs his panels with all kinds of sight gags–one of which is an unexpectedly poignant poster for an X-rated video titled “Not the Life I Anticipated,” subtitled “But Here I Am I Guess” and featuring a topless, frowning woman half-turned away from the camera, shyly covering her breasts with her arms. In Star*Reach #1, Jim Starlin put his green-skinned Servants of Death on display for a uncomplicated voyeuristic gaze, and my 12-year-old self was (and is) grateful, but these days I prefer Sex Criminal‘s ironic, witty raunch.

So: viva the new groundlevels, and viva la Sex Criminals. If you haven’t read the comic before, you should know that the first trade, collecting #1-5, is priced at $9.99 and set to drop in a month or so. I prefer the single issues, because though the trade will feature a process section (titled, ahem, “Making Sausage”) with sketches and commentary, it probably won’t include “Letter Daddies,” Sex Criminal ‘s hilarious letters column, and I need to read Fraction and Zdarsky’s “Sex Tips.” (One example: “Sex is a wonderful and natural way to discover if your partner is a lousy lay or not.” Thanks, fellas!) These days, an active comics letters page is almost quaint and old-fashioned, and maybe Sex Criminals as a whole is old-fashioned too: despite the book’s playfully crude sense of humor, Fraction and Zdarsky insist on humanizing Suzie and Jon and using their fantastic premise as a pretext to explore the thrilling, terrifying experience of falling in love and starting a relationship. Works for me, baby.

SETH’S PICK :: SOCK MONKEY TREASURY HC: This is one I’ve been anticipating for some time now.  At over 300 pages, this sprawling treasury collects all twelve of Tony Millionaire’s award winning Sock Monkey comics, plus a full color novella, an illustrated storybook and a full length graphic novel.  Millionaire’s work, while easily enjoyed by young readers, is also something that adults can appreciate.  There’s an underlying sense of the odd and twisted in these narratives, which are wonderfully rendered in a style that conjures up memories of E.H. Shepard and Lewis Carroll fever dreams.  There’s also humor here, though it’s not nearly as dark as you might have seen in Millionaire’s decidedly adult Maakies strips.  With most of these books out of print, and the individual comics especially difficult to find, this treasury is absolutely the perfect opportunity to see why so many people respect Tony Millionaire and his inimitable work.  Just check out THIS incredible preview available on Fantagraphics’ website to see why I’m so excited about this book. 

3 straight weeks with HUGE HeroesCon 2014 Guest List updates?! Get used to it! Check out today’s update and please tell your friends about the show on Facebook and Twitter!  Tickets for Heroes Convention 2014 are on sale now!

CREATORS! Artists Alley tables are still available but they are going fast! Reserve your space today!

FRANK CHO – Artist: Savage Wolverine, Avengers, Shanna, Liberty Meadows

DENNIS HOPELESS – Writer: Avengers Arena, Cable & X-Force, Avengers Undercover, The Answer!

DAVID MARQUEZ – Artist: Ultimate Spider-Man, All-New X-Men, Joyners in 3D

PAUL MAYBURY – Artist: Sovereign, Catalyst Comix, Aqua Leung, Marvel Strange Tales

BRIAN REBER – Colorist: XO Manowar, Archer & Armstrong, Unity, Batwing

ROBBI RODRIGUEZ – Artist: Federal Bureau of Physics, Frankie Get Your Gun, Uncanny X-Force

TIMOTHY TRUMAN – Artist: Conan the Conqueror, Scout, Grimjack, Hawkworld, Jonah Hex, A Man Named Hawken

DAVE WACHTER – Artist:  Breath of Bones: A Tale of The Golem, The Guns of Shadow Valley

RICO’S PICK :: STRAY BULLETS: KILLERS #1: Fans of David Lapham’s Stray Bullets original crime series will be happy to see the return of some familiar faces in this relaunch. New readers don’t have to worry though, every issue of Stray Bullets has always presented a self-contained story.

SETH’S PICK :: CAPTAIN MARVEL #1:  The former Ms. Marvel has been enjoying a resurgence in recent years, and that can largely be attributed to the work of writer Kelly Sue DeConnick.  Her last Captain Marvel series was as much a character study as it was an entertaining super hero romp.  For this new relaunch, DeConnick is teaming with David Lopez, an artist who, though he might not be a household name, has well established himself as a reliable and gifted artist.  Now, I know there are some among you who are weary of the increasing number of relaunches or new #1 issues.  Recent weeks have proven, however, that it’s worth giving some of them a look.  The recent debuts of She Hulk, Wolverine and the X-men, Ms. Marvel, and Moon Knight have all acted as reminders that there are plenty of opportunities for genuinely fun new comics.  I’d also like to point out that DeConnick is writing at the top of her game at the moment.  Her Image series Pretty Deadly remains a category-defying series that is also well worth your patronage.  With DeConnick’s momentum and the looming probability that Captain Marvel might appear on the big screen, it’s a good time to catch up with the character.