Category Archives: Image

The Top 10 Ongoing Comics of 2012

Well, it’s that time of the year: the time when every obsessive with an Internet connection (and some obsessives, like me, without one) make lists.  Best Album of 2012 leads into Worst Album of 2012 and culminates in Best Comeback Performance in 2012 Of An Artist Who Started His Career in the 1980s But Suffered Setbacks In The 90s.

We here at read/RANT like to keep things pretty simple.  We talk about what we know: comics.  Also, sometimes, TV and movies.  We’re Renaissance Men, capable of being interested in many things at once.  But, admittedly, it’s mostly comics.

Last year, there was just a single list: The 10 Best Graphic Novels of 2011.  This year, I’m splitting my Top 10 into two separate lists: Top 10 Ongoings – what you are reading now – and an upcoming book on the Top 10 Graphic Novels.  There are some books that may be thrilling as ongoings, but only very good as collections – or books that had a fantastic year, but don’t yet have a collection released!

So I’m hoping this will help bring a little diversity to the lists.  We’ll see.  Anyway, click through for the first list: The Top 10 Ongoing Comics of 2012, then chime in down in the comments and let me know what your favorite books were this year!

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This Week In Comics: 8/15/12

This week in comics, Saga #5 finally exists just in time for Saga #6 to come out, I completely forget to pick up Avengers Vs. X-Men, and Rorschach gets the impossibly bland mini-series you always hoped he’d have.

This cover, though lovely, has absolutely nothing to do with what’s in the issue? And what, you ask, is in it? Azzarello’s best 20 pages on the title to date.

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This Week in Comics: 7/11/12

This week in comics, Frankenstein, Demon Knights, and The Shade continue to impress, Image launches a pretty fantastic new title in Revival, and we can finally stop giving a crap about owls.

Pictured: A scene that is still a good 15+ years off from where this issue ends.

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This Week In Comics: 6/27/2012

This week in comics, Before Watchmen: Nite Owl shows us why we should have feared this whole silly prequel business more, Abnett & Lanning launch a new superhero book for Boom! and two of Gotham’s many, many massive criminal conspiracies clash in All-Star Western.  Would you like to know more?

Everyone is super hostile to the kindly old man inviting them all into his house. It’s like a gritty retelling of The Sandlot.

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Review: Creator Owned Heroes


I have never really loved, or even hated,  anything produced by Gray or Palmiotti and 30 Days of Night, my sole venture into Niles’ work, was underwhelming to say the least. So I bought this book solely on the strength of its concept. An anthology equally featuring serialized creator-owned stories and comics-magazine-style content, e.g. interviews, pictures, etc. Although, as many have commented, the format isn’t exactly novel,  the creator-owned  hook is what really has caught people’s attentions.  As with virtually every form of entertainment, it’s incredibly pervasive for comic book fans to elide a certain key term: industry. The comic-book industry, by all accounts, doesn’t seem to possess the most progressive model regarding labour issues. Like most fans, it’s something I know in the back-of-my-head yet my desire to see Batman hook Superman in the face with a kyprtonite mecha suit ensures that those thoughts stay exactly there – in the background. However, I do want to see comics – as a medium, as a format, as an industry – grow, expand, mutate. In the last three decades it certainly has. The advent of the graphic novel, literary acceptance, the looming spectre of the digital revolution. None-the-less, for those unlucky enough not to be one of the handful of superstar writers, they don’t seem (and this from an outsider’s perspective) to reward their creators commensurate with the blood, sweat and tears that go into production. Enter creator-owned heroes. With this book, these guys are really trying to carve out a new space free from corporate exploitation but also editorial interference. The numbers will tell if this is a successful venture financially, but creatively, it mostly delivers.

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This Week in Comics: 5/16/2012

This week in comics, the Avengers and the X-Men settle their differences via walk-off (with special guest judge David Bowie!), Image wows with Dancer #1, and I confuse the plot of a major event comic with that of Zoolander to mildly comedic effect. Very mild.

Let’s dance!

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Review: Saga #1

“It was a time of war. Isn’t it always?”

I’m going to say this up front: Saga, Image’s new ongoing from Brian K. Vaughan (Y: The Last Man) and artist Fiona Staples, is my first new must-read book of 2012. Combining gorgeous creature design and playful worldbuilding with cynical, adult storytelling, Vaughan and Staples have crafted a book that is genuinely unlike anything else on the shelves right now.  Funny, bloody, dramatic and, at times, ridiculous, Saga #1 does everything an opening issue needs to do with economy and style.

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Review: Hell Yeah #1

I’ve never been a reader of Imagine comics.  Never even thought about checking them out, yet when I saw Hell Yeah: The Last Generation of Heroes on the shelf on the 7th, I just had to grab it.  Maybe it was just the odd title, or the cover art.  To be honest, I think it was the “KA-POW, asshole!”  Whatever it was, something made me pick this title up, and it was worth it.

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