This is a fresh start I can get behind

Werewolf By Night: New Wolf Rising tpb
Marvel Comics
Creators: Taboo, B. Earl, Scot Eaton, Scott Hanna and Miroslav Mrva
Release date: April 2021

I’m a werewolf fan; the wolfman is my favorite among the various great Universal monsters. Always has been.

I don’t recall when I first learned of the Marvel Comics character Werewolf By Night/Jack Russell, but the great Mike Ploog art was surely a part of that first exposure. I have all of that first run of the character in my collection now thanks to the Marvel Essentials series of black-and-white reprints.

There have been some attempts to update the Jack Russell/Werewolf By Night character, either in the pages of Marvel Comics Presents or self-titled miniseries throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, but I never much cared for those stories. They often seemed to focus more on gore and killings, things I’m not really a fan of in my horror fiction.

I heard some good things about this title in single issues. I wasn’t entirely sure I would like a Werewolf By Night updating without the Jack Russell character at all, but making a new werewolf character a Native American youth and setting the adventure in the southwest was intriguing. I decided to give the mini a try in trade format, and I was pleasantly surprised by the result.

This series doesn’t ignore Jack Rusell’s history; although the previous WBN title character does not actually appear, he is name dropped a few times. The story of 17-year-old Jake and how he chooses to deal with the family curse that afflicts him is interesting. But the creators here also throw in a classic Marvel western character, Red Wolf, and a secret group of bad guys genetically experimenting on folks.

It all adds up to a very solid read with some beautifully nice artwork. Like a lot of modern comics, this story doesn’t actually come to a final resolution in these four issues. Rather it sets up events that may or may not continue in a future series or another title. I hope to see more of this new Werewolf By Night cast of characters.

I’m back, these creators are back and these villains are bad

Dear Super-Villains 
DC Comics 
Creators: Michael Northrop and Gustavo Duarte 
Release date: April 2021 

Hello, Kiddie Cops, and welcome back to the first new blog post in a spell.

I initially stopped posting here for two reasons. First, I’d recently started a new job that was taking up more of my time. Second, my comics buying was dropping to very few titles at the time, and I was getting a little worried that I might be just talking about the same handful of titles over and over again. I didn’t want the blog to suffer because of that.

Jump ahead almost two years, and I’m still not really buying that many new monthly comics. But I am still buying and enjoying a handful of new titles every month. My decreased regular pull list has allowed me to try some new things. And buying fewer new comics each month has allowed me time to read some of the many, many comics, trades and more that I’ve purchased over the years but never had a chance to read before and to finally re-read some favorites I haven’t explored again in several years.

Now, this blog has always been about celebrating comics that I love. You try some new things and not every one of them is going to be to your liking. But I don’t want to dwell on comics I don’t like. If I didn’t like it, why spend more time with it and make myself continue to feel bad about it? I’d much rather give a shout out to creators, characters and projects I enjoyed in an attempt to help others discover the same delight for themselves.

And I’ve found myself doing just that over the last several months again. I just wasn’t doing the celebrating here. I was writing much shorter bits of praise for some recently read comics, then sharing those thoughts on other platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. In the past few months, I’ve shared praise for books like The Marvels Project by Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting; Batman Universe by Brian Michael Bendis and Nick Derington; Point of Impact by Jay Faerber, Koray Kuranel and Charles Pritchett; The Booster Gold hardcovers – The Big Fall and Future Lost – by Dan Jurgens; Pulp by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips; the two Robin Archives from DC Comics; Infinite Frontier Nightwing by Tom Taylor, Bruno Redondo and Adriano Lucas; and Somerset Holmes by Bruce Jones, Brent Anderson, April Campbell and Ed King.

There’s nothing really wrong with posting about comics on those platforms. I’m sure I will continue to do so. But my comics-related posts on those platforms were mixed in with other kinds of posts – politics and job and family and real life, those kinds of things – and not likely to be seen by too many people outside my immediate circle of followers and friends.

At one point, this blog had a decent following, and if I start posting regularly again, it may have more of an audience again, giving my attempts to promote good comics a potentially wider audience.

Which brings us to this digest-sized modern original graphic novel, a sequel to the popular book I reviewed in my last post here nearly two years ago. Once again, the book focuses on some inquisitive youngsters who email their questions to super-villains this time instead of the members of the Justice League. As you can likely tell from the image above, the villains featured include Harley Quinn, Lex Luthor, Catwoman, Grodd, Giganta, Sinestro, Black Manta, and for some reason, Katana.

Michael Northrop’s words and Gustavo Duarte’s illustrations make for a whimsical, fun follow-up tale to Dear Justice League that I heartily recommend. To my taste, this volume was a little more loose than the first volume, but what do you expect from a group of villains all vying for the top spot? They’re not going to act the same as the heroes, obviously.

Dear Super-Villains is absolutely another fun read. Check back soon for something else from the realm of comics that I’ve recently read and believe might be worth your time to check out.