Brandon-Graham

We don’t often consider single issues here at Comic POW! We prefer to look at story arcs and completed series to get a better feel for what the author and artist were trying to accomplish. However, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at some comics’ first issues to predict where we think it might be going and see how that compares with where the series actually goes. This series is called “At the Beginning” and it’ll usually be for series right as they are starting up. ...

Regular readers of Comic POW know I’m a huge fan of Brandon Graham. When I discover a new creator that I like, I tend to binge on their works. Fortunately for my bank account, Brandon Graham has a pretty small canon of work in which he is both writer and artist. Prior to working on Multiple Warheads his major non-porn was was King City. King City started off on Tokyo Pop and then the American division went belly up. The story was left untold until Image Comics picked it up for the second half. The story is, in my eyes, a cross between Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction and Brian Lee O’Malley’s Scott Pilgrim. From Pulp Fiction it takes a couple low level gangsters - a professional burglar and a human smuggler who are best friends and then spends a large portion of the story dealing with their lives outside their jobs. From Scott Pilgrim it borrows a world that’s ALMOST, but not quite our world. One of the characters is a veteran of the Korean Zombie war. The cat burglar literally uses a cat that can become nearly any device with the right injection.

While I was on vacation last week Image Comics announced a boatload of new series coming out soon. Here they are: The Fade Out I’m not a huge fan of Ed Brubaker, but I do respect his work on Fatale. It’s going to be ending after its 24th issue and Brubaker will be working with Sean Phillips (who he also worked on Fatale with) on The Fade Out. Here’s how Brubaker describes it: The Fade Out is my ultimate noir story. It’s a brutal crime story set in late ’40s Hollywood, and all spinning around the mysterious death of an up-and-coming starlet. For people who’ve been waiting for us to return to Criminal, this will be exactly what they’re looking for, but on a much more epic scale—going from studio backlots to the debauchery of the rich and famous, and even stretching back to the horrors of World War Two. I am a fan of noir, but what’s really exciting about this announcement is how it’s shaking up the industry. Phillips and Brubaker will have full creative control and ownership of their projects at Image for the next five years. Image Comics was founded because of the Big Two having ownership of characters created while working for them. But this is an even further move. I think this new move is motivated by Thrillbent and Panel Syndicate proving that the Internet is finally coming through on its promise of no longer needing a publisher. So if publishers want to stay in business, they need to provide something above and beyond what creators can get doing it on their own. It’s an exciting shakeup that could lead to even more creative works in a space that really needs it.

This week I came across the following quote from a Paul Pope article: Asked by Yang if he had tried to do an all-ages book with a franchise character, Pope said he did test the waters, only to be knocked back. “Batman did pretty well, so I sat down with the head of DC Comics. I really wanted to do ‘Kamandi [The Last Boy on Earth]’, this Jack Kirby character. I had this great pitch… and he said ‘You think this is gonna be for kids? Stop, stop. We don’t publish comics for kids. We publish comics for 45-year olds. If you want to do comics for kids, you can do ‘Scooby-Doo.’ And I thought, ‘I guess we just broke up.’” ...

When I first heard about Multiple Warheads: Alphabet to Infinity I had no idea who Brandon Graham was and the solicit didn’t particularly sound exciting: Sexica and her Werewolf boyfriend Nikoli travel across a sci-fi, fantasy Russia smoking singing cigarettes. Meanwhile the organ hunter Nura is sent out with a severed head and instructions to find its body. I mean, Sexica? That just sounds like it’s going to be such a corny, stupid story. And a werewolf boyfriend? I don’t even like horror. So I ignored it. But I kept coming across all these incredible Image Comics series like Saga, Chew, The Manhattan Projects, and Harvest among others. That combined with Comixology making the first issue free made me decide to take a look. Unfortunately, Comixology does not have the original Oni Press One-Shot where Graham introduced us to Seixca and Nikoli, but Graham does a good job of catching the reader up when the first issue of Alphabet to Infinity starts. ...