Wednesday's New Things: Play It Again, Satellite Sam

1) Bullets, broads, business, a murder on Broadway? What's not to like about the second issue of Satellite Sam, from the suddenly very prolific Matt Fraction and Howard Chaykin. It's good to see Fraction working outside of Marvel again; he does best when he's got the most space to breathe, which is why his best series at that publisher have been the ones where he could do whatever he wanted either because editorial's let him play (Invincible Iron Man, FF) or because nobody's going to crow about what he does with the characters (Immortal Iron Fist, Hawkeye). I was a little disappointed with Chaykin's art in the first issue, which seemed sketchy, half formed, like they yanked it from him before he was done. At the time, I wondered if his pencils always looked like that, and the lack of color just revealed it to me, but, if the preview is anything to go by, he's gotten that in check.

2) I missed the first issue of this one, but its an interesting idea; a few connected stories, with the same author but different artists. I've been wondering about why there doesn't seem to be a market for anthology comics in the US, but if something like this, something where the quality is consistent relatively consistent, can succeed, it would suggest that the problem isn't so much the fact of the anthologies themselves so much as it is what it is that goes into the sausage. Preview here.

3) Holy moly, Jeff Lemire writing and drawing his own horror/sci-fi/historical fiction love story? And will you look at the preview pages? There's something about his art, maybe that wavy line, which removes the pretense of realism and replaces it with a certain sort of impressionism, that's always seemed to call out for the softness of water color; that he's mixing it in with more traditional looking comics coloring suggests that he's getting creative. I'm very excited for this one.