Wednesday's New Things: Floppies and Movie Screens

1. Two $5.00 releases from Fantagraphics this week. The first, Cosplayers 2, is the second in a series of short ones from Dash Shaw. The first issue of the book seemed pretty well received, a slight step back from Shaw's weirder impulses, but still subject to his propensity for surreal coloring and still a little out there. It seems like there's an opportunity to get meta here, either about fandom or about comics themselves. Same thing goes with Italian cartoonist Sergio Ponchione's DKW, which features one story each in the style of Steve Ditko, Jack Kirby, and Wally Wood. I'm always intriguing when an artist goes for a straight pastiche, instead of just incorporating an influence, in a particular project-- how do you approach it? Which era of an artist do they choose? Is their Kirby, for example, different from somebody else's? You can bone up on your Italian and see some preview pages here.

2. As the cover says, this is the French comic from 1982 that inspired that a supposed to be excellent just now coming out Bong Joon-Ho movie starring Captain America. I don't anything about the writer, Jacques Lob, or the artist, Jean-Marc Rochette, but the preview panels included with this review look excellent, if highly composed and a little stiff.

3. With the release date for Guardians of the Galaxy now less than a month away, Marvel is stepping up its promotion by putting out both a Star Lord comic and a new Rocket Raccoon one, written and drawn by Skottie Young. Young is a real talent, someone who takes his cues from gag comics as well as caped ones, and its nice to see him on a frontline Marvel book as opposed to cover duty or a Wizard of Oz adaptation. I was pretty into the idea of this book, but the preview is busier than I would like, and it strangles some of the visual comedy. Still, this one is probably worth picking, particularly if Young focuses on the action a little more towards the end.

4. This one is exactly what it sounds like, one of Craig Yoe's crate digging releases, but in floppy rather than trade or hardback form. I wonder about some of the choices behind a book like this-- how long is it supposed to go? How did Yoe choose the stories? Why release it as a floppy? Actually, that's the most intriguing-- do books like this sell ok as single issues? It seems to me that this is the kind of thing that a completist or historian would shell out good money for a hardcover. The stories inside really do look great, though. They don't make 'em like this anymore. Can you imagine the kind of things we'd be seeing now, if Wertham hadn't ruined everything?