Since the last time we did this, back in April, the amount of comics I’ve purchased each week has gone down dramatically, as you’ll see as we look at the month-to-month comparisons. With the now-standard $3.99 price tag, plus a lot of more expensive specials, I had to start cutting back on my Wednesday buying habits. When you throw in a near-complete historical library available on the DC UNIVERSE app, I’m almost never lacking for comic books to read.
Just because I’ve been cutting back, though, doesn’t mean there weren’t some great highlights over the last three months.
To see the comics I loved in the first three months of 2019, CLICK HERE.
April
Comic Books Purchased: 34
New Series Purchase:
Dick Tracy Forever
American Gods: The Moment of the Storm
Even though my first real experience with Dick Tracy was from the 1990 MOVIE starring Warren Beatty, I still have a weird affection for the character and the world he populates. It’s a hard-nosed detective battling a world of weird enemies while trying to keep his relationship with his true love in tact. Dick Tracy has so much untapped potential, in comics and likely in other media that unfortunately may have been scared away by that almost 30-year-old film.
But the new miniseries from Michael Avon Oeming (the artist on Brian Bendis’ epic POWERS comic book) has been unleashing that potential in the new IDW miniseries DICK TRACY FOREVER. Oeming is taking Tracy out of his comfort zone and into new eras, proving that the character is a classic no matter the year.
Another fun adaptation of classic characters came to an end in April, with SCOOBY APOCALYPSE 36. The last remaining series from the original batch of Hanna-Barbera revamps from three years ago, Scooby and the gang had been put through the wringer, as a deadly nanovirus turned most of the world’s population into monsters. The final issue featured a confrontation between the monsters and the humans, aided by a nano-monster-infused Fred Jones, who was killed earlier in the series. It was a great ending for a series that had been slowly running out of steam.
May
Comic Books Purchased: 38
New Series Purchased:
Angel
Batman & the Outsiders
Batman: Last Knight on Earth
Clue: Candlestick
DCeased
A slight uptick as the calendar turned to May, with a lot of big new series hitting shelves. In addition to a new wave of BATMAN BOOKS, new takes on established properties like the board game CLUE and Joss Whedon’s vampire with a soul, ANGEL, have made for some enjoyable reading.
For me, though, the highlight of the month was the SUPERMAN: LEVIATHAN special, a giant-sized issue featuring work from Brian Bendis, Matt Fraction, Greg Rucka and Marc Andreyko, that sets up a summer’s worth of Superman stories, along with a big event that kicked off in June (more on that, obviously, later). With stories focusing on Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane alongside Superman and Supergirl, the special got me excited for the summer and the other comics coming later this year.
May also gave us the most recent issue of Geoff Johns’ and Gary Frank’s DOOMSDAY CLOCK maxiseries, which may be one of the best single issues of the whole year. Johns managed to take more than 80 years of stories and managed to retcon every retcon so that it wasn’t a retcon any more! If it didn’t fit so well with the larger story Johns was telling, it may have broken my brain.
June
Comic Books Purchased: 32
New Series Purchased:
Event Leviathan
Superman: Year One
Transformers/Ghostbusters
The least amount of comics purchased so far this year, but man, I really enjoyed pretty much everything I bought. Going high on my list of comics for the year is the TRANSFORMERS/GHOSTBUSTERS crossover from IDW, which teams up two of my favorite properties from the 1980s in a series I had no idea I wanted until I saw that it was available.
But the biggest focus for the month was on EVENT LEVIATHAN, the big miniseries to which Brian Bendis’ work on ACTION COMICS had been building. With the best detectives in the DC Universe hunting down information on why one clandestine organization is destroying all the others, the miniseries has so much potential, and the first issue was firing on all cylinders.
After the first issue was released back in March, we got two issue of the GLOW comic book miniseries this month, offering a standalone tale of the women warriors from the NETFLIX series.
That’s it for the first half of 2019! There’s a lot of good stuff coming in the last six months. Look for another edition in October as we delve into the year’s third quarter! And be sure to let us know what you’ve been enjoying in the comments.