Comic Book Previews for Spring/Summer 2024
I know this is an incredibly long post and each comic book or even publisher deserves their own page, but I don’t have the staff for that. Gus refuses to do any of the admin except for biting my devices and seeing how his Instagram posts compare to others.
Plus, right now my father is on a deeply slanted roof working on my windows and I’m distracted about the possibilities of him falling off. In other words, this massive post with galleries of comic previews that look cool is the best I can do right now.
Bonus!
I have Gus and Ollie’s first comic book available at a couple of places including Amazon. However, if you’d like to name your own price, you can get it for FREE or whatever you find fair at Gumroad.
I have not been reading. Another slump has hit me. I have perused some previews of upcoming and newly released comic books. I’ve been filling my spare time with hoping to spot wildlife, but it mainly amounts to feeding blue jays and chipmunks.
Review: I Did Manage to Read One OGN!
I finished my press preview of Goblin volume 2: The Wolf and The Well by Eric Grissom and Will Perkins from Dark Horse Comics. They are two of my favorite people in comics and basically in general. They’re good people. Like, the kind of people you’d want in your bunker when the world ends just to be around kindness. If you saw Don’t Look Up! and recall the family sitting around the dinner table scene, that’s what I mean.
This sequel to volume one is incredible. They’re a team that shows a reader they understand each other. Will’s visual storytelling is expressive and dynamic. All the characters, including Fish-Breath and the other wolves, go through a wide spectrum of emotions. It’s perfectly clear what they’re feeling in each panel. The colors are beautiful giving light to the magical elements and moving everyone from drastically different light sources throughout. All the wolves are uniquely identifiable as well.
Eric’s storytelling impresses me every time. He’s the type of creator (who also knows art) that makes me jealous but in a good way—in the way where I’m so happy to root for him and his successes as best as I can. I also wish I were that good.
Join Eric’s newsletter so that you can follow information on when it’s time to pre-order The Wolf and The Well from Dark Horse Comics.
Here are some preview pages including a few in sequence so you can fall in love with it right now!
Here’s the list of comics I hope to get to sooner rather than later:
Invader Comics
Back to Fairtaylia
Back to Fairtaylia came through Kickstarter via Invader Comics. Written by Jörg Alberts & Roland Heep. Pencils and inks by P.R. Dedelis. Colors by Liezl Buenaventura. Lettering by Mike Stock. Logo designed by Timo Leβmöllmann.
It’s described as:
TopOnce upon a time, five childhood friends found a magical doorway to Fairtaylia, an enchanted realm full of wizardry and wonder. 20 years later they are a bunch of self-absorbed adults who don’t believe in fairytales anymore …until a talking squirrel and a chainsaw-wielding fairy show up on their doorsteps.
In a fast-paced quest to save Fairtaylia from an unspeakable evil, the gang has to evade wicked witches, battle orcs, ogres, and break into Sleeping Beautie’s castle while suffering through fairy farts, skimpy outfits, and several musical numbers.
Good luck with happily ever after…
Our biggest challenge with B2F has been that while it has all the trappings of a children’s book or YA adventure, this is ANYTHING BUT… It’s graphic. It’s raunchy. It’s adult. And it’s a lot of fun!
Abrams / Amulet Books
The Harrowing
The Harrowing is a book that I am anticipating even if it scares my pants off. It’s by author Kristen Kiesling, who is making her comics writing debut, and artist Rye Hickman. The Harrowing is called “stylish, surprising, suspenseful, and unsettling.” The book follows a psychic teen who hunts potential killers… until she discovers the boy she loves is her next target.
TopOn the very day that 17 year-old Rowan Sterling almost, nearly, finally, kisses her longtime best friend and secret crush Lucas, she makes a surprising (and quite unwelcome) discovery. Rowan should be worrying about normal teenage things like attending college and whether Lucas is maybe more than a friend after all. But Rowan Sterling is gifted and she’s having terrifying visions of blood and violence. As her premonitions increase in number and intensity, Rowan seeks her father’s help, but instead finds herself drugged, kidnapped, and sent to a mysterious facility called Rosewood. And it isn’t long before Rowan discovers that it isn’t a boarding school or an asylum: it’s a training center for teens with special abilities who are known as Harrows. Rowan is a Harrow, a seer of death, and her world has forever changed.
Empowered by the skills she’s acquired and ready to change the world, Rowan returns home, but when she reunites with Lucas, she has a vision of him shooting a man in cold blood. Now Rowan is questioning everything she learned at Rosewood—she refuses to believe Lucas is capable of murder—and sets out to protect him from the Harrows.
AHOY! Comics Previews
Deadweights
Deadweights is created by Tyrone Finch and Sebastián Piriz with lettering by Rob Steen. There are various prose stories with illustrations by different writers and artists included.
My Bad
My Bad is created by Mark Russell, Bryce Ingman, and Peter Krause. The color artist is Kelly Fitzpatrick and the lettering is by Rob Steen. Some stories include art by Joe Orsak.
Project Cryptid
Like other comics from AHOY!, Project Cryptid comes with multiple art teams in each issue. And you know how much I love cryptids. They frequently appear in my own Winchester-Nabu Detective Agency stories (sorry, not “mine,” Gus and Oliver’s).
Comixology Originals Previews
I admit that I balked at the idea of digital comics and digital reading in general when the Nook first came out. However, I’ve appreciated the reduction in storage space from stacks of white boxes to small hard drives. I do buy hard copies when I meet people at conventions and can get them signed. Nonetheless, Comixology Originals is a publisher that frankly, surprised me with its quality.
Raise Hell!
Raise Hell! is written by Jordan Alsaqa with art by Ray Nadine and edited by Mark Bouchard. Raise Hell! is a coming-of-age horror comedy illustrated by GLAAD Award nominated cartoonist Ray Nadine (Light Carries On, Messenger, Station Six) and written by Jordan Alsaqa (Cooking with Monsters, Our Sins are Scarlet). In this supernatural 6-issue monthly series set in the mid-2000s, a few bored teens summon a demonic familiar.
She’s Running on Fumes
I read issues 1 & 2 of She’s Running on Fumes and it’s freaking fantastic! Written by Dennis Hopeless and art by Tyler Jenkins, this book is like if Breaking Bad were about a dirt poor mom before the age of high tech. One thing that makes this title stand out is that the coloring is watercolor by Hilary Jenkins. Lettering is by the renowned Hassan Otsame-Elhaou.
Dark Horse Comics
Gilt Frame
Gilt Frame by Matt Kindt and Margie Kraft Kindt, his mother, a writer making her comics debut—is coming in August and at San Diego Comic Con at the Dark Horse booth.
TopTogether the two Kindts are creating Gilt Frame, an eccentric and electrifying crime thriller starring the most unlikely detective duo in the history of murder mysteries. The 3-issue whodunit will be published at Dark Horse Comics through Flux House, Kindt’s boutique imprint that features crime, science fiction, and humor stories, all told and presented in startling and untraditional ways.
A classic whodunit that spans the globe from Paris to Hawaii to Montenegro, Gilt Frame stars Sam, an orphan in his early twenties, and his well-off Aunt Merry who has an outsized appetite for antiques, travel, and solving crimes. Sam was adopted by his aunt years ago and together they have solved some of the most notorious murders in the world. Now their latest Parisian adventure is cut short when they stumble upon a murder scene so bizarre that only a raging psychopath could have produced it. To solve this crime, Sam and Merry will have to wrestle with jewel thieves, art-forgers, gun-runners, the century-old ghost of the woman in black, a lost puppy, and a master French detective who just might solve the crime before they do.
IDW Publishing
IDW is making a LOT of everyone’s favorite kaiju, GODZILLA! There’s also a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with Usagi Yojimbo team-up (I’ve never read either and feel especially guilty about Usagi Yojimbo).
Image Comics
June has been hopping for intriguing looking comics from Image. My TBR from them is long and it’s embarrassing. Image Comics has previews on their site so I don’t think there’s a need to repost all of them here.
Midlife (or How to Hero at Fifty)
The Midlife (or How to Hero at Fifty) volume one collection is out now. Written by Brian Buccellato with artist Stefano Simeone and lettering by Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou.
Rat City
Erica Schultz has been wildly busy on so many different comics with various publishers including Marvel. I highly recommend Rat City (Image Comics) – a perfect MacFarlane Spawn book for people who have never read Spawn (like me!). I read issue one and will be back for more. Erica takes on the roles as writer and letterer. She is teamed up with artist Zé Carlos and color artist Jay David Ramos.
Peter Cairn is an ex-soldier, an amputee, and a Hellspawn in a post-war future. But Peter’s not dead like Al. Peter got his Spawn powers from the nanites in his prosthetic legs—nanites that were affected when Al Simmons initiated his necroplasmic detonation in the present. Al had no clue that the effects would ripple across not just space, and but time as well.
Feral
Feral—by writer/co-creator Tony Fleecs, artist/co-creator Trish Forstner, artist Tone Rodriguez, and color artist Brad Simpson—is up to issue 4 and I’m kind of afraid to read it. Fleecs and Forstner also created Stray Dogs which was another comic about animals with one heartbreaking gut punch after another – but they’re so talented.
Meet Elsie, Lord Fluffy Britches, and Patch, three indoor cats lost in the not-so-great outdoors during a nightmarish rabies outbreak. Without their humans to protect them, the cats rush to find their way home before they’re eaten by the forest full of rabid beasts on their tails.
Our Bones Dust
Our Bones Dust is already in trade volume. Ben Stenbeck wields the story and art roles. He’s joined by Dave Stewart for coloring with Rus Wooton for lettering and logo design.
When an AI archaeologist on a final mission to post-apocalyptic Earth finds a feral child that’s equal parts predator and prey, they form an unlikely bond. Together, the two are hunted by a family of nomadic cannibals across a brutal and bloody landscape, even as a homicidal mechanical menace lurks in the shadows. Finding hope by the end of this horrific adventure may just prove to be very difficult—for everyone!
OUR BONES DUST is the first solo outing of long-time MIKE MIGNOLA collaborator BEN STENBECK, artist on Baltimore, Witchfinder, Frankenstein, and KosHChei! Collects OUR BONES DUST #1-4, plus a bonus sketchbook and variant covers.
There are some new titles that might possibly be things I end up liking: Plastic: Death & Dolls, Scarlett (from GI Joe), Ain’t No Grave, Falling in Love on the Path to Hell, and Bear Pirate Viking Queen.
Bear Pirate Viking Queen
The epic fantasy is a tale of the sea, of Pirates, Vikings, Queens, and bears, warring with each other and trying to assert dominance over the past and future of the world. Beautiful, poignant, and daring—readers embark on the adventure of a lifetime with a story by masterful writer Lewis and with mind-blowing hand-painted watercolor art by Barravecchia, resulting in a book unlike anything you’ve read. The first issue, a breakout hit, immediately sold-out at the distributor level and was rushed back for a second printing. Fans will now have the ability to read the whole series from start to finish in a brand new volume.
The Bear Pirate Viking Queen trade paperback (ISBN: 978-1-5343-8261-9, Lunar Code 0624IM264) will be available at local comic book shops on Wednesday, August 21 and independent bookstores, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-a-Million, Indigo, and Waterstones on Tuesday, September 3. Bear Pirate Viking Queen will also be available across many digital platforms, including Amazon Kindle, Apple Books, and Google Play.
As usual that’s only a part of the list of comics I would love to digest through osmosis. My reading is slow and I’m tired by 2:00pm.
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Founder and Editor-in-Chief of AmberUnmasked.com and Vodka O'Clock Podcast. Author of The Farrah Wethers Mysteries, comic book short stories, prose, and non-fiction. Cosplayer and figure model.