New comics are due to hit the shelves on Wednesday so here’s a look ahead at some of the books we’ll be picking up this week. To see what’s available at Paradox this week, click here.
Matt C: Warren Ellis is a frustrating talented individual. Responsible for some of the seminal series of the Modern Age (with Planetary being perhaps the most lauded example) and arguable expanding the possibilities of the superhero paradigm in the 21st with The Authority, his bibliography is littered with amazing projects that were abandoned part of the way through. I remain thoroughly disappointed that Doktor Sleepless came to an unexpected halt, and the likelihood of Fell ever appearing again has become increasingly remote. Oh, and don't get me started on the aborted newuniversal relaunch for Marvel! So, while he may be working at a level most of his contemporaries only dream of reaching, he does seem to have a problem with actually concluding some of his stories. Marvel have perhaps found an answer to this problem by hiring Ellis to launch their new original graphic novel line, with a done-in-one, in continuity Avengers tale entitled Endless Wartime. Not only does this book provide us with a complete Ellis story but it also sees Marvel enter the OGN business in a big way, something they've steadfastly avoided for years, bar the recent spate of Season One books (and I'm not entirely sure how successful those where). These two reasons are enough to sway be to fork out Endless Wartime and my hope is that it will prove to be the start of a promising new venture for the House Of Ideas. Obviously there are bunch of regular monthly comics out on Wednesday too - Lazarus #4 and Trillium #3 being the highlights - but for me it's all about seeing if Ellis can still work his magic with some established, iconic characters.
Stewart R: When it comes to a good old post-apocalyptic landscape - or perhaps just the predictive visualisation of the ‘natural descent and collapse’ of the human world system we know today - I am a sucker for a city overrun with forest and lush vegetation! '90s cartoon series Cadillacs And Dinosaurs (based on classic comic book series Xenozoic Tales) and the cinematic version of I Am Legend offered up such flora and concrete-heavy locales and it looks like Hinterkind #1 is where I will be heading this week to get my modern comic book fix. The idea that ‘mythical’ creatures actually exist in the world and have been forced into hiding by mankind is interesting enough, but the idea that they now hunt a decimated human population adds an extra level of excitement. It’s a quiet week for me when it comes to Marvel with the delayed Uncanny Avengers #12 (it seemed to miss the boat to the Uk last week) and Superior Foes Of Spider-Man #4 being the only books I’ll be picking up from their section of Paradox. Nick Spencer and Steve Lieber have been doing a sterling job of making SFoSM an interesting and amusing title focussing on C-list villains, and where the Marvel NOW! version of Thunderbolts failed to catch my attention (primarily because the cast there are simply ‘dodgy’ or anti-heroes), this book is easily covering my fix of ne'er do weller stories in the Marvel Universe. My fix of modern day warfare and intelligence operations on the other hand is pretty much covered these days by Matt Hawkins’ Think Tank and The Activity by Nathan Edmondson and Mitch Gerads. While I’ll have to wait another seven days for the former to land in my hands, the latter's fifteenth issue hits shelves around the globe this week and it has to be said that it’s been a cracking read through all thirteen previous installments that arrived within these shores (#9 having gone walkabout somewhere between the US and the UK delivery point apparently!) and the slowly building overriding plot has been complemented by some fine mission stories detailing how anti-terrorist forces and other agencies may well be operating in this complicated modern age.
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