Wednesday is New Comics Day! Each week, The Comics Observer picks brand new releases worth checking out that should be suitable for someone who has never read comic books, graphic novels or manga before.
These are out today! If you like what you see here, click the links to see previews and learn more about them. Then head to your local comic book store, or check out online retailers like Things From Another World and Amazon. Let us know what you think in the comments below or on Facebook.
For a full list of this week’s new releases, see comiXology and ComicList.com.
The Massive #1 by Brian Wood and Kristian Donaldson
The Massive #1
Written by Brian Wood
Illustrated by Kristian Donaldson
Published by Dark Horse Comics
Genre: Action/Adventure
32 pages
$3.50
In a post-war, post-crash, post-disaster, post-everything world, the environmental-action trawler Kapital scours the earth’s oceans for its mysteriously missing sistership, The Massive. Captain Callum Israel, a man who has dedicated his life to the ocean, now must ask himself—as our planet dies—what it means to be an environmentalist after the world’s ended. Callum and his crew will come up against pirates, rebels, murderers, and thieves as they struggle to remain noble toward their cause. Can you save a planet that’s already doomed?
* The perfect follow-up to Wood’s DMZ!
“The Massive is a book to keep an eye on in 2012.” —IGN
At the end of the world, the story begins.
New York Mon Amour by Jacques Tardi
New York Mon Amour
Written by Jacques Tardi and Benjamin Legrand
Illustrated by Jacques Tardi
Translated by Kim Thompson
Published by Fantagraphics Books
Genre: Crime
84 pages
$19.99
A quartet of big-apple-centric stories by Tardi including “Cockroach Killer” and “Manhattan.”
Many years ago, Jacques Tardi was introduced to American audiences with “Manhattan,” a grim and grimy story of depression, madness and suicide in New York City whose appearance in the premiere issue of RAW magazine was instrumental in defining both that magazine’s virtuoso aesthetic and its dark sensibility. Three decades later, New York Mon Amour collects “Manhattan”and three other tales of the Big Apple — rendered by Tardi with just as much panache and you-are-there detail as Paris or the trenches of World War I in his other books — in one spectacular volume.
Aside from “Manhattan,” the centerpiece of the book is the graphic novel “Cockroach Killer,” written by Benjamin Legrand. This violent,surreal conspiracy thriller, starring a hapless exterminator named Walter, features a striking two-color black-and-red technique unique in Tardi’s oeuvre, and remains one of the cartoonist’s most startling, confounding works. New York Mon Amour is rounded off with two short stories written by Dominique Grange: “It’s So Hard” (starring John Lennon — but not that John Lennon — and never before published in English) and “The Killing of Hung” (a story of revenge and redemption).
New York Mon Amour is a crucial and unique addition to Fantagraphics’ acclaimed Tardi collection.
Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt by Chris Hedges and Joe Sacco
Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt
Written by Chris Hedges
Illustrated by Joe Sacco
Published by Nation Books
Genre: Non-fiction, Journalism, Travelogue
320 pages
$28.00
Two years ago, Pulitzer Prize winner Chris Hedges and award-winning cartoonist and journalist Joe Sacco set out to take a look at the sacrifice zones, those areas in America that have been offered up for exploitation in the name of profit, progress, and technological advancement. They wanted to show in words and drawings what life looks like in places where the marketplace rules without constraints, where human beings and the natural world are used and then discarded to maximize profit. Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt is the searing account of their travels.
The book starts in the western plains, where Native Americans were sacrificed in the giddy race for land and empire. It moves to the old manufacturing centers and coal fields that fueled the industrial revolution, but now lie depleted and in decay. It follows the steady downward spiral of American labor into the nation’s produce fields and ends in Zuccotti Park where a new generation revolts against a corporate state that has handed to the young an economic, political, cultural and environmental catastrophe.
[Note: Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt mixes prose with short comics interludes.]
