Deadshirt

It’s Wednesday and that means new comics. Let Deadshirt steer your wallet in the right direction with reviews (and preview pages) of titles out today from Image, Dark Horse, IDW, Boom! Studios, Archie, MonkeyBrain, Oni, Fantagraphics, Top Shelf, Action Lab, and more!

Lady Killer #1 (of 5)

Written by Joëlle Jones and Jamie S. Rich

Art by Joëlle Jones

Color by Laura Allred

Letters by Crank!

Dark Horse Comics

$3.50

Josie Schuller is the iconic, picture-perfect wife: beautiful, thin, perfect hair – she even wears pearls over her apron while cooking dinner for her nuclear family. Oh, and she secretly kills people for money. This first issue in a limited series reveals little in the way of plot details, but instead presents a regular day in the life of an assassin homemaker, a woman who clearly has some dark history but has chosen to lead a contradictory double life.

The cover art plays with the funhouse imagery of the perfect 1960s housewife covered in blood and gore, and that theme carries throughout the comic. All the snapshots of the quintessential home life in that era, down to the a-line dresses flaired with tulle and the classic kit-cat wall clock, are splattered with dark droplets. The art is truly gorgeous in its detail, with that real life messy and cluttered quality that feels familiar and accessible.

Despite the vague story introduction, this is a fun comic. I was sold in the first scene as Josie, disguised as an Avon lady, attempts to distract a victim by obnoxiously spraying beauty products in her face. Plus, I kind of love the subtle noncompliance vibe of a housewife acting as a contract killer in her spare time. Things will inevitably get more complicated in the upcoming issues, especially when you factor in an overly suspicious mother-in-law and a flirtatious colleague. I look forward to the next panel of Josie’s “aw shucks” reaction to blood-stained high heels.

– Sarah Register

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Feathers #1 (of 6)

by Jorge Corona

Archaia Entertainment

$3.99

A strange, feather-covered baby boy is found abandoned in a dark city referred to only as The Maze. When he’s taken in by a kind but unlikely man, mysterious figures intone that he may be the key to upsetting the balance between The Maze and the shining White City it surrounds. Flashing forward eleven years, the boy Poe has grown into a rambunctious child. His adoptive father only allows him to leave their apartment at night, fearing what would happen if he was discovered. However, Poe spends the days on the rooftops of the city, observing the “normal” children. Meanwhile, Bianca, a child of privilege in the White City, wishes to strike out and have an adventure. She soon gets her wish, entering The Maze with her father to observe the road that is being cut through it so the White City can access the docks without having to deal with the rabble of The Maze. She quickly tires of their guided tour and escapes to find her adventure, where she soon meets up with Poe.

This is a really lovely comic. While there is a lot of information for the creators to get across in this opening issue, they’re always showing you the world instead of telling you about it. Writer-artist Jorge Corona’s characters are really expressive; he’s able to convey much of the emotion of the story in facial expressions and their posture, which frees the dialog from having to do all of the heavy lifting. This book is a real gem and I’m glad to see that Archaia continues to stretch the boundaries.

– Jason Urbanciz

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Escape From New York #2

Written by Christopher Sebela

Art by Diego Barreto

Colored by Marissa Louise

Lettered by Ed Dukeshire

BOOM! Studios

$3.99

This month’s installment in BOOM!’s continuing adventures of Snake “Call me Snake” Plisskin find him in search of, mainly, a cigarette. In the last issue, Snake managed to book ass to Florida (now its own sovereign republic on the brink of war with the rest of what remains of the United States), in this issue we get a good look around. There’s some really great character in these pages of Snake being shown the lay of the land by Florida’s new masters, a pair of eerie twin thirteen-year-old boys named Romulus and Remus. The sequence is punctuated by the twins’ offhanded reference to running out of light poles to hang dissidents from, and the entire issue has a clever running gag about Plisskin bumming cigarettes off everyone he meets.

Structurally, the first two issues of the book have breathlessly moved from location to location (as in the original film). While I think that worked really well last issue, this issue throws maybe too many characters and locations at you in 26 pages. It’s weird to complain about a monthly comic where too much happens, but future issues might benefit from a slightly slower pace now that we’re in Florida for a little while. Barreto’s art benefits from really strong clarity and some excellent character designs (“Meemaw” especially), though there’s definitely something jarring about reading a Snake Plisskin comic that largely takes place in daylight. I sort of lost interest in BOOM!’s other “80’s Kurt Russell/John Carpenter vehicle movie-turned-comic” (Big Trouble in Little China), but Escape From New York has me down for atleast the first arc with Sebela, Baretto and Louise onboard.

– Max Robinson

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Be sure to let us know what you picked up this week in the comments below, on Twitter or on our Facebook Page!