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↳Animals #1: ChickensChickens is a 28 page comic set in a world where animals raise humans for food. It is the story of a young hen named Marigold who struggles to keep her family together. Chickens is written by Eric Grissom (grissom) with art by Claire Connelly (thinkillustration)
What a weird and dark and strange story, I can’t wait for the next part.
#cxsubmit: Every Wednesday we suggest to you one of our new releases from our acclaimed self-publishing platform comiXology Submit.
I still love this comic and Claire has become one of my favorite creators. Check out her stufffff!
Animals #1 & #2 are part of our Women of Indie comics sale this weekend!
Use code CREATE to save on comics by @beckycloonan, @spikedrewthis, @thinkillustration, @kateordie, and more!
A comiXologist recommends
DOC UNKNOWN Vol. 3: The War for Gate City
Doc Unknown is a series of great fun that saw it’s success surge through ComiXology Submit and Kickstarter. Doc Unknown is a self-publishing dynamo with its 2 successful Kickstarters keeping the series going the last four years. After seeing such success with the first installments, writer Fabian Rangel Jr (Extinct, Los Muertos) turned a four issue mini-series into a brilliant and fun epic of Golden-Age inspired heroics. Add the heavy black shadows, strong jaws, and choice colors of Ryan Cody’s illustration and readers are left with a perspective more akin to the pulp noir books of the 1940s. All that’s missing are colorful and interesting villains for the good doctor to smack around.
Just kidding! There are tons of them! There are many foolish villains for Unknown to break the teeth of! Especially in this, the thrilling conclusion!!
We find our hero…having a deserved night out with his special lady-type friend, Helen. It is New Year’s Eve, and there isn’t anything like a penthouse party with loved ones to soothe a hero’s sore knuckles. But alas, Warren (that’s the Doc’s real name) sees an impossible green light shining off a rooftop blocks away. Warren finds that he is the only person that can see this light, and must depart from the festivities without delay. Not even a page later does Doc Unknown swing his foot into the jaw of the dreaded Sub-Creatures of Min Yao! I don’t know what they are, but they’re scary and he swings his heel right into one. Before that page is done, he punches another one’s teeth out in the proper pulp way!
A few wild fists and one big green teleportation light later and the Doc comes to in an abandoned apartment surrounded by three cloaked figures: The Conjurer, the Apparition, and another Doc Unknown?! It is revealed to Warren mere moments after the reveal of his doppelganger, that there are “legions” of other Doc Unknowns living in hundreds of other timelines. But that particular detail isn’t important right now, because these three would-be kidnappers have to warn Warren of the coming war and the hand he is to play in it!
This whole series is fantastic! The energy is actually non-stop, and it has every potential opportunity for a ridiculous thing to happen set up to happen one after the other with a new ridiculous thing! And yes, that is what a story is supposed to do. The difference here is the timing, and pacing is faster and in no way drags out. No punches are in the least pulled, especially when the book wraps up. Doc Unknown goes through 2 separate fistfights, gets projected through time and space twice, meets a wizard both when he’s old and young, and fights with a demon using shuriken and smoke bombs before expelling it back to the “Hidden Realm.” And that only puts you at maybe 20 pages into this volume, give or take a page or two.
Give this volume a look and definitely take a look at the whole series. In the meantime, I’m going to work on a nickname for fans of this series.
I see nothing I don’t like about this book. It is some of the most fun anybody can have reading a comic. Fistfights, gunfights, possession, mystics, wizards, kung-fu, ambushes, warrior cults, inter-dimensional hero guilds, and some other outrageous sweetness grace the pages of just this volume. I have to insist that if you’re interested, you should go back and read this series before this volume, but you don’t have to in the least. Volume 3 stands on its own as one hell of a thrill ride.
Abbadon
From prolific writers Jimmy Palmiotti & Justin Gray (Jonah Hex, Power Girl, 21 Down) with art by Fabrizio Fiorentino & Alessia Nocera, Abbadon tells the tale of a city steeped in sin. The Western boomtown of Abbadon is poised for a bright future until it experiences a series of gruesome murders. U.S. Marshal Wes Garrett is called to town to solve them. A legendary lawman, Garrett is known for killing a notorious murderer named “Bloody Bill” who once cut a brutal swath across the country and left scores of mutilated men, women and children in his wake.
Garrett’s arrival reveals the secret that Abbadon Sheriff Colt Dixon has desperately been trying to conceal: that the recent victims have all been murdered in the same style as the killer Garrett supposedly stopped years ago. Garrett and Dixon join forces to uncover the killer’s identity in a town so full of corruption that everyone is a suspect.
A comiXologist recommends:
Fresh Romance #5
by: Brianna Klemm
I’m not a big romance fan. Preferring dystopian futures and alien landscapes over googly eyes love letters; I haven’t picked up a bodice buster since tittering with girlfriends on the middle school playground. But every month Fresh Romance makes me swoon, giggle and grin so much that I must admit that I am falling in love with romance.
Fresh Romance is a collection of 3 comic series in the romance genre. There’s a little bit of love for every type of lover – it’s got magic, queer politics and a period piece all baked into one comic! And in issue 5 each of these worlds are heating up.
In this month’s installment all of the stories see our protagonists grappling with difficult feelings. We reach a touching conclusion in The Ruby Experiment when Ruby feels all the feelings and discovers that her next mission may hit very close to home. Tensions continue to run high in Ruined. Catherine and Andrew could use a little of Ruby’s help to understand one another’s hearts – though their bodies seem to be very much in sync! In School Spirit Justine let’s love overtake fear when Malie threatens to end things!
With art that jumps from adorable to stunning in a page turn and stories that tug at your heart strings and your funny bone Fresh Romance 5 is a must read this Wednesday.
[Read Fresh Romance #5 on comiXology]
Brianna is Director of Product at comiXology she lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son. Her superpower is getting everywhere 10 minutes early.
A comiXologist recommends:
Gunsuits #3
If your cup of tea is giant monsters and killer bugs, then Gunsuits is for you. If massive, gun-mounted, pilotable mech warriors float your boat, then Gunsuits is for you. It carries all the necessary explosions, pitched battles, and loud-mouthed military mouthing-off a good Mech story from the Western Hemisphere needs.
It’s a good time wrapped in a slice of fried action. Much like another of my recent recommendations, GRIMFISH, it follows the idea of a good and simple science fiction formula. Although, GUNSUITS doesn’t follow the “lonesome journey through the cosmos” like GRIMFISH, and instead follows the good ol’ trope of “killer monsters meet killer robots.”
So the story almost always goes, beasts from another plane of reality cross into our own, invading all of our major cities. Mankind answers back with big, metal, badass bots piloted by every mean military stereotype one writer can cram into this four-issue series. Writer Paul Tobin does a good job not getting bogged down by all his characters and instead shows us a team who looks after each other when they aren’t too busy poking fun and getting drunk between battles. Heck, if the world was ending and all I had to look forward to was blowing up a few monsters before my inevitable last stand, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone who didn’t want to just put their feet up and knock back a brew.
PJ Holden, our dear artist on this fun little series does a fine job of keeping things hectic and energetic without making it impossible to see what is happening panel to panel. Holden tells the story across his layouts excellently, and with such a sharp hand for finer detail. Honestly, I was never at a loss for what was happening at any point and that is really important with stories like this. With rubble, gore, explosions, gunfire, and any other craziness all over the page, it becomes increasingly easy to lose the necessary storytelling elements in order to (you guessed it) follow the story, and Holden loses none of it. He is a very skillful artist, and it shows.
A comiXologist recommends:
Fresh Romance #4
by: Lindsay Smith
I don’t know about you, but I have a select group of comics I refer to when I want to… convert someone.
No, not like that. There are no spiked kool-aid drinks, stranger-danger, basement baptisms here. When I want to convert someone to comics, I have a list of titles that I know will work for someone who says that they just don’t think they “like comics”.
Well, TWIST, until recently I would have told you that I just didn’t really have an interest in comics in the romance genre. Fresh Romance, an anthology from Janelle Asselin’s Rosy Press, has totally bungled my stance on romance comics and I hope the creators behind it are only the first in an exciting revival of this genre.
There are 3 romances per issue of Fresh Romance; “School Spirit” which is a queer high school tale amongst a very charming flirtatious group of friends with a dash of magic added in, “Ruined” which follows a regency era arranged marriage and is utterly compelling despite a familiar story line, and “The Ruby Equation” which shows us what life could be like as a fairy/barista who is so caught up in her assignment to make matches that she gets lost in the numbers and forgets about true chemistry.
In issue #4 of Fresh Romance, out this week, the group flirtations start to catch up with Malie, Justine, and Miles. Catherine and Andrew have finally reached their wedding night… but Catherine might be hiding more than we’ve realized. And Ruby learns just how hot your cheeks can feel when you start blushing… plus she might be starting to understand what chemistry really is.
With irresistible characters written by Sarah Kuhn, Kate Leth, and Sarah Vaughn, accompanied by stellar art from Arielle Jovellanos, Sarah Winifred Searle, and Sally Jane Thompson, Fresh Romance #4 is certainly worth your while, even if you think the romance genre just isn’t for you.
[Read Fresh Romance #4 on comiXology]
Lindsay Smith is a member of the International Production Team. She lives in Brooklyn and has been invited to join multiple cults…. She probably just has one of those faces, right?
A comiXologist recommends:
Grimfish #1
I’ve said before that smaller, independently published reads can be a hit or miss. It’s like finding buried treasure when you’ve tracked down a hidden gem. It’s like being Jafar and you found what the talking desert tiger head called “the diamond in the rough.” Or it just feels good and probably relieving to know your money wasn’t wasted.
It’s a dangerous leap of faith to find the right new read, but fear not, put a bit of that faith in GRIMFISH #1, because it is some solid and easy science fiction to relax with.
I love independents that make it easy for me to follow. GRIMFISH #1 is a space explorer and his floating orb Artificial Intelligence mixing it up on a distant world. They cross paths with bad guys, fight them, and meet up with friendly locals. See? Easy. Easy as in good and easy!
Comics are intended inherently to be read as a casual medium, and this creator does well to not overwhelm the senses. Aaron Pitman is a Chicago-based artist with a keen eye for color, and he really shows it off in this first issue. His casual painter’s eye for red’s and blues across the cosmos of stars and planet surfaces is exceptional. The barren wastes, open expanses of sky, and wide shots make their colossal size easy to grasp in their purple and yellow washes. The establishing of the surroundings is so easily overlooked by many storytellers, but Pittman utilizes it here as his most important supporting character with immediacy and effectiveness.
Some people find this facet of the Space Opera subgenre to be kind of heady and too existential a concept to fully grasp without exposure to characters and settings for a long run (see Battlestar: Galactica, Star Wars, Firefly). GRIMFISH however seems to approach it more gently, intimately, and most certainly leaving the reader with a moment to moment pensive beat just staring at “it all.”
I seem to have started digressing into genre tropes, so allow me to sum up as simply as possible how I feel about the beautiful backgrounds and the moments inbetween the action-violence of GRIMFISH #1:
It’s a big and beautiful universe out there. It doesn’t all have to be about shooting. Sometimes there are also big robots and laser-knives.
A comiXologist recommends:
The Mighty Titan #1
The Mighty Titan #1 is good old-fashioned superhero action. It’s fights in tights without the moral ambiguity. It’s punching robots without the consequences of not having fully grasped the villains driving motivations. It is a simple plot with a family-accessible atmosphere. “Simple” should not be taken as representative of a negative opinion. I liked that I was able to read through this issue without the excess of extenuating circumstances that surround almost all of superheroics nowadays. Sometimes it is just better to read about a handsome fellow punching robots and monsters for the city he protects.
This story sets us up with out-of-work forensic investigator Mark Williams. Mark has been unemployed for some months and is in the process of reworking his resume for his next round of intense job hunting. All his fierce typing on his laptop is interrupted by a tank-like robotic automaton wreaking havoc on the streets across from the very coffee shop Mark is working!
The police are at a loss, for what can they do if they can’t even run the mechanized menace down with a squad car? Chicago’s resident hero Titan arrives to mop the floor with the tin terror! The pages of fisticuffs to follow are thrilling and worthy of the late-Silver Age.
The creative team that brought us on this trip to a simpler time comes from the group of writers and artists over at Red Anvil. The team comes with a few titles under their belts already with Joe Martino and his Shadowflame series, Luca Cicchitti with his series Misfits, and Jeff Austin with Unit 5. Looking at this roster and their experience, you can enter this book knowing it couldn’t be worse than decent, and easily come out pleasantly surprised by a genuinely enjoyable experience. Sometimes relatively small publishers are a hit or miss, but Red Anvil has a solid product here in The Mighty Titan #1, and for those of us who miss a good safe read for most any age this seems to fit the bill.
FRESH ROMANCE #1 is on sale right now! You can buy it on our website or on Comixology!