Attention all parents:
Free Comic Book Day is this Saturday May 1st. Go to the Free Comic Book Day website to find a participating comic book store near you. The stores near me usually limit the kids to 3 free comics per child.
Also, make sure, especially those of you with younger kids, to preview the comics your child selects. There will be non-child appropriate comics available. The list of comics for this year is also available on their website:
My suggestions:
Archie’s Summer Splash! #1
Fractured Fables
Mouse Guard/Fraggle Rock
Shrek & The Penguins
Toy Story
Bongo: Free-For-All (Bongo does The Simpson’s comics)
*Love and Capes #13
*The Tick #1
Owly And Friends
*Oni Press Free-For-All!
*Irredeemable #1
DC Kids Mega-Sampler
* means not for younger kids
by Martin Wagner is a amazing story featuring anthropomorphic animals that was never finished due to real-life intrusions. And the sad part of the story is that the best parts of the story were never collected. It’s a strange tale of how art and reality collided in unforeseen ways and killed off one of the best self-published comics of the 1990s.
by Bill Willingham is a novel based on Willingham’s 
comic book series (which if you haven’t read, then you should). The basic concept is that the characters that the fables are based on are real and have had to relocate to our Earth from their original homelands due by The Adversary who has taken over all their homelands. The comic book series is the ongoing adventures of these Fables (Snow White, Prince Charming, Big Bad Wolf, Beauty and the Beast) in their hidden neighborhood known as Fabletown. Peter and Max is the first prose novel based in this world and ABC is working on a 
by Frank Miller is one of the under publicized comic masterpieces of the 1980s. Everyone knows about Miller’s original run on 
. But Miller came back to Daredevil for a couple issues (219 and 226) before working with his 
artist David Mazzucchelli to create an amazing Daredevil story that redefined Daredevil and his supporting cast.
by Matt Fraction is a steampunk comic about a fight between historical figures. Nikola Tesla and Mark Twain are on one side and Thomas Edison, JP Morgan and Andrew Carnegie are on the other. It’s a wonderful idea that immediately grabs people’s imagination and makes them want to read the book. Unfortunately the execution is lacking and the great idea is the only thing worthwhile about the book.
by Dave Sim captures the first 25 of an amazing 125 issue run of comics (unfortunately it kept going for a mediocre to bad additional 150 issues). This collection shows Sim starting to master his satire of politics, religion and comics that made Cerebus such a successful comic. In High Society, Sim starts pulling together the characters he had created in his first 25 issues and sets the stage for the rest of the series.
from Marty Pasko. Moore had made a name for himself in England with his work on 2000AD and Warrior (where he had two ongoing series: 
and 
). The book was headed for cancellation with low sales and DC saw no harm in letting Moore try a revamp of the character. What DC didn’t anticipate was the ramifications that Moore would have on DC and the whole US comic industry.
by Brian Michael Bendis (author of 
and 
and half of the Marvel Universe) worked with artist Marc Andreyko to present a little known historical story of Eliot Ness (post Al Capone) and a serial killer. Eliot Ness and his band of 
cleaned up Chicago Police and dismantled Al Capone’s mob. But what would Ness do for an encore? He went to Cleveland to clean up the police and help restore order to the city. But right as he started, a serial killer showed up it the city. Torso is Bendis’ last non-superhero work and one of his best.