Comicsphere: Dragon’s Claws

From the moment I saw that first advert for Dragon’s Teeth, as this series was originally to be called I was hooked on the idea. Back when marvel actually had an interest in a unique British market Dragon’s Claws was a stand out title. There was some great stuff that came out of that small [...]

Comicsphere: Batman Black And White

Batman and reinvention go together like a horse and carriage or whatever other pair of inseparable ideas you wish to use, hmm, maybe Batman and Robin. I said something similar earlier with works about the character that were operating under the same kind of mission statement: to reimagine the world of Gotham’s Dark Knight.
Anyway this [...]

Comicsphere: Red/Tokyo Storm Warning by Warren Ellis

This set of two works collected back-to-back presents two very different types of work which can be read in one sitting and work the palate to a nice effect.
They are both lean just because of the dictates of the format that they were originally produced in and the number of pages that allows the writer [...]

Comicsphere: Freakangels Friday

Ellis once again working to confound the tendency that people have to pigeonhole characters or jump to conclusions about what sort of person they are or the role that they fulfill. Today we see that far from being the flighty delicate creature that some have mistaken her for, after her display of strength last week, [...]

Comicsphere: Stray Bullets 1&2 by David Lapham

The exploration of violence in these two volumes takes many twists and turns. The first volume struck me as being more grounded but both of them have a resonant emotional core that connects with the reader on a very visceral level.
To say that something is filmic is over-used and perhaps misguided when it comes to [...]

Comicsphere: Batman, Gotham By Gaslight

Brought to you by messrs. Brian Augustyn, Michael Mignola, P. Craig Russell, David Hornung.
In places where I have been hanging out in a virtual capacity there has been much discussion of the design of book covers and how this affects the sales but more importantly the perception of the work contained therein. It should be [...]

Comicsphere: Witch Doctor By Brandon Seifert & Lukas Ketner

This comic really grabs you from the first piece of art that you see until the last. Having been a part of Warren Ellis’s Whitechapel community since it’s launch I and others have been privileged to get an insight into the research that went into this story; the thoughtful way in which every aspect of [...]

Comicsphere: Batman, Daredevil - King Of New York

With the Batman and Judge Dredd team up I complained about the fact that the story was somewhat flimsy and that the great artwork lacked a narrative backbone or drive (well, I intimated that anyway). I like the ideas of these crossovers, hence the number I have bought, but there aren’t many that have really [...]

Comicsphere: Batman, Judge Dredd - The Ultimate Riddle

After reading the first team up between Dredd and Batman it was almost inevitable that I was going to be around for the second one. This one definitely didn’t pack the same punch as Judgment In Gotham though. The premise is fairly simple and fairly similar — to place two iconic figures with different perspectives [...]

Comicsphere: Freakangels 10

There is nothing out there quite like it. Ellis is not just creating something that no other major comics writers are creating, namely a webcomic that comes out every week, he is creating a narrative that is pretty uncommon in comics too.
The domesticity of the main characters in this story doesn’t feel like some thin [...]