The Black Io Chronicles.

Comics are the one thing I keep meaning to talk more about, especially with all the hoops I now jump through just to keep up with my monthlies. (Think being a comics fan is tough? Try buying all of your issues sight unseen from Scotland.) So I figured I’d kick off the conversation by chatting about a couple of titles I’ve been pulling of late: 

We(l)come Back

Mali and Tessa have lived hundreds of different lives throughout time, caught up in an eternal cycle as they take part in a war so old that neither side remembers what they’re fighting for anymore. As Mali wakes up in her newest life, she suddenly becomes self-aware and starts to question everything, especially why she continues to fight. But elsewhere, Tessa is already on the hunt…

Jason Bourne with added dashes of past life regression therapy, We(l)come Back often feels like a paper-and-ink version of those high-concept shows Fox will launch to modest fanfare, then Jimmy Hoffa after a dozen episodes: tough female leads, plenty of action, and an intriguing mythology teased out just enough to keep people hooked. Initially drawn up as a limited series, WB made the jump to an ongoing run almost immediately; whether the premise can keep pace remains to be seen, but seven issues in, this is still slick entertainment. 

The Spire

The Spire is a mountain of metal and stone that rises out of the middle of the desert, containing a vast city of twisting tunnels, grinding elevators, ancient machinery, and is home to over a million human and non-human residents. Shå, the last of the Medusi, is responsible for keeping watch over them as Commander of the City Watch, despite the fact she isn’t shown any respect due to her race. When a string of grisly murders is committed just as a new Baroness of the Spire is about to be sworn in, Shå will have to find the serial killer and bring them to justice.

I’ll admit, I added this one to my pull list entirely off the strength of that first issue’s cover art (see above). Thankfully, those instincts panned out, as this is probably one of my favorite reads of ‘15/’16. A spirited strange-fantasy police procedural, The Spire gets big returns in pairing the charming, off-handed weirdness of its setting with sympathetic characters and some particularly sharp writing (see above, again). And now it’s been nominated for an Eisner Award, so clearly you can judge a book by its cover.

Turncoat

300 years since humanity was brutally subjugated by the alien race known simply as “Management.” Two years since these invaders abandoned Earth to return to their home world. Following her participation in the brutal massacre of human-alien hybrids left behind by Management, resistance fighter Marta Gonzalez declines to join the new human government and starts her own private detective agency instead. When a human-alien hybrid who survived the massacre is abducted for sinister political ends, Gonzalez is forced to confront her own bloody past and acknowledge the fact that the transition from oppression to emancipation is anything but clean.

Alex Paknadel’s last title for Boom!, the ambitious Matrix riff Arcadia, boasted imaginative set-pieces, but a sprawling cast and relentless location-hopping often left it feeling just a bit too widescreen-epic for its own good. His new noir-inspired yarn, Turncoat, is a more focused affair, though not one shy on the ideas, either - its post-alien NYC, astew in fungal infection, bad blood, and conspiracy, is one of the more intriguing settings this year, ably rendered by Artyom Trakhanov’s expressive, appealingly grubby artwork.