October solicitations (Previews #263) – part three

Concluding my look at this August issue of Previews. Now with images! (By the way, I need to come up with a better title than "Comments on Previews" for this feature. I suck at titles.)

IDW

Steve Niles, author of 30 Days of Night, has a new series called Edge of Doom, co-created by artist Kelley Jones. Niles describes it as a five-issue series, in which all the stories are stand-alone but connected, and compares it to The Twilight Zone. The first issue is about a man who discovers that "his garden contains a world of little demons that have picked him for their next sacrifice!" Sounds very promising. (October 6)

I wasn't familiar with The Coffin, by Phil Hester and Mike Huddleston, but it's getting a 10th Anniversary Edition hardcover reprint with a bunch of bonus features. The premise of the story alone is enough to seriously pique my interest: A scientist invents "an impenetrable cybernetic skin that will trap the human soul after the body within has died – a walking coffin." Sounds both creepy and thought-provoking. (October 6)

IMAGE

Jonathan Hickman has two new trades coming out on October 13: Pax Romana and Red Mass for Mars. While both look good, I'm mostly interested in the latter, illustrated by Ryan Bodenheim and set in a distant post-apocalyptic world.

Morning Glories #3. Whether or not I pick this up will depend on how good the first issue, which comes out next week, turns out to be. (October 20)

Also looking forward to new issues of Bulletproof Coffin, Meta 4 (both October 13) and Orc Stain (October 27).

OTHER STUFF

That picture of Paul Levitz holding a copy of his ridiculously oversized book, 75 Years of DC Comics: The Art of Modern Mythmaking, is hilarious. It sounds like a fascinating read, but holy shit, did it have to be that big and expensive? People are actually going to pay $200 for a book so huge you can't even hold it? Of course they will. (October 27)

Neonomicon #3. I enjoyed the first issue, but I need to take another look at it after watching David Smart's excellent and very insightful two-part video review. Very much looking forward to the next issue to see whether it supports Smart's analysis so far. (Avatar, October 27)

I'm pretty excited about Charles Burns' X'ed Out, which apparently draws inspiration "from such diverse influences as Hergé and William Burroughs." The cover's homage to L'Étoile mystérieuse is already a classic. The only other work of Burns that I'm familiar with is Black Hole, which is in black and white, so I'm curious to see what he does with colour. (Pantheon, October 20)

The Horror! The Horror! Comic Books the Government Didn't Want You to Read! sounds like a must-have collection for fans of horror comics from the 1950s. I have a few friends who I'm sure would be interested. Maybe I'll bully one of them into writing a review for this blog. (November 3)

Finally, I noticed there will be new printings of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics and Will Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art and Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative, all of which are classics any serious comics fan/blogger/wannabe-critic should have in his or her collection.

COMING SOON TO THIS BLOG: Reviews of actual comic books, instead of a way-too-long review of a comic book catalogue!