Euthanauts #3
Tini Howard (w) • Nick Robles (a & c)
There’s nothing worse than someone coming into your life and solving all your problems. The mess of inheritance burdens Thalia with the ghosts of Mercy’s past while Indigo presents the future. Saga meets The Sandman in a series that explores death, dynasties, and psychonautic mindspaces.
FC • 32 pages • $3.99
Black Crown Quarterly #4: Summer 2018
Peter Milligan, Rob Davis, David Barnett, Tini Howard & various (w) • Rob Davis, Martin Simmonds, Philip Bond & various (a) • Philip Bond (c)
Shock and delight in spades as we stretch out the long, hot summer for all it’s worth and bring grand conclusions to Tales from The Black Crown Pub and CUD: Rich and Strange. Plus: Hey, Amateur!, Beat Surrender, previews and interviews with local street celebs in this compendium of comics, culture & cool.
FC • 32 pages • $3.99
Euthanauts #2
Tini Howard (w) • Nick Robles (a & c)
The dead speak. Grant them Mercy. We learn who is alive and who is dead (for now). And who is the boy who burns things so brightly? A look at the very first Euthanaut. Funeral home receptionist Thalia Rosewood’s life has just changed forever in this provocative new series.
FC • 32 pages • $3.99
House Amok #1
Christopher Sebela (w) • Shawn McManus (a & c)
Ten-year-old fraternal twin Dylan Sandifer and her family have fallen down a rabbit hole full of secret implants, conspiracy theories, Mandela effects, extradimensional invaders, and organ thieves. As the attacks against them intensify, the Sandifers light out on a cross-country search for answers and salvation, blazing a bloody path of torture, arson and murder. Can young Dylan save her family from these delusions… or is this ornate conspiracy actually true?
It’s a summer vacation the Sandifers will never forget, evoking Natural Born Killers and The X-Files for fans of Paper Girls and Locke & Key.
FC • 32 pages • $3.99
Assassinistas
Tini Howard (w) • Gilbert Hernandez (a & c)
First there were three: Octavia, Charlotte, and Rosalyn, a trio of badass hit-women who picked up the slack when the going got too real for other so-called top-level assassins. But things happened. Octavia hung up her semi-automatic for a semi-lucrative kidnapping insurance scam. Charlotte chose expensive Chardonnay, love, marriage and, until recently, a baby carriage. And Rosalyn? There’s a lot of conspiracies, but according to the federal government, she’s simply M.I.A.
When a kidnapping hits too close to home, Octavia is forced out of retirement and back into the bounty-hunting business. Down two partners, she recruits her son Dominic and his boyfriend Taylor to aid and abet her in a semester of murder-based work study, where she’ll teach them everything she knows (if she can get them to put down the video games, stop making out, and actually focus on the mission already).
TPB • FC • $19.99 • 152 pages • ISBN: 978-1-68405-271-4
The day my great-grandmother died was the closest I have felt to an out of body experience. It had been two weeks coming with Louise Risko stubbornly holding onto staying on this plane of existence as she did with most things in life, but I still couldn’t prepare for the sudden chestpunch of knowing she was fully gone. My dorm suddenly felt like a box I couldn’t escape from. I didn’t know who to call or who would even want the full brunt of this sudden wave of grief. When I went to bed that night, it felt like my soul was trying to escape my body. As if it wanted to chase after her.
I hadn’t really felt that feeling again since that day. Not even when my grandfather died two months later. Tinges of it came back listening to ‘Lazarus’ by David Bowie on repeat shortly after he passed and I certainly felt the same anxious buildup the day Prince died and it ended up compounded with Finn Balor losing the NXT championship that I just sort of ended up screaming in my kitchen. Maybe it was less of a “hadn’t” situation, but more that I didn’t want to. Not all the way.
But Euthanauts #1… It’s the only comic that has made me want to revisit that feeling.
Euthanauts #1 is the latest Black Crown book from writer Tini Howard following her hilarious and poignant shoot ‘em up mini-series Assassinistas with Gilbert Hernandez. I wasn’t certain if I should review this book because I do consider Tini a friend and we certainly did talk a lot about this book at MomoCon this year while I helped her with her table. But I couldn’t not know what it was about after spending a weekend hyping it up to people, parroting her spiel about it and hoping that it stuck in people’s minds. Finally reading it though, I think I was underselling it.
The issue follows funeral director Talia Rosewood on possibly the strangest day of her life when she encounters Dr. Mercy Wolfe, a “dead woman walking” out to dinner on her last day alive. Talia admits that death is all she can ever think about and “…in some way, I felt like this woman was calling me out for that.”
Talia would end up right about that, but probably not in the way that she thought.
Most of this issue is getting to know Talia as a protagonist as she gets immediately thrown into the deep end of her adventure and it’s a credit to Tini that I feel like Talia is someone I’ve known for years. Not in the sense that I can see the shreds of Tini in her, but in the sense that she’s someone in my friend’s group I’ve known for years, but haven’t really had a chance to hang out with. Somehow though, we inevitably end up having super deep conversations at parties probably because of that disconnect. And that’s probably the same reason Mercy picks her to be her tether as well.
Nick Robles is on art for this series and I have to say, while I wasn’t familiar with his work before this series, he makes a hell of a first impression. The way Talia exists so casually and so fashionably as a curvy protagonist is amazing in of itself in a way that it shouldn’t be in comics, but as soon as that oxygen canister makes contact with Talia’s head and she starts questioning what was real and what wasn’t, Robles’ art truly comes alive as we get our first look into Death Space. The digital review copies we receive are often just fine for reading and reviewing, but I desperately wanted to rip this one from my screen and somehow dive into it. To experience how that world glows and breathes.
After being away from comics for a while, Euthanauts #1 is one of the most engaging first issues I have read in a while. While the story does throw you into the deep end right away, it gives you the tools you need to begin to breathe and understand what it’s going for. Much like Talia, it stays rooted while beginning to look deeper into itself. While Tini Howard and Nick Robles’ story is ultimately rooted in something that is inevitable and terrifying, the fact it can make me look back at one of the worst days of my life and wonder just what exactly happened when I tried to sleep that night is a book that is definitely worth re-reading.
Story: Tini Howard Art: Nick Robles
Story: 9.5 Art: 10.0 Overall: 9.75 Recommendation: Buy
IDW Publishing provided Graphic Policy with a FREE copy for review
Punks Not Dead #6
David Barnett (w) • Martin Simmonds (a & c)
Everybody’s out to get Fergie Ferguson. The police want to speak to him about the death of a fellow pupil after a schoolyard fight, the Department for Extra-Usual Affairs are back on his tail after Dorothy Culpepper has a startling revelation, and a mysterious stranger who Fergie should totally have not been talking to on the internet is showing a keen interest… and a taste for casual murder. But Fergie’s mum Julie is realizing a few things as well… which means everybody better watch out because she’s going to kick some ass. With everyone closing in, where can Fergie and his ghostly BF Sid turn next? Find out in the anarchic conclusion to “Teenage Kicks.”
FC • 32 pages • $3.99
David and Maria Lapham, the creative legends behind the long-running, Eisner Award-winning comic book series Stray Bullets, bring Lodger, a brutal psychological thriller, to Black Crown, IDW’s creator-owned imprint for fiercely independent voices. Debuting in October, Lodger is a pulse-pounding game of cat-and-mouse through roadside America between a vengeful young woman and the serial killer who ruined her life.
Lodger follows a handsome drifter who murders his way through the Midwest while hiding in plain sight as a travel blogger using the alias “Lodger.” With an almost supernatural ability to change appearance, he leaves families in shreds and body bags in his wake. He’s pursued across the country by Ricky Toledo, a teenager who fell hard for the mysterious stranger years ago when he rented a small room in her home – right before he killed her mother and framed her father.
Tini Howard is a writer and swamp witch from the Carolina Wilds. Currently, she writes Euthanauts, Assassinistas (with Gilbert Hernandez) for Black Crown Comics (fmr Vertigo editor Shelly Bond’s new imprint) and Hack/Slash: Resurrection, with occasional stories for two of her favorite things: Rick and Morty and WWE. Her previous work includes Power Rangers: Pink, The Skeptics (Black Mask Studios), and a contribution to the hit Secret Loves of Geek Girls. She is writing the upcoming Captain America Annual.
Euthanauts #1
Tini Howard (w) • Nick Robles (a & c)
Death is like outer space—a seemingly unknowable, terrifying blackness that yields beautiful discoveries and truths—if only you’ve got the right kind of rocketship. Thalia Rosewood has had a lifelong obsession with death, keeping her from living her life to the fullest. Mercy Wolfe has a brain tumor the size of a billiard ball, and a need for a new recruit before her next journey begins. Inigo Hanover is a reluctant tether to the world beyond, seeking to continue a cycle that exploration would halt. Go toward the light. Then go beyond. EUTHANAUTS.
FC • 32 pages • $3.99
