My “to be read” stack is ever-growing. Here’s what I’ve been enjoying and what I’ve got up next:
Two seasons of director David Fincher’s “Manhunter” were not enough. While the Netflix series’ future is currently in limbo, writer James Tynion IV’s “The Deviant” series is poised to scratch a very similar itch.
Launched this month via Image comics, the first issue sees Michael, a comic book writer, interviewing a convicted murderer as research for a potential project. The murderer maintains he didn’t kill the young men, though he had engaged in some illicit activities with them before their deaths. Of course, the real killer is beginning to rear their head again, dressed in a blank-faced mask and Santa costume.
The artwork is just impressionistic enough to feel slightly dreamy, and the details artist Joshua Hixson highlights, often with minimal line work, match Michael’s tenuous emotional state as he grapples with a sense that something just isn’t right with him.
The second issue drops in December. In the meantime, I’ll tide myself over with Tynion’s ongoing action horror series “Something is Killing the Children.”
I can’t imagine reading the work of Jamie Delano in my early 20s when I first delved into comics for mature audiences. Delano was tapped by Alan Moore to write “Swamp Thing” spin-off “Hellblazer,” featuring paranormal and occult detective John Constantine. The series ran for 300 issues without a continuity reset and sees Constantine age in real time.
While writer Garth Ennis (“The Boys,” “Preacher”), who picked up the series in issue 41, is most famously associated with the series, Delano’s work is nuanced on a personal and cosmic scale in a way few writers ever achieve. John Constantine is a man running from debts personal and cosmic. He can’t get the blood off his hands, and he keeps running, only to find himself in the mirror over and over.
Delano’s work is deeply sad and terrifically rounded, and it’s for anyone who’s ever known loneliness, failure and familial breakdown. His one-off works for DC’s Vertigo imprint feature equally tormented characters who are as sympathetic and repulsive as those in the pages of “Hellblazer.”
After leaving “Hellblazer” in 1991, he published creator-owned titles through various comics labels. I’ll be reading everything by him that I can get my hands on.
The hammy 1995 “Judge Dredd” film starring Sylvester Stallone as the titular Dredd, may have turned off mainstream audiences to picking up the source material at the time. Since then, the 2012 film “Dredd” quietly found an audience and piqued my interest in the steel-jawed lawgiver.
The “Judge Dredd” comics themselves, which first appeared in weekly British comics anthology “2000 AD” in 1977, can vary widely in tone and have successfully included comedy since their inception, but the 2012 film is reportedly a far better adaptation of the comics. The film issues of the comics I’ve read confirm this.
My current reading stack includes reprints of early Dredd adventures, as well as material from the 2012 IDW Comics’ standalone “Dredd” relaunch that coincided with the film.
As a budding cultural elitist in my 20s, I largely avoided superhero comics, unless they came with a stamp of approval from experts. Thus, in the early 2000s, Mike Mignola’s “Hellboy” series was A-OK with me.
It’s not really fair to brand the character Hellboy as a superhero, but he’s not without a few similarities. I’v e never lost my affinity for the character, but I’ve always found it hard to shake my devotion to creator Mike Mignola’s early work on the series, on which he handled both writing and illustration duties. Later, he’d hand off the art to other collaborators while tackling the scripts, and it’s here I jumped off the “Hellboy” train. Boy, was I cheating myself. I should’ve known that Mignola wouldn’t tap just anyone to draw his most famous creation and that his writing would only improve.
I recently finished the “Hellboy” collections “The Wild Hunt” and “The Storm and The Fury,” and they’re more than worthy of the series’ earlier works. “Hellboy in Hell” is next in the series, and I’m ready to follow the red-skinned one down.
I’m always looking for something new. If you’ve got any recommendations, please drop me a line.
Thompson, VHS.D, holds a doctorate of cult media in pop culture from University of Maine at Castle Rock. He delivers lectures on movies and other pop culture topics under the moniker Professor VHS. Find him on Instagram as @professorvhs and more of his work at professorvhs.substack.com.
