BOUGHT:  Thorn: The Complete Proto-Bone College Strips 1982-1986 and Other Early Drawings (Cartoon Books) My sole comic book purchase for the month of March came not from a comics specialty shop or from an online bookseller like Amazon or Barnes and Noble, but rather from a Kickstarter campaign: The complete collection of Jeff Smith's mid-eighties comic strip from Ohio State University's student paper The Lantern, a strip that would eventually evolve into the comic book series Bone, the impact of which on the direction of the comics industry—or should that be "graphic novel industr ..read more

 BOUGHT:  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Reborn Vol. 8—Damage Done (IDW Publishing) This volume opens with a somewhat incongruous done-in-one chapter, by guest writer Michael Walsh and artists Vlad Legostaev, Santtos and Walsh. In it, the four brother turtles are hanging out alone in their lair together when they receive an unexpected visitor from the future, a middle-aged mutant ninja turtle who is apparently one of them. He's there specifically to warn Donatello not to do something he's thinking about doing, something that will visit great ruin on them in the future and, indee ..read more

 BOUGHT:  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Usagi Yojimbo: WhereWhen (IDW Publishing) In 2018, Dark Horse Books published Usagi Yojimbo/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Complete Collection, which included every single one of the comic book crossovers of Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's TMNT and Stan Sakai's samurai rabbit, from the 1987 Sakai-drawn six-page short "Turtle Soup and Rabbit Stew" to the 2017 Sakai-created "Namazu or the Big Fish Story," a 40-page IDW-published one-shot. The title of that book, as vital and rewarding as the book itself may be, is no longer accurate, as IDW j ..read more

It wasn't something I was expecting to see in a comic book, least of all in the pages of Mayor Good Boy Turns Bad, the third installment of Dave Scheidt and Miranda Harmon's Mayor Good Boy series, about a talking dog mayor of a small town.  Early in the book, Robert Ableman, the father of the book's heroes Abby and Aaron Ableman, is shown going through his record collection. When Aaron interrupts him, Robert clutches the album he's holding to his chest defensively and holds it there for several panels. As you can see above, it's a Cub album, specifically their second album, 1995's Come O ..read more

BOUGHT: Batman: Dark Knight Detective Vol. 8 (DC Comics) This latest collection of post-Crisis, pre-"Knightfall" issues of Detective Comics opens with a mistake: The volume includes 1991's Detective Comics Annual #4, the Armageddon 2001 tie-in, just as the previous volume in the series did. In seems to be a mistake of addition though, as it doesn't look like it replaced anything. The next ten issues of the series from 1992 are all included, as is the 1992 Annual #5, the Eclipso: The Darkness Within tie-in.  This turns out to be the sole contribution of writers Alan Grant and Jo ..read more

BORROWED:  Mabuhay! (Scholastic) Teenage JJ Bulan wants nothing more than to fit in and be popular at school, but instead he always feels like he's on the outside looking in, a fact he blames in part on his family and their Filipino heritage. It probably doesn't help that his parents fully embrace that heritage in their business, the food truck The Beautiful Pig, which JJ and his little sister Althea are guilt-forced to work; she giving away free samples, he wearing a pig mascot costume and dancing around with a sign. As self-conscious as JJ is about all of the things that mark him ..read more

 BOUGHT: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Reborn, Vol. 7—Isolation (IDW Publishing) The tag on the cover says "The Armageddon Game", and the seven issues included in this collection are apparently those that were published in the pages of the main TMNT comic while the TMNT: Armageddon Game miniseries was unfolding. As such, it's clear that quite a bit of other stuff featuring the stars of the series is going on somewhere else, stuff that only occasionally intersects with the plotting of the stories collected in this trade. Still, it's surprisingly readable, with only two or three of th ..read more

I feel weird about Kickstarter, the crowd-funding site that some comics folks use to bring their projects to life, instead of going the traditional route of securing a publisher.  I've backed a couple projects there before (some Jim Lawson comics, Mystery Science Theater 3000*) and been pleased with the results, so I'm not, like, opposed to it or anything, I just think it's weird when certain creators or certain projects show up there, given the fact that they seem like they should be the exact sorts of comics that publishers should be fighting one another to publish, rather than somethin ..read more

BOUGHT: G'nort's Swimsuit Edition #1 (DC Comics) Fare like this from my favorite superhero publisher doesn't exactly make me regret not visiting the comic shop every Wednesday any more. Originally solicited as G'Nort's Illustrated Swimsuit Edition (you can still see the original cover at comics.org, which I've posted below), DC apparently backed off too closely echoing Sports Illustrated, changing the title and its font before publication.  Unlike most of DC's seasonal specials, 80-page giants containing eight to ten short stories, this one is mostly recycled material, collecting ..read more

BOUGHT: Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #8 (Remastered) (Waverly Press) I absolutely did not need to buy this, having the original, Mirage TMNT #8 collected in the old Mirage Publishing trade paperback I have of the first eleven issues of the series (plus the four "micro-series"). That said, perusing the Kickstarter page for the issue, a "remastered" version of it so excited me that I ended up ordering a $25 copy of a comic I've already read at least a dozen times (and used to try to redraw pages of into a sketchpad).  Much of that excitement came from seeing the various variant covers; I k ..read more