If you’re like the Shortboxed staff, we have a lot of free time now that baseball has ended. Perfect. More time for comics. This week, we’ve managed to avoid superhero comics and instead have a trio of sci-fi titles. Sit down, and get ready to enjoy Brian K. Vaughn’s favorite Image title of the year, the broken future of mankind, and The Matrix meets What Dreams May Come this week… on Weekend Shorts.
EDIT: Couldn’t pass up the chance to promote one of my favorite comics of the year, not like it needs any help.
Copperhead is Image’s new sci-fi Western title, no… not East vs West… Copperhead. It’s the 24th century, and there’s a new sheriff in town. This town is Copperhead, a mining colony on a distant planet. The sheriff is Clara Bronson, human, badass, and single mother.
Brian K Vaughn of Saga and Runaways fame calls Copperhead “The best Image debut of the year, and my favorite new comic.” The art is beautiful and we have another comic with a strong female lead.
You can start this series now and be caught up quickly, Copperhead is only 2 issues deep at the moment.
Pick Copperhead up at your LCS, or Amazon.
Oni Press’ The Life After is one of my favorite new titles. The Matrix meets What Dreams May Come meets For Whom the Bell Tolls. The protagonist of the book is Jude, a man living in total and complete monotony day after day for his entire life.
Well, you know, until he ends up in Purgatory… with Ernest Hemingway and his dog. Jude and Hemingway run around Purgatory, trying to figure out its mysteries and end up disrupting a very carefully balanced afterlife ecosystem.
Someone is going to make sure they pay.
The Life After is rendered weirdly, and beautifully by artist Gabo – and author Joshua Hale Fialkov’s version of the afterlife is not to be missed.
The Life After is only a few issues in, find them at your LCS, or Amazon.
Langford Skaargred imagined that the Roche Limit colony, sitting on the edge of a temporal anomaly on a dwarf planet, would be the be the future for all mankind; stand as an example of human ingenuity and brilliance. Instead, the colony fell into a state of disarray where crime and lawlessness is the norm. Doesn’t it always?
This new space sci-fi/noir series by Image, written by Michael Moreci (of Hoax Hunters fame) sets the mood and prepares us to uncover the mysteries within the Roche Limit colony and its neighboring black hole type anomaly. Undoubtedly revealing its many secrets.
Roche Limit is another of Image’s wonderfully rendered sci-fi novels (artist Vic Malhotra) and a great read for those who love the pitch line “2001 meets The Blade Runner.”
The second issue was released this week and we’re looking forward to the next.
Grab your copy at your LCS or imagecomics.com
So much has been said about Marvel’s new Ms. Marvel, that I hardly need to go into too many details. Kamala Khan is famously the first major Muslim character to have her own title, and she takes over the character title of Ms. Marvel.
At Shortboxed, we love Ms. Marvel because it reminds us of early Spider-Man runs; Peter was fresh, young, and the action was new. Kamala feels so real, and the language and tone of the series expertly captures the current youth zeitgeist.
((Very minor spoiler))
And, in this reviewer’s opinion, Kamala’s team-up with Wolverine is one of my single issue comics of all time.
Pick up the first TBP (issues 1-5) at your LCS or Amazon
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