Category: Image

December 30 / / Comics

2015 has been a great year for comics – we got two reboots from Marvel and DC, Image kept pumping out winners, and some of the best series from 2014 kept going strong.

It’s also been a great year for Shortboxed! We managed to hit lots of cons up and down the California coast, made it up to Seattle for Emerald City Comic Con, visited some comic book shops overseas, and we got to attend the mecca for comic book geeks, San Diego Comic-Con. We also added another member to the Shortboxed crew this year, Jeremy, who’s been crushing it with his reviews and opinion pieces! All this on top of reading some amazing stories from our favorite creators this year! So thank you to all of our readers and followers on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook for allowing us to geek out with you and connect over this passion of ours.

November 22 / / Comics

We’re all used to time travel stories by now – disrupting the space-time continuum, changing the course of history, undoing past mistakes, yada yada yada. Well the creators of Chrononauts from Image Comics, Mark Millar and Sean Murphy, realize that and still manage to give us a really fun story.

Chrononauts revolves around two best friends Corbin and Danny, genius rockstar scientists that discover time travel and decide to televise historic events around the world, only to go time traveling themselves and screw up everything along the way. If this sounds a bit ridiculous and Hollywood-y, it is, and it’s supposed to be.

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September 8 / / Comics

If there’s one thing I’m a sucker for, it’s space westerns. From Firefly to Star Wars to Guardians of the Galaxy, nothing beats a good old fashion anything goes in the old wild wild west. Well, in this case, west is actually planet called Jasper in the town Copperhead.

May 4 / / Image

Black Science is an epic science fiction adventure, spanning multiple parallel dimensions with the most unique creatures and landscapes seen in comics today. Written by Rick Remender, with pencils by Matteo Scalera, colors by Dean White and letters by Rus Wooten, this is a gorgeous and action-packed book that will delight any sci-fi fan.

In the distant future, Grant McCay, leader of the Anarchist League of Scientists, unlocks “black science,” which allows him and his team of Dimensionauts to hop back and forth across dimensions, or so that’s the plan. Of course, nothing ever goes according to plan, otherwise we’d have a very boring story. The “pillar,” which is the tool that allows them to hop between dimensions, has been sabotaged and now the team has to deal with unpredictable jumps between dimensions – they have no idea when they will jump, where they will end up, or what types of worlds and creatures they’ll run into. You can already imagine how many things can go wrong and how many unexpected turns things could take if you’re at the whim of random dimension-jumps.

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April 21 / / Image

There are so many genres of comic books, and storytelling, in general. Pretty Deadly manages to blend multiple genres and storytelling techniques in one beautiful, intricate package. Written by Kelly Sue Deconnick and illustrated by Emma Rios with colors by Jordie Bellaire, Pretty Deadly volume 1 collects the first five issues of the series, and is a story that demands multiple readings, which in this case, is a good thing.

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April 7 / / Image

Wanna feel weird? I’ve got just the thing for you. Prophet is a space opera that is like David Lynch’s Dune meets Conan: The Barbarian (Arnold version, sorry Aquaman) meets The Cantina from Star Wars meets Multiplicity. That’s right. I referenced Multiplicity. The Michael Keaton rom-com from the 90’s. Oh, don’t be that way. You know you want to read about space Conan turning everything in his path into a blood jelly.

February 8 / / Image

spawn digital library and blog.shortboxed.com

Here at shortboxed, we are advocates of the physical medium of comic books. The tactile feel of the pages as we scrutinize the art, the story, the lettering… we feel it simply can’t be beat. But sometimes the utility and ease of digital comics reminds us that there is a place for both formats.

January 20 / / Image

Sex Criminals, written by the best duo in comics today, Matt Fraction and Chip Zdarsky, is a coming of age heist story, with lots of sex.

Suze is a woman who stops time when she has an orgasm. No explanation necessary, that’s just what happens. One day at a fundraising party to save her library, she meets Jon, whom she sleeps with, and discovers that he can do the same. What follows is an exhilarating tale of two young people in love who can stop time when they have sex, and of course they use their “ability” to rob banks and save Suze’s library from demolition at the hands of an evil corporation.

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