Opening the Year With Some New Stuff

Let's see what interested me in the solicitations for January.

At Boom, the two things that caught my eye are that 1) the Buffy comics appear to be starting back up there now, rather than at Dark Horse. I'm not planning to buy it, just surprised me. More critically, there's no sign of a new issue of Coda, though there is a trade of the first 4 issues.

Atomic Robo & the New Era rolls on. There's also a Rocketeer Reborn mini-series that starts in December I didn't mention last month. It's set in the present day, but is about someone finding the original jetpack that Cliff used in the '40s. Javier Pulido's drawing that, so it should look nice.

I don't know if Copperhead is ever going to finish at this point. Every time I check Image's website, the release date for the next issue (which was due out in June) has been shoved back another 3-4 weeks. So it may be there in January, or it may just be Infinite Dark from Image, assuming I'm even buying that by then. Seeds is absent again, and issue 3 was supposed to ship in October and didn't, so who knows what's going on. Dark Horse currently has no projected release date for it. Swell.

The most notable thing to me in DC's solicits was that they're starting up Young Justice again, and they've handed the writing reigns to Bendis. I don't guess I should be surprised, but good luck with that.

Red 5 released the first Bonnie Lass mini-series by Michael Mayne and Tyler Fluharty back in 2011. I picked it up some time after it had already finished, and though I haven't read it in a few years, remember it being pretty good. The second mini-series, also by Mayne and Fluharty, starts in January.

There's two or three manga series that sounded kind of interesting, although they're all on at least volume 3 by now. Dr. Stone, even though it sounds like it might be a story partially about rebuilding civilization, which is not usually my bag. There's another one, with the overly long title of Precarious Woman Executive Miss Black General, about a lady who runs a criminal organization bent on world domination as a way to romance a particular superhero. Which could be annoying, but could be funny. Depends how they play it.

I saved Marvel for last because, while there wasn't much new for December, there are a lot of things on their first issues in January. Some of those are Annuals, or one-shots, and most of it is stuff I'm not interested in, but I guess they were waiting for Infinity Wars to finish. Guardians of the Galaxy is starting again, with the Thanos series creative team, but it sounds like they're going with the Jonathan Hickman approach of a roster of dozens. Which means even if your favorite character makes it into the book, there probably isn't enough page space for them to get much screen time. But maybe they'll focus on different groups in different arcs. Abnett and Lanning juggled a cast of roughly a dozen, mostly by splitting the team, or having half of them dead or pissed off at Star-Lord at any given moment.

Tom Taylor and Juan Cabal are doing a Spider-Man book about how he's a great person to have as a neighbor. Well sure, as long as he keeps his secret identity. Marvel's publishing Conan books again, which was a real surprise. Is Dark Horse getting out of the licensed properties game? Maybe it doesn't mean anything. IDW is publishing kid-friendly Marvel comics. You'd think Marvel could handle that themselves, but apparently not.

Mojo's showing up in that Rogue and Gambit series (I'm sorry, Mr. and Mrs. X is a really dumb name for a book), and in Domino. He's getting around, which could be good. I'm not sure anyone will doing anything good with him. The Superior Spider-Man is gonna fight Terrax, so hopefully that'll be the end of him. Octavius running around, calling himself a hero really annoys me.