This month’s MKE Comicbook meetup did a fine job again of introducing me to comics I hadn’t heard of before, or hadn’t know much about. I was pretty excited too, as the night’s theme was “Independents Day” – meaning everyone was supposed to bring a few comicbooks they were fond of that were explicitly NOT published by Marvel or DC Comics!
I had hoped that we’d have a few more attendees present, so as to share an even wider spectrum of publishers, but still, I was pleased with what was shared! Across the fourteen books people brought, there were eleven different publishers represented!
Here’s what books got shown off!
-“Small Press Expo 98” – an anthology of independent artists and writers, including the story “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love John Byrne”, from Small Press Expo Publishing
-“Lazarus”, a political/futuristic drama/adventure from Image Publishing
-“Monica’s Story,” a funny cartoonish bio-comic about the Clinton scandal, from Alternative Comics
-“Optic Nerve”, in which the creator “channels contemporary zeitgeist and vernacular to produce flawlessly designed, compellingly readable stories”, from Drawn and Quarterly
-“Concrete”, a beautifully drawn, sensitively written story about alien abduction and what happens when your consciousness gets transferred into a body made out of concrete, from Dark Horse Comics
-“Stitching Together” a short bio-comic about Jim Henson, by Annie Mok, from Bare Bones Press
-“Lumberjanes”, a fun adventure comic about some people who get lost while whitewater rafting, from Boom.
-“Damned”, a film noir where that devil of a mobster actually IS a demon, from Oni Press
-“The Boys”, about a team of powered black ops agents whose job is to keep the tights-wearing superheroes from misbehaving, from Dynamite Comics
-“The Goon”, Eric Powell’s funny, gross, well-realized, odd-as-can-be story about a thug who protects a town from the things that go bump in the night, from Dark Horse Comics
-“The Foot Soldiers”, an interesting take on the “young boys are given powers and figure out what it means to be heroes” story, from Image Comics
-“The Rocketeer”, the beautifully illustrated, fun ride about a rocket-propelled, costumed adventurer in the 1940s, from IDW
-“Sam & Max – Surfin’ the Highway” – an over-the-top tale following two “freelance policemen” who happen to be a dog and a sort-of-looks-like-a-rabbit-but-not-quite creature, from Telltale Games
-“Star Wars: Tag and Bink”, in the tradition of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead”, this book charts the story of two lowly grunts in the Imperial Army, from Dark Horse Comics
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August’s meetup theme will be “Guilty Pleasures: Those Comics you LOVE, That Everyone Else CAN’T STAND”
