Happy Holidays everyone, and just in time for those holidays there are some excellent comics coming out this week.

From DC Comics, we have the constantly-getting-better Detective Comics. I swear to God, this book just gets better and better with every issue. If you’re not buying this book than you are missing out on one the most groundbreaking comics of the year.

From Image, we have the line of Image United comics. With art by the founding fathers of Image and written by Robert Kirkman, this is sure to be a collector’s dream.

I’m most looking forward to the new issue of Jonathan Hickman’s Fantastic Four, I think this book is in my early running for Best Continuing Series, if I was allowed to vote for the Eisners. Dale Eaglesham is off for two issues but I’m sure that it won’t slow down the brilliant writing that Hickman is doing with the characters.

I’ll also be checking out the spoilerific Captain America: Who Will Wield The Shield book. Now that Steve Rogers is officially back, it’ll be intriguing to follow the reaction.

That’s all I’m getting this week. As always, we here at The Flickcast care about what you read so let us know what you liked/didn’t like in the comments. Otherwise, check out the complete list at Midtown Comics.

Have a Happy Holiday!

Another slow week my wallet will appreciates so thanks to the comics publishers. From DC: I’m sorry, SPOILERS, but if you missed the last issue of Green Lantern Corps it’s your own fault because you missed Kyle Rayner’s death.  Yeah, Hal Jordan’s replacement died in a battle against the Black Lanterns, so this new issue is bound to be an emotional firecracker.

A personal favorite of mine is collected by IDW this month with the complete Rocketeer by Dave Stevens.  If you remember, a pretty decent movie came out several years back with Billy Campbell, Jennifer Connolly, and Alan Arkin featuring this character. It was favorite of mine when I was 10 years old and somewhere in my parent’s garage are the single issues Dave Stevens wrote and drew of the series. This week sees the release of the complete series collected, and it a beautiful spectacle to behold.

From Marvel, I’m looking at the Amazing Spider-Man issue where we are left guessing that these “Gauntlet” murders have been committed by the Sandman! Sandman is probably my favorite Spider-Man villain so I’m generally always on board for those issues. Other than that, I’m not getting anything else this week.

As always, we here at The Flickcast care about what you read so let us know what you liked/didn’t like in the comments. Otherwise, check out the complete list at Midtown Comics.

Happy reading!

The Brazilian “Wonder Twins” of comic art, Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba, give us their first Vertigo book in the form of Daytripper #1 this week. These guys have worked with top talents in the industry like Joss Whedon (Dark Horse’s Sugar Shock), Matt Fraction (Casanova), and Gerard Way (Umbrella Academy).

Here we have their first solo work in the tradition of Vertigo focusing on the small psychological things of daily life like “how does a down on his luck obituary writer get out of the shadow of his famous father?” Apparently the ending to the first issue is a twist for the fantastic, and not at all expected. I’d expect nothing less from these extremely creative guys. Anytime these guys come out with something new, I can’t snatch it from the stacks fast enough.

The rest of the week is fairly light.  The other book I’ll be getting is Invincible Iron Man, in which we finally come to figure out how Thor and Captain America “reboot” Tony Stark. I think I’ve exclaimed enough how much I love this book, and to say the least Fraction and Larocca have not slowed down at all.

This is the last episode of ABC’s FlashForward we will see until March. Yeah, until MARCH. Can’t say I’m happy about that. Well, at least this episode went out on a bang.

We open on the mystery woman (Shoreh Aghdashloo), who informed Demetri Noh (John Cho) that he will be assassinated. She’s sitting at her desk, her own Mosaic chart laid out on the glass spread like a spider-web with a picture of  Cho with the number value: A561984. She is watching the classic A Christmas Carol.

A plane lands in Hong Kong, on it Benford (Joseph Fiennes) and Cho get off, discussing their plan to track down Aghdashloo.  They twice ignore calls from Wedeck (Courtney B. Vance) only to be met by someone with “Kid N Play” hair, who calls himself Marshall Vogel from the Hong Kong FBI office. Vogel tells the Dynamic Duo to get out.

Fiennes picks up his phone walking away to only get into an argument with Vance about going to Hong Kong. He gets into this argument so that if anyone goes down for disobeying orders it’s him [Fiennes] because Noh needs to keep his gun on him if he’s going to live past March 15.

Vance breaks one of his televisions only to have another one where a press conference is on at National Linear Project [NLAP] as it’s called, where a stooge announces Simcoe (Jack Davenport) who will address the crowd on the experiments he and Monaghan were doing on the day of the black out.  It gets hairy quick when this happens.

In this sequence, Davenport claims responsibility for the blackout and literally raises hell, saying their experiment was to reproduce the energies created by the Big Bang and may have contributed to the cause of the blackout. Total bedlam occurs when he says this: shots are fired, dogs and casts living together, mass hysteria!

For those of you who don’t know who Grant Morrison is you’re likely to be made aware of him soon.  The groundbreaking comic book writer behind such legendary runs on X-Men, Animal Man, and Doom Patrol is getting his own biopic, and the director of that movie, Patrick Meaney, is profiled over at Wired.

In the profile, Meaney says Morrison is about to become one of those creators that will receive mainstream recognition that only creators such as Alan Moore and Frank Miller have enjoyed.

“Most ‘civilians’ that I talk to about the project still don’t know who Grant Morrison is,” Meaney said in the interview, “but Moore is definitely a name they recognize, as is Frank Miller. I feel like we could soon be seeing a bunch of Morrison film projects in the not-too-distant future.”

Currently in-development is Morrison’s work WE3, which is a favorite among many of us Morrison fans. The story involves pets enhanced with cybernetic weaponry to become assassins who rebel against their programming and their creators. The project is currently being handled by Kung Fu Panda director John Stevenson.

Morrison’s sensibilities lends well to the screen, however, his ideas are far left of Richard Kelly-weird so I’m not sure how well they are likely to be received by the bigwigs in Hollywood, or by audience members for that matter.  But I applaud any would-be producer in developing an idea of Morrison’s, it shows a willingness to take chances and I appreciate that. But if WE3 gets a true to form adaptation for the screen, I would suspect many parent’s groups raising holy hell over it.

This week is a lighter week than last week, so I’m going to take this opportunity to talk about some of the books that came out last week that I didn’t get a chance to check out because of Thanksgiving. Which reminds me: comics do not come out today (Wednesday, Dec. 2) they come out tomorrow because of the holiday.

Last week the trade came out for one of the best miniseries that not a lot of people may know about. This book is Wildstorm’s The Winter Men by Brett Lewis and John Paul Leon. Lewis is responsible for the creation of Bulletproof Monk and this new book is incomparable. It involves the  development of a super soldier program in Cold War Russia to serve as a deterrent to America’s Superman. The trade came out last week, and if you can find it, you really cannot go wrong with this incredible book. It’s my pick of last week.

As for this week, we have Blackest Night Flash by Geoff Johns. I don’t know exactly why this book exists since the Flash is in the main Blackest Night book more than even Hal Jordan or other Green Lanterns, but I’m intrigued to see if this is different somehow. Other than that, I’m really only getting a couple more books.

Yesterday (December 1st) was Eisner award winning writer Matt Fraction’s birthday, and you can celebrate by buying the recent issue of Uncanny X-Men #518.  My second book of the week is the start of Marvel’s Siege with “The Cabal” by Brian Michael Bendis and art by the awesome Michael Lark. I think this event is going to be genuinely dynamite, and I can’t wait to get every damn issue of the book.

The other book is Hulk Winter Guard by David Gallaher and Steve Ellis, the brains behind the brilliant Zuda webcomic, High Moon. High Moon is a western supernatural story where a gun for hire hunts down supernaturals in the Wild West. There is just one hitch: this gun for hire, cut from a similar cloth to Clint Eastwood’s character in Unforgiven, is also a werewolf. It’s awesome, trust me, go read.

I’m particularly fired up for some brand new Adam Kubert art this week. The Kubert Brothers are probably my favorite comic artists working today, and this week we get Adam Kubert handling a Dan Slott Spider-Man issue, where our favorite web-slinger gets put on Norman Osborn’s List. This is probably the Must Buy of the week in my opinion, and there you have it.

Other good issues include the beginning of the Gauntlet story in Amazing Spider-Man. With Mark Waid writing and Paul Azaceta drawing the introduction, Joe Kelly and his I Kill Giants artist Niimura handle a Black Cat story.

From DC we get the penultimate issue of the Flash: Rebirth, with some incredible art from Ethan Van Sciver. At this point, with Blackest Night and everything else it seems like this book has kind of gone by the wayside and we know that Barry Allen is back and he is back to stay. So why stay with this book? Well, I feel like its still interesting to see how he comes back, plus all the Flashes together makes for some neat visuals.

Finally, an Indie book called Viking, written by one of the best comic writers that you may or may not know of, Ivan Brandon, takes on a viking crime book with artist Nic Klein. This is a beautifully dialogued, and gorgeously rendered book that is a feast for your eyes. Its easily the best put together comic on the market so I urge you all to try it out.

As always, we here at The Flickcast care about what you read, so leave us a comment and let us know what you liked/didn’t like from this week’s comics. For a more complete list of what comes out this week, check out the one at Midtown Comics.

Whoops, somehow my DVR didn’t record last week’s episode and I missed it. But Agent Al Gough (Lee Thompson Young) kills himself to stop his particular future from happening. His future being he kills a single mother in an accident and he also wants to prove that you can change things by choosing to do so.

Regardless, this week’s episode has Simon (Dominic Monaghan) and Lloyd Simcoe (Jack Davenport) play a poker game, and whatever-his-name is Benford’s Sponsor finds his formerly dead daughter still alive.

While on vacation for their anniversary the Benfords (Joseph Fiennes and the wax model known as Sonya Walger) are playing around in some house on the beach, before Fiennes gets a call asking him to come in. The reason being is someone caught some video footage of a mugging and the people doing the mugging had a triple star tattoo that Fiennes recognizes as one of the guys trying to kill him on April 29.

Investigating, it looks like the people in the mugging take a case from the muggee before shooting this victim. The witness, who took the video, is now being hunted by the muggers who kill her roommate. Nothing really comes of this besides some more of the usual questions “is this going to come true/isn’t this/are we powerless to stop it?” It’s starting to get annoying.

This week I am personally fired up for the new Marvel series S.W.O.R.D. #1 by new Thor writer Kieron Gillen and Steven Sanders. The last time I saw Sanders he did the Five Fists of Science with Matt Fraction that feels like it was a century ago. The series is a spinoff from Joss Whedon’s Astonishing X-Men where we follow Agent Brand, Beast and Lockheed through the cosmos.

Following that is the new Doctor Strange spinoff, Strange by Mark Waid and Emma Rios. Being a nut for all things Deadpool, the latest issue of Amazing Spider-Man guest stars the Merc with a Mouth. But that’s not really why I’m buying the issue, its ’cause the awesome Eric Canete draws the issue.

For Matt, this week we have a Doc Savage special guest starring Batman. Written by the brilliant Brian Azzarello and drawn by Phil Noto, the Man of Bronze encounters the Dark Knight in non-period specific Manhattan.

A personal favorite of mine is the new Escapists trade paperback. This is a fairly old story, written by Lost’s Brian K. Vaughan and based on a Michael Chabon character. The Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Chabon created a new character called the Escapist.

This comic is about the character being re-imagined by Cleveland indy comic creators.  Its a fun read about friendship and comic creator rights written by the superb Vaughan through Dark Horse comics. I can only give it my highest possible recommendation.

As always, we here at The Flickcast care about what you read, so leave us a comment and let us know what you liked/didn’t like from this week’s comics. For a more complete list of what comes out this week, check out the one at Midtown Comics.

This week we have at least one high quality comic from every publisher. From Image this week, I’m sad to see Rick Remender’s The End League go, but like all good things they must come to end. This time with brilliant art by some guy named Eric Canete and NYC Mech‘s Andy MacDonald.

From DC Comics, I’m intrigued with the Great Ten spinoff series from Checkmate, with their spotlight in Final Crisis. This could make for an intriguing read.

From Marvel, we have the last issue of Captain America Rebirth in which we get an idea how Steve Rogers rejoins the universe. There is also the excellent new issue of Ultimate Comics Spider-Man, which is about the most fun in a comic you can get. Also, check out the latest Deadpool book, this one is penned by Fred Van Lente, who I really liked the silent story he did in that Deadpool #900 issue. This one is Deadpool Team-Up with a descending order number starting out at #899. I’d really like to know what the reasoning behind that is, but whatever.

Additionally, there is the Spider-Man Short Halloween book featuring stories by Saturday Night Live stars, Seth Meyers and Bill Hader.  I’m sure this will be nothing if not a ton of fun, so check that out as well.

Finally, one of my favorite noir writers Charlie Huston returns to comics with his new miniseries featuring Deathlok! I’m not particularly fond of the character, but then again I wasn’t fond of Moon Knight either until Huston relaunched it in awesome fashion.

As always, we here at The Flickcast care about what you read, so leave us a comment and let us know what you liked/didn’t like from this week’s comics. For a more complete list of what comes out this week, check out the one at Midtown Comics.