The Copacetic Comics Company DC

Title	Creator	Publisher	Series	Price
Solo #5	Darwyn Cooke	DC	Solo	$4.49 ($4.99 list)
Read more and comment...	This time around, Solo, a bi-monthly title that takes a hands off approach in showcasing some of comics' finest contemporary creators and which is hands down the most copacetic comic book title currently being published by DC, presents Darwyn Cooke, who has turned in a bravura one-man-band performance that will be turning the heads of comics fans and pros everywhere. With the seven pieces created specifically for this issue (along with an amazing framing sequence) Cooke displays a finely nuanced understanding of the semiotics of art styles, of the language implicit in the subtle (and not so subtle) variations of style that identify and, at least in part, define the terms that make up the lexicon of comics. Cooke shows off his wide range of techniques and demonstrates an understanding -- and appreciation -- of the inherent expressive capacities of a panoply of comics styles that few have equalled; only Art Spiegelman, Dan Clowes and Bill Sienkiewicz -- each in their own distinct fashion -- come immediately to mind. Darwyn Cooke is a post-modern pen-and-ink mix-master!
OMAC: One Man Army Corps	Jack Kirby	DC		$22.22 ($24.99 list)
Read more and comment...	Even the U.S. Army has based it's philosophy on Kirby's (We will freely admit that this is pure conjecture on our part, but hey: "Be an Army of One", "One Man Army Corps" -- coincidence or co-optation? You decide!). Anyway, this full color hardcover volume collects the entirety of the original 8-issue series that Kirby created in 1974. OMAC features some of Kirby's most mind-boggling (not to mention prophetic) science fiction concepts melded to non-stop action. This is a work that can be appreciated on just about any level you can think of and represents Kirby's last hurrah at DC in the 70s before jumping back to Marvel to reinvigorate Captain America, The Black Panther and more. OMAC!
DC: The New Frontier - Volume Two	Darwyn Cooke	DC	DC: The New Frontier	$17.99 ($19.99 list)
Read more and comment...	This is it! The second and concluding volume in the classic, definitive treatment of the genesis (and exodus, for that matter) of the Silver Age superhero. We've done plenty of raving about this series before, so rather than repeat ourselves here, we'll refer you to our previous comments on New Frontier. All we've got to say at this time is: No self-respecting fan of superhero comics will want to miss this series, and now that it's completely in print in two handy TPBs, there's really no need to put it off any longer.
Solo #4	Howard Chaykin	DC		$4.45 ($4.95 list)
Read more and comment...	When Howard Chaykin stages a comeback, he stages a comeback! After a decade of lackadaisical and dispirited meandering at the edges of comics, he is now back at center stage and busy -- make that very busy -- producing some of the best work of his long and storied career (now well into its fourth decade). Starting out of the gate with 2004's hardcover original graphic novel, Mighty Love -- described by Chaykin as The Shop Around the Corner in spandex -- he followed up in short order with his brutally satiric revisionist update of The Challengers of the Unknown, a six-issue mini-series, presumably soon to collected in a TPB. And now we have his latest, Solo #4, a 48-page, advertisement-free collection of six graphic shorts each of which gives a standard comics genre the Chaykin treatment: a jazz inflected war story starts it off, followed by forays into science fiction (love & cloning), the western (and it's Hollywood counterpart), a husband & wife espionage drama, an EC-inspired "social message" story and finally... Chaykin's first ever stab at auto-bio comics! And as for his chops? Chaykin's back with his trademark: a sleek graphic-design savvy solidly welded to classic old school comics storytelling. There are only so many pages in a comic book, and Chaykin doesn't want to waste any of them holding the reader's hand and walking him or her down well trod paths. What you see on a page of Chaykin's work represents the tip of the iceberg. There's an entire imaginative "berg" below the surface that is an accretion of a lifetime of comics sensibilities. He trusts his readership to share with him a comprehension of generic conventions and an awareness of current events. Chaykin isn't here to provide a palliative escapist fantasy that allows readers to retreat into a denial of the reality surrounding them. Rather, he redeploys the archetypal heroic narrative to provide a caustic criticism of his chosen targets -- usually the myopic normative behavior dedicated to maintaining a corrupt status quo that he sees as dangerous to and damaging of a decent, civilized society -- and prod his readership's intelligence into a bit of critical thinking of it's own. Chaykin's comics can be confusing to the uninitiated: he produces narratives that are of an unsurpassed density and that involve much cross-cutting and parallel plotting. Anyone not paying attention can quickly become lost. Those willing to devote their fair share of focus and concentration will, however, find their efforts rewarded with an entertaining education in the ways of human nature and the underpinnings of our society. In addition, there is the sheer aesthetic pleasure in experiencing a master ply his craft. Long time Chaykin devotees will know that these are comics not to be missed; and to any readers of traditional genre based comics who have yet to experience Chaykin's work, all we have to say is: now's a great time to check it out
DC: The New Frontier - Volume One	Dave Stewart, Darwyn Cooke	DC	DC: The New Frontier	$17.95 ($19.95 list)
Read more and comment...	What was the best superhero comic book series of 2004 is now set to be the best superhero trade back collection of 2005. It's hard to sing this work's praises without lapsing into a sort of rabid, gushing fanboyese, but we'll try. With The New Frontier, Darwyn Cooke -- with the very able assistance of Dave Stewart -- has flawlessly executed his vision of a classic American masculinity and completely delivered the goods. The series is, technically, a piece of historical fiction, as is takes place primarily during the decade long gap between the Golden Age and Silver Age of superhero comics -- roughly 1946 to 1956 -- before bringing us to the edge of the "new frontier" as defined by President Kennedy. This period is known, in comic book collector circles at least, as the Atomic Age. Cooke works to imagine the "real" lives of the superheroes during this historical era where superheroes were – with the notable exception of the holy trinity of Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman – absent from the American scene. In so doing, the story captures that transition from the values of the WWII generation to that of the generation that follows: Not the "Greatest Generation" but not yet the "Baby Boomers" either, this was the generation that fell in the gap, but nevertheless managed to change the direction of our culture. The New Frontier presents us with the Super Hero -- specifically, the DC superhero -- version of this generation and this period. But it is more: Like its excellent (and now criminally out of print) predecessor, The Fantastic Four: Unstable Molecules by James Sturm, Guy Davis, R. Sikoryak and Craig Thompson, The New Frontier is a work of metacomics. At precisely the same time that it is a swashbuckling adventure yarn, it provides a psychological deconstruction of the adventure narrative. At the same time that it presents us with vision of a time when men were men and women were women, it asks us to ask what this means. At the same time that it is a flat out masterpiece of graphic narrative it is an homage to the heroic comics creators of the Atomic Age: Jack Kirby and Alex Toth first and foremost among them, but also, close behind, Wally Wood, Johnny Craig, Bob Powell, Joe Kubert and many more. When you read this book you really can have your cake and eat it too. And the colors, oh, the colors: the color is alchemically integrated into the very fabric of the meaning of this work. How messrs. Cooke and Stewart managed to collaborate at such a deep level on what has to be one of the most intuitive of tasks -- that of breathing the life of color into the strength of pen and ink lines -- will probably remain forever a mystery; but what a glorious mystery it is. Simply put, DC: The New Frontier is a prime example of something that is unbelievably good -- you just can't bring yourself to believe that anything could be as good as they say until you finally experience it yourself. That said, the caveat must be made that readers lacking a grounding in the conventions of superhero comics might have difficulty plugging in. But, hey, we say that even then it's worth the try, if you're willing.DC • 192 pages • full color
Bizarro World	Jaime Hernandez, Peter Bagge, Craig Thompson, Dylan Horrocks and more ...	DC		$26.95 ($29.95 list) OUT OF STOCK!
Read more and comment...	DC lets its proprietary guard down for a contained barrage of absurdity; allowing its audience a glimpse at the super-id that lies beneath the super-ego of its stable of heroes. This long awaited sequel to the popular Bizarro Comics is a veritable who's who of the indy comics world. Starting off with a cover by Locas maestro, Jaime Hernandez, the line-up inside includes Rick Altergbott, Peter Bagge, Ariel Bourdeaux, Ivan Brunetti, Eddie Campbell, Dave Cooper (in a ten-page opus featuring Super Girl and Wonder Woman), Leela Corman, Evan Dorkin, Ben Dunn, Sarah Dyer, Phil Elliot, Hunt Emerson, Asaf & Tomer Hanuka, Gilbert Hernandez, Dylan Horrocks, James Kochalka, Michael Kupperman (he's in his element here), Roger Langridge, Tony Millionaire (with a very gothic Batman), Harvey Pekar teams up with Dean Haspiel, Craig Thompson, Pittsburgh's own Don Simpson -- even the French team of Philippe Dupuy & Charles Berberian! And many more. Fab fan fun.
The Spirit: Femme Fatales	Will Eisner	DC		$17.77 ($19.99 list)
Read more and comment...	Before the 1950s, there was -- surprise! -- the 1940s, where the same dilemma of identity choice faced the American male, especially upon returning in droves from fighting the second world war, and discovering a newly empowered female whose taste of (relative) freedom and independence in the males' absence made some of them less enamored of a life of submissive domesticity than before. This "new" woman was often perceived as a threat to male and so that staple of the noir era, the femme fatale was born (intriguing that this period is so closely associated with terms of French origin, non?) Thus the choice, for a man, between what kind of life to lead came to be identified with the choice between what kind of woman to desire: the "good" woman -- here clearly identified as Police Commissioner Dolan's daughter, Ellen -- and the "bad" women, of which there are, invariably, many and whom the Spirit has many a run-in. This is the second affordable, softcover edition collecting the creme de la creme of Will Eisner's classic series. Published by DC, this 192 page full color softcover collects 23 frankly fabulous tales. If you have yet to experience these era-defining comics, this is a good place to start.
The Spirit: Volume Two	Darwyn Cooke	DC		$22.22 ($24.99 list)
Read more and comment...	And then there's this: the second -- and final -- hardcover volume collecting Darwyn Cooke's masterful, updated reading of Will Eisner's classic character, that may very well end up being the last word, particularly in the stunning finale, in which Cooke does his best to explode the good girl - bad girl divide and reveal the psychological roots of noir. As an added bonus, there is also the "Summer Fun" issue that features short takes on The Spirit by a host of of other top talent including Kyle Baker, Gail Simone, Chris Sprouse and Karl Story.
The Spirit #12	Darwyn Cooke	DC		$2.99 ($2.99 list)
Read more and comment...	While Darwyn Cooke originally planned for a two-year stint on The Spirit, circumstances conspired to cut his run short at the halfway mark. The evidence of this final issue -- an exigetical adaptation of Eisner's original Sand Saref story (the same story Frank Miller's upcoming movie is also using as it's core text) -- bears out that this is all it took for Cooke to bore right to the core of not just the character of The Spirit but of the spirit of the noir sensibility itself. Through his masterful employment of Eisner's late style (which Eisner himself used to portray the past; i.e. his own childhood during the depression out of which so many heroes emerged to collectively shake the country out of its torpor) in conjunction with his own, Cooke has managed to delineate how the fatalistic noir sensibility is connected to a personal feeling of discontinuity, particularly the sense of disconnection with childhood self: the "paradise lost" that Denny Colt's pre-sexual relationship with Sand represented. It is the trauma of sexualization (that is metaphorically represented in The Spirit #12 -- as it is in so many other myths -- by the death of the father) that separates childhood from adulthood and it is the "something" that is lost at that moment that the hero (here, The Spirit) is forever trying to recapture; but these attempts are always failures and it is the final resignation to the permanence of this "failure" to regain the "paradise" of unsexualized childhood that colors the noir sensibility. This quest to capture the sense of childhood innocence is amplified by the choice of medium: the fact of the story being told in comic book form implicitly links it to the very childhood innocence that the comic book symbolizes and so transforms this issue into a near perfect symbol of Paradise Lost. The Spirit #12 is not just a tough act to follow, it's impossible. retail price - $2.99 copacetic price - $2.99
The Spirit #12	Darwyn Cooke	DC		$2.69 ($2.99 list)
Read more and comment...	While Darwyn Cooke originally planned for a two-year stint on The Spirit, circumstances conspired to cut his run short at the halfway mark. The evidence of this final issue -- an exigetical adaptation of Eisner's original Sand Saref story (the same story Frank Miller's upcoming movie is also using as it's core text) -- bears out that this is all it took for Cooke to bore right to the core of not just the character of The Spirit but of the spirit of the noir sensibility itself. Through his masterful employment of Eisner's late style (which Eisner himself used to portray the past; i.e. his own childhood during the depression out of which so many heroes emerged to collectively shake the country out of its torpor) in conjunction with his own, Cooke has managed to delineate how the fatalistic noir sensibility is connected to a personal feeling of discontinuity, particularly the sense of disconnection with childhood self: the "paradise lost" that Denny Colt's pre-sexual relationship with Sand represented. It is the trauma of sexualization (that is metaphorically represented in The Spirit #12 -- as it is in so many other myths -- by the death of the father) that separates childhood from adulthood and it is the "something" that is lost at that moment that the hero (here, The Spirit) is forever trying to recapture; but these attempts are always failures and it is the final resignation to the permanence of this "failure" to regain the "paradise" of unsexualized childhood that colors the noir sensibility. This quest to capture the sense of childhood innocence is amplified by the choice of medium: the fact of the story being told in comic book form implicitly links it to the very childhood innocence that the comic book symbolizes and so transforms this issue into a near perfect symbol of Paradise Lost. The Spirit #12 is not just a tough act to follow, it's impossible.
The Spirit #1	Darwyn Cooke	DC		$2.50 ($2.99 list)
Read more and comment...	Speaking of born again spirits, here is the much anticipated return of the one and only Spirit. Created 66 years ago (can you believe it?!) by the legendary Will Eisner, Denny Colt is back courtesy of Darwyn Cooke (DC: The New Frontier), who, with the able assist of J. Bone on inks and Dave Stewart on colors, is recreating the Spirit & Co. (including a revamped Ebony!) for both the 21st century and the DC Comics universe (see the Batman and Spirit one-shot, also by Cooke & Co., but with script by Jeph Loeb). The series starts off in full stride with "Ice Ginger Coffee," a completely self-contained adventure (as Cooke promises all issues will be in this nice interview feature) that brings The Spirit straight away into the war against crime and the battle between the sexes; right where he belongs.