How strange is it, that it would be Sam Peckinpah to articulate this moment?

Right at the end of The Wild Bunch there’s a moment that has absolutely no place in that movie. The Bunch have met up again, they’ve holed up in some anonymous house, but they encounter each other changed men. One look in their eyes and you know, individually, they’ve each committed themselves to rescuing Angel, held prisoner by the Mexican General, the movie’s chief villain.

It’s a flawless, near silent cinematic moment. The camera sweeps across the room. Each of The Bunch know with a certainty that the tensions between them will never be resolved. There’ll never be restitution. And yet, with an equal certainty, each one of them is now, uncharacteristically, committed to this greater thing of rescuing Angel.

Writing a contemporary Superman comic heavily featuring Bizarro is no easy task. After first appearing in the pages of Superboy in 1958 and later in Action Comics in 1959, Bizarro has popped up in the DCU frequently with his trademark backward “S”, Frankenstein’s monster appearance, and muddled, broken speech.
More than anything, Bizarro’s hokey manner of speaking—Me am Bizarro. Me say opposite of everything—makes it painfully difficult to actually read a comic with Bizarro for more than a few pages. As a reader, the shtick wore thin pretty fast, a semi-novel concept quickly dissolving to schoolyard antics on “backwards day”. Anyone else get tired of Backwards Day in elementary school? (“I like you” is funny for 7 year olds because it means “I don’t like you”.)

Paul Pope’s THB is one girl’s sprawling and surreal journey across planets as running from bug-faced monsters with the aid of her protector, THB, a molecule that transforms into a giant “super-mek” when activated with water. What’s particularly perfect about the THB series, and Pope’s work in general—which he has been self-releasing in creative blitzes since 1995—is how he manages to integrate aesthetic elements from Asian, European, and American graphic genres and end up with a wholly original style that, despite its English language narrative, is very cross-cultural.

“My dear Casanova. You don’t think you’re my only man on the inside, do you?” Holy shit is right, Cass. Spy, thief, dimensional traveler, and international sex toy, Casanova Quinn doesn’t have the time to understand the twists and turns his life continually takes.

It’s hard to pass Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson’s Beasts of Burden off as a simple supernatural horror comic. Sure, the cover logo features a skull and crossbones embedded inside an EC Creepy-looking tattered typeface, but Beasts of Burden is a comic that eschews the trappings of typical genre schlock.

“Lost” is the one-shot story in issue two which finds the super-sleuthing neighborhood animals of Burden Hill conjuring the spirits of lost animals for clues to help them solve the mystery of Hazel’s missing puppies.