Before the pandemic BF’s Staff Picks feature had run for many years, with members of the team giving a weekly overview of recommended new releases. Now, retooled and re-imagined to fit the site’s current ethos, it has returned as a monthly series designed to spotlight just a few key releases that appeal to us. This is not, then, intended as a comprehensive, exhaustive or extensive round-up but rather to point you in the direction of some top projects that caught the eyes of BF contributors. Please also remember these aren’t intended as reviews and full coverage of the comics/books below may follow in due course!
Comic(s) of the Month
LDComics Online Comic Fair
A slightly different tack for our Comic of the Month for July. Because we’re actually choosing 84 different comics in that category for this month! The LDComics Online Comics Fair is full of downloadable comics goodies and provides a much needed extra platform for creators while also ensuring an accessible international comics market.
You can browse, peruse and purchase the comics on offer here. There’s some amazing work there and we will be tagging our ongoing coverage of the event here at Broken Frontier so you can read our thoughts on the range on offer. There are many BF Six to Watch artists taking part too including Mereida Fajardo, Zhenyi Zheng, Beastly Worlds and more!
– Andy Oliver
Womb Rider (Uncivilized)
Looking through the Lunar Distribution catalogue this is the title that stood out like a beacon amongst the month’s offerings. Danish artist Emil Friis Ernst has a very unique style, leaning more toward a Kevin O’Neill or alternative cartoonist bent than a traditional illustrative one. The premise seems to be Death Race 2000 by way of Yuichi Yokoyama!
– Gary Usher
The Woman With Fifty Faces (Fantagraphics Books)
Sometimes graphic biography works to give us an encapsulation of lives familiar to us. Sometimes it broadens our knowledge of its subjects. And sometimes it introduces us to a fascinating story of which we have no prior knowledge.
Writer Jonathan Lackman and artist Zachary J. Pinson’s The Woman with Fifty Faces is subtitled Maria Lani & The Greatest Art Heist That Never Was and looks at the bizarre true story of Lani, a model and purported actor. In the late 1920s she persuaded over fifty artists of the calibre of Pierre Bonnard, Marc Chagall, André Derain, Henri Matisse and Georges-Henri Rouault to capture her likeness in artworks supposedly to be used in a film that never happened. That enough should be a hook for most potential readers.
– Andy Oliver
Comics of the Movement #1 (Good Trouble Comics)
This publisher has put out a few titles (Register #1, Recognized #1) that focus on civil rights and the history of LGBTQIA+ pioneers. This particular title presents two civil rights era comics: Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story (1957) and a student-produced comic from 1966 featuring the previously unknown first iteration of the Black Panther.
– Gary Usher
Brain Damage
This collection of four short stories comes from Shintaro Kago whose English language debut Dementia 21 was reviewed at Broken Frontier by Robin Enrico here back in 2019.
For fans of manga horror this looks set to be a gory treat with some cool-sounding premises for the stories contained in its pages, including what sounds like an interesting new take on the zombie subgenre and what appears to be a locked room mystery but with cars instead of buildings,
– Andy Oliver
Spectrum TPB (Mad Cave)
Broken Frontier‘s past coverage of Dave Chisholm belies his interest in music-related subjects. With writer Rick Quinn, Chisholm brings a fictional story about music and time travel and madness to life. Sounds like an unusual comics experience.
– Gary Usher
Will Eisner: A Comics Biography (NBM)
Bringing the life of the man we most associate with the term “graphic novel” to the comics page, Will Eisner: A Graphic Biography comes to us from the creative team of Stephen Weiner and Dan Mazur, and via NBM who have a strong track record in the graphic biography department.
Look for an upcoming review of the book at BF very soon. In the meantime check out some preview pages on the NBM site to whet your appetite.
– Andy Oliver
