Sequart Organization » Image Comics: Recent Episodes
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The Dead and the Dying, written by Ed Brubaker and illustrated by Sean Phillips, is the third volume of Criminal, and it marks the point where the series really hit its stride. This is where… [more]
Syphon is the latest comic-book effort by Patrick Meaney, better known by his quite informative and insightful documentary works on iconic comic book writers such as Grant Morrison: Talking with Gods and Neil Gaiman: Dream… [more]
Written by Tony Fleecs Art by Trish Forstner Don’t let the cute dog illustrations in this comic fool you into thinking this is a children’s story. Using anthropomorphic dogs as its main characters, the first… [more]
Writer: Kyle Higgins Artist: Marcelo Costa SPOILER WARNING… The superhero genre often uses the “super” element as a way to explore experiences that in real life would be ordinary. Radiant Black certainly fits the genre,… [more]
Written by Brian Holguin Art by Jay Anacleto and Brian Haberlin While I am unfamiliar with the Aria comics from the ’90s, this one certainly makes an impression for a first-time reader. Set in Victorian… [more]
The world of cape-comics has a rather tortured relationship with certain sets of words used to describe a character, creator or project. ‘Iconic,’ for instance, is probably one of the most overused words in our… [more]
The title of this essay comes from lines spoken by the character Jenny Sparks in Warren Ellis’s first issue as writer on the WildStorm title Stormwatch (#37, July 1996), after she is recruited to the… [more]
2019 has just barely put on its socks and we already have our first whiff a controversy in the comics-corner of the world. To wit: the first issue of the new Image series Gunning for… [more]
Writer and Artist: Sloane Leong Publisher: Image Comics Prism Stalker is a new science fiction series from Image comics. These days “a new science fiction series from Image” is not quite an exciting announcement as… [more]
[Editor’s note: Sorry that I have fallen behind recently with my coverage of Manifest Destiny. But since the 5th trade paperback is released this week, it seems the perfect time to catch up. For those… [more]
This week marks the 25th anniversary of the founding of one of the strongest and most creative comics publishers, Image Comics. Founded by and for comics creators, Image was established as a home for creators… [more]
“I’m Cain, the man who invented murder. But God invented me, so ask yourself: who’s the real asshole here?” If readers expected the story of Jason Aaron and r. m. Guera’s The Goddamned to take… [more]
In its latest issue, #18, Descender gets back to business, driving the plot of this story forward after taking some time to develop the characters in recent issues. This issue is classic space opera science… [more]
It’s a very special issue of Manifest Destiny as the 25th issue makes its appearance this week. The journey of Lewis and Clark has entered a different phase, as the Corps of Discovery settles down… [more]
There are eerie and tempting parallels between Coach Boss and a certain American President-elect. Both are brutal, simple-minded, deeply insecure tyrants, and both have a tendency to move the goalposts and declare victory when an… [more]
Sequart Organization is pleased to announce that our documentary The Image Revolution is now available to stream for free, if you subscribe to Amazon Prime. Simply click HERE and begin watching! 20 years ago, a… [more]
Here we are again in the steaming tribal vendetta-filled world of Southern Bastards. Craw County continues, here in issue #15, to be a community that measures is worth based on the standing of its high… [more]
The situation faced by the crusaders in Lake of Fire is becoming increasingly desperate in issue #3. Theo has been badly wounded, the Keep is surrounded by aliens intent on getting in, the people are… [more]
All of the characters in Descender (with the possible exception of the TIMs) have an undercurrent of rage and confusion. Their world changed so dramatically, and so quickly, with the Harvester attack that it re-drew… [more]
The latest Manifest Destiny brings the “Sasquatch” story arc to an end in fairly spectacular fashion. These story arcs function quite a bit like seasons of television, and Chris Dingess has fashioned a whopper of… [more]
The long-awaited collaboration between Mark Millar and Greg Capullo is now here in the form of Reborn, which debuts today. The book is certainly blessed with a deep bench of talent (Jonathan Glapion is the… [more]
Lake of Fire, by Nathan Fairbairn and Matt Smith, seems to be mixing what we would expect from a “crusaders vs aliens” storyline (lots of fights, strange eruptions from wounds) with a fairly robust and… [more]
The new story arc of Invisible Republic, which begins here in issue #11, is a bit of a departure from previous issues and arcs in this compelling and complex science fiction drama. Readers will remember… [more]
It’s become apparent that the Captain Helm story in the pages of Manifest Destiny serves, at least in part, the same function that Tales of the Black Freighter did in Watchmen. This is emphatically a… [more]
There’s been quite a lot written about The Crusades, but it seems like modern historians agree on one thing: they were a great excuse for Christians of a certain persuasion to engage in some serious… [more]
Like many men of their era, Lewis and Clark were “blessed” with an overabundance of positivity and confidence (more for Lewis than Clark, but they each believed in the soundness of their society and their… [more]
Descender #13 is ostensibly about Captain Telsa, the red-haired, firey Captain from the UGC, sent to retrieve TIM-21 and the codex he carries in his electronic DNA that may hold the key to understanding the… [more]
One of the many challenges that the historical Lewis and Clark expedition had to surmount was simple hunger. They weren’t as badly off as some, and fared far better than some of the more northern… [more]
It’s too easy for us today to slip into a simplistic stereotype of the “dark ages”, or the early medieval period. Barbarians roaming across the countryside, committing unspeakable acts of carnage and pillage, and scared… [more]
The finale of Plutona’s five issue run is understandably dark, but then again, that’s basically the only place this remarkable series could go. The most interesting parts of this book have always been the relationships… [more]
“Captain Clark killed a curious animal… [one] never yet known in the United States.” That’s a quote from a member of the actual Corps of Discovery, and in that case it was the antelope, which… [more]
One of Descender’s strongest themes has always been the notion of robots having souls — sometimes souls more pure and more sensitive than the flesh and blood humans that surround them. Our central robot character,… [more]
Kieron Gillen and Jamie McKelvie’s Phonogram is very much a celebration of pop music, a comic filled with characters who love it deeply and at times overwhelmingly. A blurb from Art Brut vocalist Eddie Argos… [more]
Invisible Republic is only just now in its tenth issue, but it feels as if there have been many more than that. The complexity of the world, and the subtlety with which Gabriel Hardman and… [more]
Warning: If you haven’t read the first five issues of Paper Girls, this discussion will spoil a few things. On the other hand, if you have read those issues but not the latest, don’t worry.… [more]
The Goddamned is one of two major comics that have recently offered us a reimagined version of the Biblical character Noah. The other book — Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, which was also made into a big… [more]
When undertaking a task as dangerous as the exploration of unknown lands, teamwork is an absolute necessity. Other writers (such as Stephen Ambrose) have noted that it was this capacity for group unity, strong leadership… [more]
It should come as no surprise that Black Road has the narrative structure of the “journey”. (The word “road” is right there in the title, after all.) While we were introduced to the characters and… [more]
As we reach the end of the “Homecoming” story arc in Southern Bastards, it becomes fairly clear what this particular storyline has always been about. Not football, or even race, necessarily, but the rather the… [more]
Monstress wastes no time in creating a lush, vivid fantasy world and giving us some great characters to populate it. This Image Comics release by Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda builds all manner of artifice… [more]
The Fade Out is a comic about Hollywood, specifically that magical post-war late-1940s Hollywood that is so often romanticized. It’s one of America’s true mythic places, full of hard-drinking writers, bombshell girls (and the occasional… [more]
East of West is an ongoing series that hasn’t exactly been getting the attention it rightfully deserves. So, if you haven’t been reading this series, then you need to run to the nearest bookstore and… [more]
Another contender for the 2016 Eisner Award for Best New Series is Paper Girls by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang, from Image Comics. By now we’ve come to expect great things from the creator… [more]
Vikings have a special place in the European imagination, to put it mildly. A crazy blend of the wild west with the notion of the Fantasy Hero archetype set to a Heavy Metal soundtrack, the… [more]
When I was in Grade 12, our laid back physics and astronomy teacher once asked our class, “What do you want to do when you leave here?” One bravely honest soul replied, “I don’t want… [more]
Jason Aaron’s The Goddamned is best described as a cross between the Bible and Mad Max, with all the brutality and wit that implies. But somehow it goes so far into the depths of inhumanity… [more]
Timeliness is next to prescience, or something like that. Here I was preparing this screed when I chanced upon an article by a person who insists that the survival of comic books is dependent upon… [more]
We’ve spent so much time getting to know the characters and their personal challenges over the past 10 issues of Descender that it’s good to be reminded in the new issue that the freaking galaxy… [more]
The latest, and darkest, collection of Manifest Destiny appears in stores this week, gathering issues #13-18 in a gruesome, intense and compelling TPB. Although it may be obvious to anyone who reads this comic, it… [more]
Tom and Shawn get all combative in a very angry Smorgasbord, as they discuss the new Suicide Squad trailer, Image series ending too early, Marvel superhero (and price) inflation, and a complete rundown of the… [more]
Ah, American football. It isn’t the world’s most competitive sport (have you seen the World Cup lately?), nor is it necessarily its most violent (I’m looking at you, Australian rules rugby), but there’s something about… [more]
Who are “the goddamned”, referenced in rm Guera and Jason Aaron’s The Goddamned? This ultra-violent re-interpretation of the Old Testament is faithful to the original text in the sense that the goddamned are really all… [more]
Despite the epic sweep of this science fiction adventure, the best moments in this latest issue of Descender come in the form of a simple conversation between the two TIM robots, now being taken through… [more]
In Descender #8 we finally meet the series’ Han Solo character. There’s even a Chewie equivalent (a giant slug with six eyes but he’s still charming). One could cry foul and say that Jeff Lemire… [more]
Both Arthur McBride and his cousin Maia Reveron eventually become revolutionary leaders: this is not really much of a spoiler for the continuing saga of Invisible Republic. But it’s important to note the differences between… [more]
“Beware the best-of list”, Shakespeare once wrote. Or he should have. There are deep problems with basing one’s opinion of the literature worth reading on one critic’s list of the “best” of the year, most… [more]
Time travel stories can be some of the most enjoyable, as well as some of the most complex science fiction stories. When done well, they’re intricately plotted and deal with a number of complexities that… [more]
The Roman Empire had nothing on groups of kids when it comes to conspiracy, collusion, forming alliances and keeping secrets. That’s one of the great truths about young people that Jeff Lemire and Emi Lenox… [more]
“I’ve been involved in several cults, both as a leader and a follower. You have more fun as a follower, but you make more money as a leader.” -Creed Bratton We have to start the… [more]
The main theme of Fil Barlow and Helen Maier’s arc “Yorris” for 8House appears to be transgression. Little Yorris rebelled against her culture by presuming to suggest that war isn’t automatically the answer to every… [more]
Anyone of a certain inclination who has read the Old Testament can’t help but come away thinking of it as pretty “metal”, to coin a phrase. Fights to the death, plagues, burning cities, vendettas, and… [more]
“Americans love a winner, and cannot abide a loser.” -Gen. George S. Patton We have to go way back to issue #4 of Southern Bastards to recall the story that’s picked up here in issue… [more]
Sometimes, maybe all the time, compelling narrative storytelling is about constantly raising the stakes. For a book that started with the destruction of a major human civilization, Descender has fairly masterfully managed to raise the… [more]
As previously mentioned in our discussions of Rasputin, one of the more curious aspects of this historical figure is that we all know how he died. That’s the first and sometimes only thing we learn… [more]
Sequart is proud to announce that Shout! Factory has picked up our documentary, The Image Revolution, for distribution. We’re very excited to get the film out to a wider audience, and Shout! Factory is a great company… [more]
This isn’t the first time, nor, I suspect, will it be the last, when there is blood on the scales in Manifest Destiny. One of the things that makes this comic so fascinating is how… [more]
8House brings us yet another new world this week in the form of 8House: Yorris. For those keeping track, we’ve already seen Arclight (still a personal favourite) and Kiem, which featured some very arresting and… [more]
Each new issue of Southern Bastards seems to get deeper, more thoughtful and more artful in its rendering of the American south. The book has always had a wonderful ability to capture the Southern Gothic… [more]
Plutona continues to excel at assuming the point of view of children in a complex and difficult world. One of the great things about that particular point of view, especially with regards to this kind… [more]
It’s interesting, and a little jarring, that in issue #9 of Rasputin, having spent a great deal of time in the “present”, in America, we are thrust back into the thickets of Russian folklore and… [more]
Everyone wants the Reveron journal. That’s been true since issue #1 of Invisible Republic, and it’s, if anything, even more true as we pass into the second major story arc here in issue #6. Once… [more]
Manifest Destiny has great moments when it combines the absurd with the profound, or the fantastic with genuinely powerful character moments. And both are to be found in its most recent issue, #17. What could… [more]
Believe it or not, Alan Moore wrote an issue of Spawn. In the midst of a crass and embarrassing era of comics, could Alan Moore steer Image Comics to substance? [more]
From Descender, we know that Jeff Lemire can be a very skilled science fiction storyteller, a genre quite far removed from his realist roots in books like Essex County. With his uncanny ability to adopt… [more]
It’s fairly well established that Brandon Graham conceived of 8House as not just a connected series of stories, set in the same science fiction universe, but as a “label”, under which any number of stories… [more]
When I was in high school, all of us history nerds (or nerds in general) knew one thing and one thing only about Rasputin: the way he was killed. For a young and growing boy,… [more]
Invisible Republic is celebrating its first TPB release this week, collecting issues #1-5, and this is the perfect opportunity to catch up with this fascinating and intelligent science fiction comic. While ostensibly a science fiction… [more]
Improbable as it may seem to some readers, who may be out off by the sharp turn towards fantasy taken in the previous issue of Manifest Destiny, this book is still thoroughly about America, and… [more]
A significant part of the new issue of Descender takes place fifteen years before the start of our main story, on a dusty old planet named “Ostrakon”. It’s a very clever and literate reference for… [more]
We should start this review by revising, in retrospect, some of the assumptions and conclusions I made about 8House: Arclight #1. For one thing, as some have pointed out, I’m not entirely sure what the… [more]
Coach Big is dead. That fact no doubt affects people in lots of different ways in Craw County, and the larger mythic universe of Southern Bastards. But before we get to all of that, the… [more]
“Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living” -Arthur C. Clarke That’s a very interesting maxim to apply to Grigori Rasputin, particularly in… [more]
At the end of issue #5 of Invisible Republic, we’ve reached the end of the first story arc in style. Opening up its secrets like a very well-written television series, the big twist at the… [more]
As this writer got into reading comics, he noticed that dozens of movies are comic adaptations. It was a startling realization to see Men in Black, The Mask, Wanted, Oblivion, The Crow, Kick-Ass, Snowpiercer, The… [more]
Bitch Planet is a comic that uses the language of exploitation, visual and verbal, to discuss the topic of exploitation. And it’s definitely well-informed on that subject. Kelly Sue DeConnick’s script is full of metaphors… [more]
In the latest issue of Descender, we get a tremendous narrative “focus pulling”, showing us with absolute clarity for the first time where the story of TIM-21, Dr Quon, Captain Telsa and Driller fit into… [more]
In the long and storied history of the United States, a key moment occurred on August 18, 1805. That day, the “Corps of Discovery”, led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, crossed the North American… [more]
It doesn’t take a great deal of exposition to build a completely original and engrossing science fiction/fantasy world, especially in comics. That principle is exemplified by the 8House series, the first story arc of which… [more]
Rasputin returns for its sixth issue, following one of the most dramatic and unexpected jump-cuts in the history of comics that ended the previous issue. It isn’t as if this issue walks back those surprises… [more]
As I’ve mentioned before in our discussions of Invisible Republic, one of the most interesting things about this book is the nature of the dramatic stakes. Nobody is fighting to “save the world” in the… [more]
“But the Good Lord always gives us another chance, don’t he?” -Coach Big Here were are again, back in the tangled thicket of history, race, sex, sports, ribs and morality that populate the literate and… [more]
Manifest Destiny somehow always seems to keep one toe in historical reality, and one toe in the wildest fantastic metaphors of the all-American mind. But it has generally erred on the side of realism: even… [more]
After four issues, which brings us to the end of the first story arc of Chrononauts, here’s the story in a nutshell: two irresponsible teenaged goofballs steal a hot car and proceed to have a… [more]
The cover of the new issue of Descender is adorned by a character who is rapidly becoming the “Chewbacca” of the series, “Driller”. Driller is exactly what he says he is: a robot that drills… [more]
After four issues, I can safely say that I’m still not really sure what’s going on in Nameless. Just as I get, or at least seem to get, a handle on the proceedings, reality shifts… [more]
By coincidence, for an unrelated project, I’ve been reading Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle lately, and I can’t help seeing many similarities with Gabriel Hardman and Corinna Bechko’s Invisible Republic, as… [more]
Chrononauts continues to be exuberant, good-hearted fun, and as we head into the last act of this four-issue arc, Quinn and Reilly are starting to encounter consequences to their extremely irresponsible (though fun) actions. Mark… [more]
It’s becoming clear what Descender is really about as we reach issue #3, and the good news is that it’s about something very interesting. This is really a story about “descent” in the biological sense… [more]
Science Fiction, it almost goes without saying, is replete with parallels and metaphors for real society and true history. Invisible Republic is literally about the process of making, recording and retaining history, told from two… [more]
The first few pages of the latest issue of Manifest Destiny have a great blend of the horrific and the absurd. The tension in the sequence is built around the fact that the men of… [more]
In the second issue of Descender, the focus is on the robot boy, Tim, rather than our human protagonist, Dr Quon. While it might seem like Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen are borrowing too heavily… [more]