Giants Beware is a polished piece of cartooning that reads like its writer was raised by sitcom reruns. Any kid will love it, while adults might find the charm wearing as thin as a "Friends" marathon. Which is not to deny its definite charms, or undercut my hopes that this writer and artist do more work together, and soon.

"The Martian Confederacy" is two volumes, so far, of light sci-fi entertainment set on a trailer-park Mars and populated with scoundrels, good-hearted thieves, villains, small children, a sexy robot and a talking bear. There is, in other words, something for everyone in these breezy, self-contained adventure-comedies.

Royden Lepp's Rust: Visitor in the Field, has a dreamlike feel. There's the sepia color scheme, retro jetpacks and battle robots, and a slow-motion pacing that hobbles, but doesn't quite defeat, the work.

Down these mean streets a self-appointed reviewer must go, who is not himself mean, just a little tarnished, and unafraid. By the flicker of a bare bulb, he reads a comic, the kind with dames swooning into the arms of noble but cash-strapped detectives. Inky shadows, greasy mobsters, jet-black pools of blood. The works.

With Wondercon just around the corner here in the Bay Area, Badmouth’s thoughts are turning toward comics. All right, easily a third of Badmouth’s regular thoughts are about comics, but nonetheless, we’re going to try to get some fresh comics content posted in the runup to...

PART TWO: Volumes 5-8 Hellboy II got its ass handed to it thanks to The Dark Knight‘s stellar debut. It’s a shame Hellboy opened only a week before Batman—it was going to be hard enough to hold market share anywhere in this summer of superheroes, but having this Batman cut into...

Part One: Volumes 1-4 With a new, higher-profile Hellboy movie in theaters today, it seems like a great time to consider the series of graphic novels that inspired Guillermo Del Toro’s productions. In part one, we look at the four collecting material published before the first Hellboy...

At 45 years old, Spider-Man is still one of the greatest comic-book heroes of all time. But that doesn’t mean that every every Spider-Man story is a gem. Recently, Marvel infuriated fans with the One More Day storyline, where Peter’s Aunt May was shot and lay dying for the...

You're not alone -- you're on the Global Frequency

Global Frequency was a 12-issue comic book series, released in 2003, now collected in two volumes. The concept? When the world, or the chunk nearest you, is about to be destroyed by something way beyond normal, members of a 1001-member worldwide network are summoned—whoever's nearest or most needed. A special cell phone rings, you answer it, and a woman you'll never meet says, “John Doe ... You're on the Global Frequency.” And you put down your bacon double cheeseburger and help your ad-hoc team save the world. Global Frequency is also a television pilot produced in 2004 and rejected by stupid, stupid TV executives in 2005. Then someone with the true spirit of the property leaked the pilot onto the Internet, where it became the hot BitTorrent of the early summer. The show is creating enough buzz that there's the dimmest hope it can pull a Firefly -- getting its still-warm corpse defibrilated by rabid 'Net fandom.