By Ram V and Mike Perkins
After a devastating event in his home village, scientist Levi Kamei reluctantly finds himself succeeding Alec Holland as the new Guardian of the Green. I probably made the mistake of reading this series while also doing a full reread of Alan Moore's seminal run from the 80s. Was just impossible not to play compare and contrast with this series suffering the most as a result. Even with a new main character with a different background, it still felt like a typical Swamp Thing series, playing around with a lot of the same ideas Moore did decades ago. It isn't by any means a bad series, the story is well told and artwork is strong, but it just didn't offer anything I haven't seen many times before.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
By Jed MacKay, Alessandro Cappuccio, and Others
MacKay's Moon Knight run has consistently been one of Marvel's strongest titles for the last few years, but it has struggled somewhat since someone at Marvel decided they needed to keep relaunching it every 10 or 15 issues with a different name. The previous volume, Vengeance of the Moon Knight, suffered from being too short and too heavily tied into the Blood Hunt crossover. Fist of Khonshu, on the other hand, has felt too rushed, directionless, and never really recovered from the loss of Cappuccio as artist early on. Domenico Carbone and Dev Pramanik are both fine, but an obvious step down from Cappuccio.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐
By Tom King and Bilquis Evely
Following the death of her father, the esteemed pulp writer C. K. Cole, Helen Cole is brought by her new governess to Wyndhorn House, the enormous estate of her grandfather, who turns out to be the very barbarian adventurer her father wrote about. Inspired by the tragic life and death of Conan creator Robert E. Howard, this is a grand fantasy tale that mixes together the works of Howard with L. Frank Baum, C.S. Lewis, and Diana Wynne Jones. At heart it is a tale of grief, generational trauma, and how stories can brings us together. Of course, the main attraction is Evely's art and I do wish that King had dialed back on his narration considerably so I could appreciate it better.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
By Daniel Warren Johnson, Jorge Corona, and Others
What if the robots that turn into cars had PTSD from fighting an endless war? That is the question that drives Daniel Warren Johnson's better than it has any right to be reboot of the Transformers franchise. In-between all the grand scale mechanical carnage, which is often as brutal as the deeply traumatising first ten minutes of Transformers: The Movie, Johnson takes the time to really dig in and explore just how messed up these robots in disguise are. After two years and 24 issues, he brought his run to a close this year. The final arc managed to bring Optimus Prime's character arc to a close, but Johnson left so many other plot threads dangling before he departed, bringing his amazing run to something of an unsatisfying conclusion.
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
By Matthew Rosenberg and Tyler Boss
In a dystopian world where there are no adults, Sid, a member of the Academy gang, mysteriously disappears, forcing the rest of the gang to leave the rundown record store they call a home in search of her. Take a slice of The Warriors, sprinkle in some Logan's Run, add two spoonfuls of 90s slacker comedies, and just a drop of John Carpenter and you get post-apocalyptic coming of age drama What's the Furthest Place From Here? Although the many influences are obvious to see, there's an alluring story here, but much like their protagonists, Rosenberg and Boss were in no rush to take it anywhere really interesting. The whole things dragged so much that reading quickly became more like a chore and I decided to pack it in after finishing the first trade.
Rating: ⭐⭐
Mark Greig has been writing for Doux Reviews since 2011 More Mark Greig
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