This is Variant Covers! Every week I humbly show you the titles that I’m excited for on Wednesday, and I ask you to kindly splay yours out in front of me. It’s a nice pow wow in front of the paneled ponderings and the like. This week though, I’m not really feeling anything. Oh sure, there’s a list of titles that I’ll be buying, and probably even enjoying. Nothing that’s really getting my fires burning though. So indulge me, let’s play a game this week. You can buy one title this week. What is it? No fucking cheesing! One title to stem your tide until next week.

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Yo! Welcome to Variant Covers. This is the weekly column where I kick you my pull list for the week, and you spit back at me with yours. There’s too many titles to keep up with and buy on a weekly basis, so don’t nerdfroth if your favorite comic isn’t here. It’s part of the fun, send the recommendation my way.

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Breakneck #1.
Comic books are a crapshoot. The market is flooded, and as I’ve often intimated, there’s too much good shit out there. Sometimes things fall by the wayside, and I’m not a perfect dude! Take for example Breakneck #1. I came across the title when searching for a sweet header image. I thought the artwork was fantastic, and pressed I carried on my way. Snagged it, cropped it, didn’t think of even promoting it until a reader pointed out the douchery behind that in the comments section. Douchery, indeed. My bad.

Dropping this week, Breakneck a superhero title daring to exist outside of the gauntlet of Marvel and DC titles. The indie offering by writer Mark Bertolini and artist James Boulton is an inversion of the superhero motif, deciding to fixate on the workings of a bottom feeding supervillain. What’s the world look like to someone peering through the opposite side of the looking glass? Superheroes as menacing bastards, the supervillain as enterprising down on his luck protagonist. Don’t be like me, deciding to feed the machine while simultaneously bemoaning it. Check this out.

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Infinite Vacation #2.
I really dug the first issue of this series by Nick Spencer and Christian Ward. It strums up the zeitgeist of the modern dude or dudettes: we’re never happy, we’re always searching, we are missing life in search of something better, newer, faster. Vacation seems to posit that we can be perfectly happy if we just sit down and appreciate the moment. All done through the conceit of multiple dimensions, and modern technology, riding a couple of our other obsessions.

I don’t know if that’s something that rings of the Man Stuffing Us Back In Place, or as I imagine Spencer hoping, as a life-affirming notion.

This issue continues the main character’s search for the killer who is wiping out him out across dimensions. Gulp!

Around The Horn:
Casanova: Gula #4 is coming out, and it concludes the collections of Fraction’s first two stories in the Casa-verse. This summer the title will kick off new content. Then there’s Northlanders #39. I’m not really feeling this Northlanders storyline, but that’s the beauty of the title. With smallish storylines, you need just wait a couple of issues for something new to be introduced. Also, let’s face it: Wood’s lesser storylines carry more heat than most people’s fastballs. I just mixed all sorts of metaphors.

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New releases! Trade paperbacks! Splash pages! These are a few of my favorite things. Man, what a clichéd way to start a column, no? Jesus Christ and then I followed it up with a rhetorical question. This is Variant Covers, the place where I puke up adolespeak about the comics I’m most excited about this week. Not a Be All List, I encourage you to let me know what you’re reading.

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I got myself a stack of the fat ass funny books. ‘Stead of reading them, I have to blather to you interbeings about the shit that is dropping in the world of comics tomorrow, and I’ll be goddamned if that ain’t proof Leibniz didn’t know shit. Most perfect of all worlds? My fucking ass! Pizza gets you fat and your fucking colon kills you.

Bullshit.

This is the world of Variant Covers, a preview of the comic books coming out this week. Hit me with your pull-list.

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The skull threatens to crack. Athena surely rests inside. The caffeine isn’t cutting it, and I have a mental list to transcribe into a word box. This is Variant Covers, the column where I tell you the funny books I’m buying on a given week. This is also Caffeine Powered, exhausted, with a splitting headache, cursing the Christian guilt that won’t let him skip a week. I can detach myself from the Bearded Floaty Guy, but I can’t remove myself from the morals drilled in by the indoctrination process.

Save me.

In the interest of saving my rotting synapses, I’m going to be succinct this week. A mere one-week trifling attempt to counteract my raging verbosity. Shit, I’m blowing it already.

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Finder Library Volume 1.
When Carla Speed McNeil’s Finder: Voice came out this year, I became aware that I was missing out on something fantastic. It happens a lot. Never stops me from feeling shitty about myself, or from feeling surprised. Gasp! I missed something else? I’m a philistine, man. Anyways, this may be the place for me to start. Finder Library Volume 1 collects the first four Finder books. It’s a massive motherfucker. For $25, you can snag 616 pages of what is purportedly awesomeness. I’m being vague as fuck, I know. Caffeine interested! Caffeine want!

Want a premise? Boom!

The series is set in a vastly depopulated far-future Earth where numerous hunter-gatherer cultures, some human and some not, surround densely overpopulated domed city-states of recognizably modern urbanites functioning at a high technological level. Our own civilization and its considerably more advanced successors are lost to prehistory save for a few twentieth-century pop cultural artifacts conveniently recovered by well-paid psychics.

I’m sure it’s generalizing a lot. But when  Laura Hudson of Comics Alliance calls the series “one of the best comics ever“, I pay attention. Smarter minds with sharper opinions garner my intrigue.  Martyn Pedler also has an awesome interview with McNeil over at io9.

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Future Foundation #1.
I never thought I’d live in a universe where the most hotly awaited title of a week would be a Fantastic Four-based comic. Such is the power of Jonathan Hickman and Steve Epting. Fucking Hickman, man. Dude is a philosophical warrior, somehow managing to plot roughly a thousand arcs at once, while mixing in utilitarian philosophy, the Negative Zone, and outstanding emotional moments starring a dude who has been one-dimensional for god knows how many years – yeah, I’m still weeping over Johnny Storm.

This is the fucking title I want. I want it tomorrow. I want it now.

If you’re not down with the cosmos, the First Family of Marvel, or Sue Storm in a skin-tight minimalist costume, I don’t know. I respect your opinion, but I’m positively losing my cool over it.

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VARIANT COVERS, the comic book column that fucking adores caps lock and funny books. VARIANT COVERS, the comic book column that covers all the new releases that I’m giggling over with wet panties and glassy eyes VARIANT COVERS, the column that encourages you to share your own picks of the week.

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The Arctic Marauder [Graphic Novel].
These are several things I hadn’t heard of until today when I was browsing various columns on tomorrow’s comic book releases: icepunk, The Arctic Marauder, and Jacques Tardi. I realize this makes me a philistine. I apologize. This graphic novel is a rerelease of a 1972 work by the aforementioned Tardi, and it has me intrigued.

Published by Fantagraphics, the concept sounds fucking outstanding, “Jérôme Plumier, whose search for his missing uncle, the inventor Louis-Ferdinand Chapoutier, brings him into contact with the sinister, frigid forces behind this – and soon he too is headed towards the North Pole, where he will content with mad scientists, monsters of the deep, and futuristic submarines and flying machines.”

Color me ignorant but trying desperately to correct the problem.

Sold.

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Fear Itself: Book of the Skull.
This would be the one-shot that is leading up to Marvel’s next event, Fear Itself. Normally I lob dung bombs at what I perceive to be obvious money-making measures in the comic book world. I know. However, I am also an  unprincipled  son of a bitch, and a huge Brubaker fanboy. What exactly is going to happen in this title? I don’t have a goddamn clue. But it does feature the Red Skull puking up Captain America and Namor, so there’s that.

If you’re really wondering, it has something to do with Red Skull’s daughter having all the dastardly secrets of her father, and she’s planning on doing…something also dastardly with them.

Also From Marvel: Uncanny X-Force 5.1. If you’re not reading this series, True Believers, this pig will catch you up. Trust me, it’s worth it.

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Ah, labor pains. The tremendous abdominal liquidations that come from strenuous exertion. It’s the middle of the semester for Seminal Idiot turned Teaching  Assistant  right here, and I’m ready for a break. I read a couple of comic books last weekend, and but for a moment, the skies opened up. Yes, I thought to myself. Perhaps it will get better. Here I am, though. It’s Tuesday, and I’m blasting through this column with little regard for grammatical form or editing. Per usual. I know.

This is Variant Covers.  Here are the comics I’m excited for this week.

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With alacrity, my good friends! This column is bursting forth from a strained cerebellum. It is at the point in the semester where I haven’t touched a comic book in two weeks, which makes the art of writing about what is coming out a bit suspect. Yet!, trust me. I bring forth the Variant Covers. The column where I harp on the dopeness that is dropping this week in the comic book world. I can’t catch everything, and thusly I encourage your collective bottoms to contribute what’s on your pull list in the comments section.

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Joe the Barbarian #8.
I’ve begun to bemoan the weekly comic book format. While I snag shit on the weekly, I’ve begun to prefer reading pigs within the halls of a comfy trade paperback. There are the pros and cons of each format; the monthly expectation and happiness of snagging an eagerly anticipated. But at the same time, the narrative coherence of ingesting an entire storyline at once seems to pay dividends for me.

Case in point: Joe the Barbarian. The final issue comes out this week, and I cannot recall when the fuck issue #7 came out. Since then, I’ve rambled through possibly hundreds of issues of comic books, and my recollection of this series is hazy at best.

With that bitching aside, I’m excited for the title. Morrison’s diabetic shock-induced trip through an adolescent’s troubled childhood has been equal parts touching and haunting. Sean Murphy’s artwork has captured the playground horror show that is Joe’s mind perfectly, and I’m eager to see how this pig ends. I’m predicting the tears will flow.

I’m weepy, what can I say.

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Ultimate Captain America #3.
Jason Aaron and Ron Garney’s fucking insane take on Captain America continues this week. I’m digging the fuck out of this comic. It’s violent, it’s hilarious, and it’s a different take on the Aryan Posterchild turned American Dream. Rogers is a profane bastard, and it’s nice to see him playing the bad ass as opposed to the boy scout.

I know, I know. Government agent turned rogue agent is a trope beaten to a paste and spread over an endless spread of burnt comics toast. But do it right and it excels. This issue sees Rogers fighting an entire village of super soldiers and throwing down with the disillusioned Captain America of the Vietnam era.

Bullets, stomach punches, and a morsel of political commentary equals a yes please from me.

Also From The Marvel Family:
While technically a Marvel title, one of the publisher’s branches is putting out Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’ Incognito: Bad Influences #4. This series is superpowered pulp at its best. Confession time: I haven’t read the third issue – one of the volumes of funny books whose spines are still waiting to be abused by my meaty fingers. I’m assuming its as dope as the first two. Listen!, I’m not perfect. Forgive me, we’re spittin’ over internet coffee. Just you, me, and the lurkers in the window.

I’m feeling the guilt, and when I consider the backlog I’m amassing, the anxiety attack thickens its presence in my throat. Drown it in caffeine and jelly beans, I say!

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Close the door and turn out the light. If you use your mind’s eye, you’ll see an infinitely tendriled machination coming your way. Don’t even sweat that, okay? It’s my mind-parts worming their way into your synaptic cores. They’ll be done soon, and when they’re gone, you’ll have the latest edition of Variant Covers in your mushy grey matter. The column that blathers on, and on, and on in verbose unedited prose about the comic books I’m interested in this week.

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Action Comics #898.
Are you still being an asshole, or are you reading this comic book yet? This title is the thunder. The culmination of a talented writer, a gorgeous penciler, and the desire to tell a hilarious, absurd storyline. In the past few months, Luthor has shot the shit with Death, gotten into a philosophical debate with the Joker, and beaten some serious ass. It’s a hodgepodge of wit sexy panels. I dismissed it at first because I’m a dismissive douchebag who thought that sticking Luthor in his own titles just didn’t make sense. Was a money grab. All of that has been thrown to the wind, cast aside like autumn leaves. This week Luthor is going to run into Larfleeze, and I imagine the alien avarice motherfucker and him are going to engage in yet another bizarre encounter. Cornell just wants to trot Luthor into the path of one prominent DC character after the next. I’m down with that.

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Shit I Should Be Reading: Scalped #46, Morning Glories #7.
There’s a good amount of comic books currently running that I’m not up to date with. Call it a function of having to read floaty bullshit about paratexts in the influence of meaning on a copy of DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe. I’m not frontin’, I’m awash in that gunk. So time is limited. Whenever the schooling gods smile upon me, I hope to begin to read Scalped. Everything I’ve heard about it informs me that a) it’s fucking awesome and b) that I’m a choad-stuffed choad for having not gotten around to it yet.

Then there’s Morning Glories. I’ve heard almost exclusively awesome things about the title, save for the inestimably rageful description of it as “LOST” meets Zac Efron’s dance moves. Sir Rager is probably correct, but it didn’t stop me from whoring out $10 for the first trade last week. It sits amongst a bunch of other trades, waiting for me to crack their spine and eat their souls.

But for those in the what, Morning Glories #7 comes out this week. For many I assume it gets their glands flowing with blood and vigor.

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Animated All-Star Superman.
I know you’re asking, what the fuck is an animated movie doing in a comic book column. Well, I’ll tell you, inquiring lads and lasses. It’s a scientific fact that All-Star Superman is the greatest Superman of the last forever. And while I haven’t been able to personally confirm it, a good amount of websites are commenting that the transition from panel and text to celluloid has gone flawlessly. This is the story that a thousand Morrison bonerbots (hi!) splooged over, only animated.

I didn’t pay attention to the first three-thousand glowing articles about it, but eventually it overwhelmed me. My forcefield eroded, I was helpless to its allure.

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Thank goodness it’s almost Wednesday. The weekly grind demands a brief respite, and on that third day of every week comic books come to the fucking rescue. This is Variant Covers. Inside you’ll find the comic books dropping tomorrow that I’m interested in.

Opinionated? You’re on the internet so you fucking must be. Hit the comments section with the funnies you plan on snagging this week.

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Jennifer Blood #1.
Jenny Blood is a new comic dropping tomorrow by Garth Ennis and Adriano Batista. The premise? Something fittingly Ennis. Blood is a suburban housewife by day. She feeds the kids, takes them to soccer, cooks them dinner. But by night! Oh you knew this was coming. But by night, she’s a totally elite assassin. In a latex get-up, which is always, always, always a good thing to me.

There was a time when Garth Ennis was my fucking idol. Between Preacher, Hitman, and his take on the Punisher, the good man owned my soul. Over time, I’ve grown less and less enthused with his efforts. While some people may find it heretical to say, I got tired of The Boys. I get it, I get it. A vulgar deconstruction of superhero motifs. Like I said, I probably just pissed a good amount of people off. I’m hoping that Jennifer Blood can rekindle my love affair.

If it’s nothing more than a female twist on the Punisher, I’d be fine with that. Perhaps my time away from the Ennis bag of tricks has been enough to recuperate my love for him.

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S.H.I.E.L.D. #6.
The first volume of Marvel’s most mindrapingly fantastic title concludes tomorrow. It is, without doubt, going to be my title of the week. Hickman and Weaver’s panel-smashing, contemporary narrative structure-defying, philosophically curious title has been nothing less than the fucking belle of my pull list ball since it started.  This week we get the epic battle between Leonard Da Vinci and his free spirits versus Isaac Newton and his Hobbesian belief that mankind must be  corralled. I think these motherfuckers are going to come to blows.

Hickman has been nothing short of brilliant to me in everything that I read of his. His killing of a member of the Fantastic Four? Had this guy in tears. His exploration of ideologies and the fictionalization of historical figures in S.H.I.E.L.D. has been something special. It isn’t a question of whether or not the sixth issue will be fantastic, but if the second volume can possibly top this first arc.

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Morning Glories Trade #1.
I have not read Morning Glories yet. However, I have only heard wondrous things regarding the title written by Nick Spencer and drawn by Joe Eisma. In fact, the buzz was so good that it drove me to pick up Spencer’s newest title, Infinite Vacation. Conclusion from reading that title? Spencer can fucking pen, yo! I’m not certain what Morning Glories is about. There’s been a concerted effort made by myself to stay away from any plot synopses, because I’ve read there’s a mystery afoot in the title.

Basic plot summary from various sites is, “Morning Glory Academy is one of the most prestigious prep schools in the country, but something sinister and deadly lurks behind its walls.” It doesn’t sound amazing, does it? Probably why I passed on it the first time. Do these copywriters realize people make financial decisions based on their bland fucking description of something that could be fantastic? Doesn’t seem that way.

I’m there.

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