posted 11-03-2000 12:02 AM               

Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics is great for any new reader, in my opinion, but I've already said enough about it in this month's article. Go read it.

Jeff Smith's Bone series is great - take an old Warner Bros. cartoon, throw in a fantasy/adventure saga, add some deceptively simple and beautiful art, and you have Bone. There are currently six collections of the series thus far; admittedly, I have only read the first three, but they are all excellent, and as soon as I have the funds, I'm going to catch up. Start with Out from Boneville and The Great Cow Race and go from there. (It may be worth your while to check out the official Bone website for information and to order the older paperback collections - if you want them quick from Amazon, you're gonna have to get the hardcover.

In my ten years of collecting, I think the storyline that had me rushing to the comic store for the next installment most eagerly was The Return of Barry Allen in DC's Flash comic. This story does incorporate elements from DC's history, so it's not quite as accessible to new readers as the other books I'm recommending, but writer Mark Waid does a pretty good job of explaining things, and the coming of age story he tells here is fabulous. My wife, who is not nearly the Flash addict that I am, loved this story.

More people today watch the Batman animated series, in its various incarnations, than read Batman comic books. This would bother me more if the animated series weren't so consistently excellent. DC has capitalized on this by putting out a comic based on the animated series, and by making it a pretty good one. The first spinoff book was called The Batman Adventures, and The Dark Knight Adventures collects issues 7-12 of that series. If you are a Batman fan in even the slightest fashion, you will enjoy these books. Kelley Puckett's writing is fantastic, compressing action and characterization into 22-page stories, and Mike Parobeck's pencils are simply beautiful. Parobeck passed away a few years ago, and he is sorely missed.

Now, if you like those books, or if you find yourself in a comic store ready to sample current series, here are a few I'd recommend:

Shockrockets by Kurt Busiek, Stuart Immonen and Wade von Grawbadger is a recently-completed six issue miniseries about a group of high tech fighter pilots helping to rebuild society in the wake of a devastating war with an alien race. The miniseries is a self-contained story with a lot of twist and turns, and Immonen provides some cool design work for the future technology and ships and draws some fantastic action sequences. There will be more Shockrockets miniseries in the future, and this story provides a good introduction to the universe and sets the stage for those stories. Plus, issue six has a preview of Superstar, the creative team's next project and a fascinating take on superheroes.

The Red Star by Chris Gossett, Brad Kayl and Project: Antares. This is truly a groundbreaking project, one several years in the making. It's an allegory to the rise and fall of the Soviet Union (Gossett spent six years doing research) told as a science fiction/sorcery epic. If that weren't ambitious enough, it melds traditional comic pencil art with three dimensional computer models for an amazing effect. I hope we'll have a chance to cover Red Star in more detail in a future article, but in the meantime, check out their website and sample the artwork.

Mark Waid and Barry Kitson's Empire series has been plagued with some unfortunate delays in its production schedule, but the two issues that are out so far are very good. Be warned, it's more than a bit on the dark side: Empire is the story of the villain who actually succeeds in taking over the world, and what he must endure to stay in control. Kitson is a great artist, and I've already praised Waid's storytelling skills - they're in full display here. (Shockrockets and Empire are both part of the Gorilla Comics imprint, a collection of some of the finest talent in the industry today.)