Some picks from the ComicList for Wednesday, Feb. 20:
Gerard Way and Gabriel Bá’s very entertaining mini-series, The Umbrella Academy: Apocalypse Suite (Dark Horse), concludes with its sixth issue. If you’re coming in late and are curious, the trade paperback is available for pre-order.
A new volume of Eiji Otsuka and Housui Yamazaki’s The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service (Dark Horse) is always cause for celebration. The sixth tankoubon arrives tomorrow, promising new business rivals for the afterlife entrepreneurs.
I really need to catch up on Tomomi Yamashita’s Apothecarius Argentum (CMX), which is already up to its fourth volume. It’s very attractive, features appealing leads, and offers fun bits of trivia about medicinal and/or lethal substances.
After four volumes of dealing with the somewhat generic machinations of snotty classmates, the orphan heroine of Natsumi Ando and Miyuki Kobayashi’s Kitchen Princess (Del Rey) gets slapped right in the face with actual adult duplicity in the fifth installment, and holy crap, is it good.
If you’re craving tales of weird, malevolent, otherworldly organisms turning humans into death machines but find Hitoshi Iwaaki’s Parasyte (Del Rey) a little too old-school, the publisher also offers a more modern take on the same subject matter with Tadashi Kawashima and Adachitoka’s Alive. I like both, but Alive is the one with a new volume arriving tomorrow.
It’s Signature week from Viz, which is always exciting, but I find myself distracted by the latest issue of Shojo Beat, infused as it is with lots of Bryan Lee O’Malley.
Still, it’s hard to get too distracted to note that Naoki Urasawa’s Monster, now in its thirteenth volume, has become a really spectacular thriller. Watching Urasawa keep his multiple narrative threads from becoming a hopeless tangle is quite breathtaking.