Dar! A Super Girly Top Secret Comic Diary Vol 1 & 2- One of the best reads I’ve picked up in a while, although I already read most of the content online anyway. It’s nice to just sit down with both volumes though and I really like to support Erika Moen, partly because she’s one of the nicest creators I’ve ever met. Dar is a fantastic autobiographical series that follows Erika over a six year length, starting when she was a 20 year old lesbian artist and follows her as she marries a boy from England and becomes a full time cartoonist. Great humor, honestly, art, and storytelling make this an awesome read and worth every penny. If you want to check out a sampler go over to the Dar! site where you can also order the book directly from Erika. A

Dingo SC- Michael Alan Nelson’s work over on Fall of Cthulhu has been pretty solid so I thought this would be worth a read. While the $16.99 price tag is a bit much for a 4 issue series at such a small trim size (if you wanna sell something small make it $9.99-$11.99, I could almost see the $16.99 if this was normal trade size), the story and art are great and this is a morbidly fun story. The man named Dingo finds himself having to clean his brother’s mess, and in the process of searching for a family heirloom he comes across a gigantic hellhound that won’t leave him alone and comes in pretty handy during the odd emergency, such as being gunned down by his ex-wife. A good mix of action, horror, and humor, I just wish the package was a bit better. B+

Justice League Cry for Justice HC- Y’know, I like James Robinson. I liked the first couple chapters in this volume despite the melodramatic scripting ("Justice!"), and the painted art by Mauro Cascioli looked great. Hell, it had Congorilla, I was pretty much going to buy it no matter what just for that. I liked Prometheus under Grant Morrison and always wanted them to fix him after the embarrassing period where he was basically Hush’s bitch. It’s great that story was included in this volume as well, although it would have made sense to put it towards the front of the book. So right after the middle of the book when the art changes is exactly the point where it all falls apart. Besides the art change, the pacing is just thrown out the window. The entire sequence where Prometheus fights the entire team is embarrassing to look at. None of it really makes sense visually and feels cluttered and tossed together, unlike when Prometheus took down the JLA during the Morrison run, or when Deathstroke took the team down during Identity Crisis. Combine that with the fact that you can tell a number of plot decisions obviously came from editorial. It just feels like a clusterfuck by the end of book. And y’know, Star City really needed to be blown up a third time in almost as many years. This had the making of something awesome and then it fell flat on its face, which is just disappointing. On the bright side, the $24.99 price tag isn’t bad for how many issues are actually in this collection. C