Lackadaisy Vol 1- I’ve been waiting for this online strip to see print and wider distribution because it’s brilliant. Set in the late 1920's in St. Louis during Prohibition, Lackadaisy follows a cast of anthropomorphic troublemakers trying to survive bad times and violent competition. Tracy Butler’s art is smooth, clean, unique, and expressive. Her actual storytelling is fun and the story arcs are paced just right so they don’t drag but you find yourself wanting to read them again because you wished they weren’t over yet. A solid package at $19.99, everyone should give this a try. A+

The Marvels Project HC- It’s a Brubaker/Epting collaboration, so of course it's going to be a solid read with great art. Sort of a ‘behind the scenes of Marvels’ type of story about the onset of the superheroics during WWII, Brubaker fits in plenty of espionage and murder mystery into the larger framework of Marvel golden age history. The packaging isn’t bad, charging you an extra couple bucks over the cost of the original series for the oversized HC treatment plus all the covers. I think that my only problem with the series is that while it’s a good story, it isn’t entirely necessary in this time of endless flashbacks and throwback stories to add one more $3.99 series that just kind of gives you some added details to what happened the night Steve Rogers became Captain America or other key golden age events. There was nothing groundbreaking here. Sure, there were some cool ideas and a good meshing of the overall history, but nothing that I can actually look back and say ‘That made everything so much better once we added that to the background’. We get it already, we have the power to retroactively change comic history to fulfil our need for a more ‘realistic’ superhero world. Move on and tell us some current stories already. A-

Magog: Lethal Force TPB- Y’know, I think the worst thing about this series is just how disappointing it is that DC decided to take the character in this direction. I mean originally he was meant to be a stand in for the archetypical crappy ‘90's anti-hero in Mark Waid’s Kingdom Come series. Then Chuck Austin used him in Action Comics and well, no one remembers that. Then Geoff Johns actually introduced the current incarnation of Magog in Justice Society and not only did they give him an interesting legacy and background, but they actually sort of steered him away from being the dead end character he was destined to be. Then the Willingham run of JSA started and well......poop. He’s pretty much your typical Cable/Wolverine rip off with slightly better writing courtesy of Keith Giffen, but pretty much nothing interesting happens in this trade and we get a bunch of forgettable villains and stuff happens and so on. Howard Porter’s art is the type that can either be a good example of a stale ‘edgy’ ‘90s series, or something that can evolve into a more unique style of storytelling via Grant Morrison’s JLA. Unfortunately, we get the former here. Dissapointing. C+