Longbox Coffin

Close observers of The Comics Journal likely noticed that, in the site's collection of Best Comics Of 2025 lists, the comic that came up the most was Deniz Camp and Javier Rodriguez's Absolute Martian Manhunter. It made my list, despite my making sure my negative feelings for Camp's series Assorted Crisis Events were on the record at the same publication. That series has now wrapped up, and at San Diego Comic Con the creators next project was announced: Batman Shadow Of The Bat, a title used in 1992 by Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle, an issue of which was one of the first comics I ever read as a kid. Any bit of excitement felt is tempered by a sense that one would hope DC editorial, seeing a creative team have an unexpected hit on a second-tier character and asking what they wanted to do next, would ask "Do you have any other ideas?" when pitched another Batman book.

They already have a lot of those! I am as much a part of the "well, talk about a sure thing" problem as anybody else, having sampled a few of the company's recent Batman offerings, and feeling like I might as well write down my takes on them.

Absolute Batman by Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta: A huge hit book for DC, and yes, I liked it too. I have read enough of DC's Elseworlds books to realize most of them are failures of imagination, not taking the sort of big swings with structure or characterization to feel fresh and exciting the way this one does. I'd already read Absolute Wonder Woman and liked it, but this was the one that made me more interested in reading the other Absolute books, which people generally don't rate as highly. A big goal for mainstream comics set for themselves is to make a reader interested in more titles that the creative team behind the comic you liked didn't necessarily have anything to do with; this is the point of all these branding exercises, crossovers, events. The sense that the Absolute books don't have the same exact story structures I've read in thousands of other superhero comics, and might function more like manga in their sense of unpredictability, is conveyed best by Absolute Batman precisely because I have read many more Batman comics than I have Wonder Woman or Martian Manhunter comics. Many of those I haven't read were those read by Scott Snyder, who I had pictured as a sort of edgelord gorehound with really dumb ideas, but this successfully conjured fist-pumping as the coolness was sold ably. Dragotta's pages go back and forth between being dense with small panels and the much rarer two-page spread. People talk about Dragotta as if he's a superstar now, which I think undersells how much his ascent is owed to the branding of both Absolute and Batman doing much of the heavy lifting - if his 2025 Image one-shot with David Brothers did one-eighth the sales of any issue of this I would be surprised - but that doesn't mean people don't like or respond to his work.

Batman by Matt Fraction and Jorge Jimenez: The latest relaunch with a new number one of the flagship title might not have made much of a splash, but this is really interesting as a vision of what blockbuster comics would look like in 2025. Jorge Jimenez's art is recognizably in the post-Wildstorm style of many people Jim Lee has employed and trained, but notably better as a storyteller than Lee himself, and Fraction gives him scripts which move fast and give him much more to draw than Jeph Loeb ever did for his highest-profile collaborators. The same point I made about the Absolute line applies here as well, in that after reading the first trade and learning there was a line-wide Batman crossover spearheaded by Fraction due after the second trade's worth of stories, I realized I would be interested in reading such a thing, as a payoff to the story this is building towards. One must assume the issues immediately preceding the reboot, also with art by Jimenez but written by Fraction collaborator Chip Zdarsky, are absolute dogshit.

Batman Dark Patterns by Dan Watters and Hayden Sherman: I wrote about this one already. I liked it, Sherman's got the goods. In addition to drawing Absolute Wonder Woman, he's now announced as drawing a Legion Of Superheroes reboot; I'm impressed by not just how prolific he is, but how within that context he is not just a great designer of pages, but of characters as well; he's doing jobs that require a lot of concept art be worked out in advance before he even gets to the first page of sequential art.

Batman And Robin Year One by Mark Waid and Chris Samnee: The weakest of the 2025 Batman comics I read, although Samnee's art is strong and he's a good storyteller, and Waid nails the big emotional moments. My big problem with this would be the length of the story, twelve issues, and the scale of it, revolving around Two-Face and Clayface and bunch of Gotham crime families, a few of which I don't think had been seen before. Generally speaking I think the idea of focusing on the mob is a distraction from the gothic psychology of grotesques and caricatures which are the ideal backdrop for these characters. When I was a kid, Waid wrote a JLA Year One series with art by Barry Kitson, which I enjoyed in large part because it was built more around on shorter arcs and more frequent payoffs than what you get here. Samnee's style does a good job at feeling like a more animated version of Mazzucchelli while not actively lapsing into Bruce Timm designs. Colorist Matheus Lopes doesn't get as overpowering as he sometimes get with artists who use thinner lines.

Detective Comics by Ram V and various other artists and a few other writers too: This is a few years old at this point and I haven't read a trade paperback of it, like I did the other ones, this is a take based on reading single issues from a bargain bin, so feel free to think this is unfair, but wow this is so much worse than all of the more recent Batman stuff I mentioned above. Felt intensely miscalculated, on a "this is what I don't think is a good idea to do with a Batman comic" level. Rather than short stories that focus on an antagonist and build on each other, this sets out to tell an epic, with many many supporting characters, supernatural plot points, issues where it feels like nothing is happening, a sense of pace that felt very bizarre, just a whole lot here that I felt actively irritated by. The art in this run tends towards shadowy linework and dark coloring for an overall muddy look. The high point is the back-up stories, written by Simon Spurrier and Dan Watters, specifically the art therein. A few are by Hayden Sherman, already mentioned as being good; Christopher Mitten and Dani were the two other artists that provided a respite from how annoying I found this. I'd previously read two series by Ram V, Rare Flavours and Resurrection Man: Quantum Karma, which were basically enjoyable but this was so bad it made me see their flaws in a new light, where I am like yeah I don't think that Resurrection Man comic actually made sense fundamentally as a story, I might argue this guy sucks actually. I didn't realize the Bat-Demon from Peter Milligan's Dark Knight, Dark City was made canonically "real" in the Grant Morrison run which feels to me like fundamentally a mistake; that Morrison Batman run being when I was like "yeah I can't fuck with this guy anymore" after a decade of following his work and this is built on the bones of it or is a response/continuation of what I see as a heap of bad ideas.

Started to write up a post about my favorite self-published comics of the year so far and then realized I basically wrote about all of them and forgot about it, so I will instead say that the new batch from Cram contains some winners. I sorta wish Cram was not committed to risograph books that end up having a sorta high price point, because in the case of publisher Andrew Alexander's new one Caught Lookin' in particular I feel like readers are contending with a pretty classic alt-comic, beginning the serialization of a graphic novel about chess one could easily see being a paperback book that sells in perpetuity a la Ghost World, really excellent stuff I'd like to see reach the broadest audience possible, outside the scene of people who regularly go to small press fests and order stuff online. There's a section of full-color pages in the middle too but were I in charge I would've just cut that stuff to have a black and white comic, offset-printed in large numbers and widely distributed. But the comic we have is great too and absolutely worth picking up if you are all inclined to be the sort of person who checks out such a thing.

And while you're ordering that, you shouldn't skip the new one from Philadelphia's Nick Bunch, Resurrection Of Low Down Coyote. I know Nick, we are friendly, but he is, in the classic mold of men, a bit emotionally guarded as a person, which comes through in his work in various ways. His previous book, How To Quit Smoking Cigarettes, has a bit more limited of an emotional register, related to the sort of anger and frustration one might feel while going through withdrawal from nicotine. This one speaks to a little more of a range of complex feelings, never feeling maudlin or pandering but just honest about what being alive is like, with joys and sorrows both. Really great stuff. Fascinatingly drawn. While Andrew Alexander's work comes off buoyant and rounded, lively, Bunch's penwork is all angular and gnarled, trying to find forms within a line that wants to scratch. The bits of color are subtle and soft, analogous to the flushes of emotion bleeding their way through.

I mentioned, in my contribution to 2025's Best-Of-The-Year List at The Comics Journal, that I appreciated Hayden Sherman's art on Absolute Wonder Woman and was interested in reading the Batman series, Dark Patterns, he was providing art for when it was released in a book collection. Dark Patterns is a Batman comic made for guys my age, a real nineties throwback kind of book, twelve issues split up into four three-issue arc, like some of my favorite Legends Of The Dark Knight arcs, (James Robinson's "Blades" or "Spook," for instance.) or the Peter Milligan/Kieron Dwyer "Dark Knight, Dark City" take on the Riddler. In a very real way, this takes that arc's approach to the Riddler, at the time a decades-old character, famously depicted in a television adaptation, and applies it to The Ventriloquist, a character created by Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle at roughly the same time time Milligan and Dwyer did their revisionism. So it's a sort of 1990s Batman squared approach.

Contrasted to Scott Snyder and Nick Dragotta's Absolute Batman, it is a comic that avoids the fist-pumping moment of climax in favor denouements unfurling a mystery's motivations, which are often tragic. If Dan Watters' scripts don't quite give Alfred the wit (and Anthony Burgess references) Miligan did, he is still writing a Batman whose monologues you can read to yourself in Kevin Conroy's voice.

Hayden Sherman's art is great, recalling such greatest hits of Batman art as Marshall Rogers, Graham Nolan, and JH Williams III, a mix of swirling layouts and straightforward line that is always readable and propulsive, moving through the architecture of physical space on the page. Triona Farrell's coloring is preferable to Jordie Bellaire's work on Absolute Wonder Woman, albeit only by degrees. Sherman is an artist whose approach to an open page is clearly built with color in mind. The design sensibilities of Farrell's coloring means working with a palette chosen from the infinite crayon-box, which is in some ways less interesting to me than the choices of an Adrienne Roy, but I still like what I'm looking at.

I got perhaps disproportionately angry at a social media from a mainstream comics artist in the wake of Sam Kieth's death. "Why do we only talk about artists after they die? Let's celebrate artists while they're alive. I'll start: I love Tradd Moore," is my paraphrase of the basic gist. This seemed ill-timed to me, in terms of its appearance in the first 24 hours after the announcement of Kieth's death, but that's not the issue for me really. The pseudo-positivity ignores basic reality: We did talk about Sam Kieth when he was alive, and people talk about Tradd Moore too. People do talk about living artists, and share their enthusiasm regularly. What bothered me is the false equivalence. People were talking about Sam Kieth not just because he was a maker of cool images who had died recently. People were moved by the death of Sam Kieth because Sam Kieth made personal work. He's not just the guy who drew a cool Wolverine comic and some cool Batman covers. Those pieces present a certain energy, a promise of comics' potential that he articulated elsewhere in personal work that connected with people and touched them. That is his true legacy, and contemporary mainstream comics artists like Tradd Moore and the guy I'm mad at but am not going to name because I'm embarrassed at my anger would do well to follow this example.

To a certain extent, I can believe that we attract the books to us that we need, that will help us in our quest to become ourselves. This is obviously aided by economics of distribution channels, which decide what the public is allowed to access. Reflecting on the continued public demand for The Maxx, as opposed to the almost-immediately-forgotten genre comics which flood the shelves, from the time of that comic's release to the present, I am left to think that maybe people don't care about that work because it would never be necessary to someone in the same way. It doesn't risk enough, or offer enough of itself, for anyone to care, instead choosing to operate in the shallow waters of one of CBS' procedural dramas. Meanwhile, a work like Twin Peaks continues to move people. 

This is not to say I want work that is necessarily inspired by Twin Peaks, or The Maxx, or that I think everyone toiling in mainstream genre work could have a hit if they got weird with it. Kieth and Lynch are particularly strong artists. Who knows how many are as capable of saying something about the human experience beyond just regurgitating the movies they've seen? Many attempt to do something different and lapse into floundering incoherence.

Probably not going to find a better interview with Sam Kieth than this two-parter from Sequential Tart from 25 years ago

http://www.sequentialtart.com/archive/dec01/kieth.shtml

Extremely saddened to hear of the death of Sam Kieth from Bleeding Cool. Sam Kieth's art was monumental to me, and really so many people of my generation: The first time we saw comics art that was recognizably fucked-up and weird, in a way where he also all, instinctively, loved it. Noel Freibert wrote about the experience of seeing his art in issues of Marvel Comics Presents for Bubbles, I had a similar experience to the same issues. I think it can be hard to articulate how we both loved comics but also recognized the art style of them, even the stuff we liked, as "normal" in a way where Kieth's art registered as a deviation that we responded even more strongly to. This is happening to us when we're, in my case, eight years old. Seeing a Marvel Universe trading card Sam Kieth did of Nightcrawler IMMEDIATELY made Nightcrawler my favorite X-Man, just the way Kieth's art registered with that design.

And then after that is The Maxx, which was an Image comic so unlike the other Image comics, and got made into an MTV cartoon, and it was again, so recognizably WEIRD, but on such a huge platform, that it CONNECTED not just with kids getting into comics but kids who were going through adolescence and having a tough time of it, just a part of the same alternative culture as Nine Inch Nails and grunge, and articulating these concerns in a way that registered to the adolescent mind as ART. The letters pages of The Maxx are littered with teenage survivors of sexual assault, writing to Kieth to tell him his work helped them. All these kids, feeling understood by this comic book which is in many ways pretty goofy, a mix of some Frazetta fantasy imagery, a character who's a massive shape, a strong desire to just draw whatever, and then this sort of Jungian processing metaphor trying to make sense of all these impulses.

And he kept going, he kept making work. Zero Girl is in part a processing of another aspect of Kieth's death which is so so sad to me - the wife that survives him, Kathy, after 43 years of marriage (the woman who worked on the letters pages and all the classified ads and personals in the back of The Maxx issues) was a generation OLDER than him, having met him shortly after he graduated from high school. I can't imagine marrying someone that much younger than you, with all the likely subsequent difficulties of sexual incompatibility I'm sure there would've been at many points, and then having to take care of them through an awful-sounding disease and lose them as they die so young. Kieth's series My Inner Bimbo is also partially about the difficulties of such an age gap relationship, and also some gender stuff. My friend James claims he once read an interview with Kieth where Sam basically came out as trans at one point, but the interviewer did not want to process it or get into at all, and just wanted to talk about Batman or whatever, but I don't know where exactly this interview ran or if it even exists. The sense of sympathy and empathy Sam had for women does run as a thread throughout all his work.

And this is all downplaying or avoiding discussing the fact that Sam also penciled the first half-dozen issues of Neil Gaiman's Sandman, another hugely influential comic book to the youth of the nineties alt-culture, and while Neil has been revealed a huge piece of shit, Sam was not, Sam was dedicating the trade of those issues to everyone in jail. He did some work which afforded him something almost no one in American comics gets - actual money, which presumably is one part of why he was able to not disclose his illness and essentially beg for money publicly. William Messner-Loebs, the scripter of The Maxx, ended up homeless a few years ago, but presumably it is the perennially in-print and generating royalties Preludes And Nocturnes trade (and also maybe getting a cut of profits from Knightfall, the Batman arc he provided some covers for) that was able to take care of him. He was someone who likely knew how beloved he was, and we should all be so lucky. And to me what's great is that such wasn't always the case, you can see in the letters pages to the Aliens miniseries he did people writing in to complain about the cartooniness of his art, which of course work that's so idiosyncratic is going to piss people off. That's what makes it art. We wouldn't have loved it if it were immediately palatable to the squares.

Alright, we're almost at the end of first quarter of 2026, and I have been remiss about posting on here about the minis that have made a big impression.

First off is the Dash Shaw newspaper which I'm going to refer to as "Special Memory," although it has "Like Swimmers" written in much larger letters upon its front page. Like Swimmers is Shaw's upcoming full-color book from New York Review Comics, much anticipated by me, and this newspaper includes some discards from that book, alongside a short story I really loved. Seeing panels from it out of context made me laugh but also made me imagine other story possibilities than what the comic itself presents - this sort of misinterpretation an example of how rich and generative the comic as a whole is.

Next up is the CF mini Ultima Multis, still available at the time of posting. Thought this was such a great concise restatement of both CF's themes and also his approaches- both the slapdash porno doodler and the inscrutable fantasist are palpable here. It feels very casual and bordering on stupid but damn it rocks. I liked his last zine Pale Lucifer too.

Molly Lecko Herro's Meatloaf Castle 2 represented a leveling up, I wrote the author a little e-mail trying to explain what I liked about it- Something about her strength with both visual storytelling, body language and spatial navigation being so clear but also a sense of the symbolic that is woven throughout a piece but then when it is understood what it is it hits like a punchline. I would describe it as a Doucet-like approach, Austin English clarifying what I mean in that we have a cartoonist exploring their ideas like monologues rather than come up with names for characters. You can see a similar approach in the work of Angela Fanche, who's got a new one I just ordered but haven't read yet. That's called In The Corner/Sun-Deprived, It's a split with Maybelline Skvortzoff, of the book Dirty Panties, the two having met during a Kus residency in Riga.

Speaking of Kus, they released the mini Not From Home, Not From Beyond, by Romania's Dina Omut, who has released a larger thing with Hollow Press. Omut's work is the sort of folklore-inspired fantasy with a tactile visual style that feels in that video game exploratory mode, taking a real pleasure in drawing. One to watch.

Also Chris Cilla's That Away Comix came out last year but I didn't get it until now, a really strong work from Cilla, maybe his most overtly narrative comics style zine in a while, as opposed to some more sketchbook-forward projects. This one is gorgeous, with a silkscreened cover, but also possesses a sense of comics as a medium as something related to the aging record-collector weedhead mentality I find very familiar. Hard to cite specifics without spoilers, but I really loved it, thought it was funny and surprising.

Also gotta shout-out issue 5 of Anand Shenoy's series Zoo, brought to America by Bubbles' Brian Baynes, issue 4 of Kevin Huizenga's Fielder, and issue 2 of Marvin Yaxam's Tales Of Qyleoth. I don't feel the need to explain what these comics are, as I've spoken about all of them at length basically, and imagine everyone is familiar with their respective approaches.