Image Comics poll week 14 - Black Clouds & Mighty Men above Rock Candy Mountain

[TotalSnorefest]

Welcome back to the weekly Image poll, vote for your favourite and let's chat!

Last week's poll was won by Lazarus' smash issue, ending on a bombshell. The series will be back after a hiatus, just to make fans wait in agony I presume.

This week's issues are mostly just in the middle of storylines, except for Sons of the Devil which returns for a new arc and Sun Bakery which introduces 2 new strips to the monthly anthology. Extremity's first issue also sees a reprint along with number 2, so that's presumably good news for sales charts!

More interesting perhaps are the 3 new titles this week!

First up is Black Cloud, which unites Jason Latour, Ivan Brandon, Greg Hinkle and Matt Wilson for a story about a world of dreams. Every dream in this world appears to come alive, or get into fights with other dreams. Main character is Zelda (not the Nintendo one), who has a whole bunch of broken dreams. Let's gooooo!

Secondly let's take a gander at Rock Candy Mountain, the new ongoing by Sexcastle creator Kyle Starks. This one is all about magical hobos having hobo fights, and searching for a mystical hobo place called Rock Candy Mountain. Sounds pretty wacky if you ask me!

Lastly we get a one-shot called Mighty Man (an Erik Larsen creation it looks like), about a 7 year old girl called Betty who somehow inherits the powers/costume/etc. of a superhero called, well, The Mighty Man. Obviously she's rubbish at superheroics though and thus needs to train before taking on the challengers of Mighty Man.

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[sven]

My buys

Black Cloud
Extremity
Paper Girls
The Walking Dead

Probably won't be reading any of them for a while though.

[Anduinel]

Just Elephantmen #76 for me. Poor Trench. Still, if that was his send-off, I won't complain. He's more than done his part and I'll try to believe he finds some peace. The announcement that the book is ending had more of an impact on me, though. Ten years? Have I really been reading this series so long? And now the curtain's coming down... geez. I think all my favorites are out to hurt me these last couple of weeks!

[Enigma]

No Image for me this week, what is this madness?!

[TotalSnorefest]

Didn't try any of the new titles (yet), but just a brief update on Sun Bakery in case anyone is interested: the Super Metroid meets Instagram pastiche from issue 1 gets wrapped up in this issue. Personally I'm kinda glad it did, it's a neat lil' thing for a webcomic maybe, but I felt it was the weakest one of the strips in the debut issue because it leans so heavily on Super Nintendo in-jokes.

Bat Rider is neat, the black & white gives it a distinct identity from the other stories which share similar colourpallets, but it's mostly just about a sentient skateboard. Dream Skills is a cooler story, it's about people with aura-shields around them that deflect bullets so the entire society has gone back to using katanas haha. It's pretty comical too, they face a barista in this one who holds the key to something valuable... the wifi password.

Dream Skills is gonna last four issues and looks like the main attraction in the Sun Bakery anthology for now, so it's good that the biggest story is also the best one. I like the lil' micro comics scattered around too, last month's issue ended on a really weird Rated M for Mature 2-pager, but these were better I felt.

[matt levin]

Just They're Not Like Us for me this week. Still sort-of enjoying it in that it's still engaging but without any genuinely likeable characters...