New Comic Wednesday: August 14

Somethings new and a few things old(er).

Even more so than the weekend, Wednesday continues to be my favorite day of any week. There is something exciting about heading out to my local comic shop (lcs) on Wednesday afternoon (or Wednesday morning if I'm real lucky) and retrieving a stack of freshly pulled (saved) publications for reading. When a week is lighter-than-expected (translation: not as many issues that are automatically pulled from the fresh table) there is that wonderful extra time spent pouring through back issue bins.

And then there are Wednesdays like today: a New Comic Day where what I've requested my lcs friends to pull includes recent issues by classic characters that I have either never followed before or have not done so for many moons, Red Sonja, by Gail Simone and Walter Geovanni, and Vampirella: Southern Gothic, by Nathan Cosby and José Luis. Both are from the fantastic publisher, Dynamite.

As I've posted about previously (here and here), my own collecting habits have moved quite a ways away from where they were 30+ years ago when I began reading comic books. Like most, I grew up a "Big Two" (DC and Marvel) fanboy, but in the past decade my interest in those characters and the universes they exist within has ebbed and flowed until finally becoming merely a trickle. My traditional super-heroic collecting tendencies have been replaced by zombies, westerns, Cthulu-esque tales, noir and pulp. Stepping back from my longboxes, I've also recently noted that many of the comics I collect feature strong female leads (Lazarus, Sixth Gun, Sheltered and Revival, to name a few).

This week's haul is very representative of that change. In addition to sampling the aforementioned Red Sonja and Vampirella series, I also finally picked up the three issue miniseries Breath of Bones: A Tale of the Golem by Steve Niles, Matt Santoro and Dave Wachter from Dark Horse. I've read great things about it, and while having previously scanned issues as they were released, I waited until I could read the entire miniseries before  purchasing. My lcs had one copy of issues 1 and 2, so the waiting game worked out in my favor this time.

Happy reading!