BEAST

Though it’s been a little over two years since the last “Beasts of Burden” one-shot, Evan Dorkin, Sarah Dyer and Jill Thompson’s “Beasts of Burden: What the Cat Dragged In” not only maintains the high standard of excellence I’ve come to expect from their collaborations, but invites in old and new readers alike. Dorkin and Dyer introduce the characters quickly, placing the cat Orphan front and center while reminding readers of Dymphna’s treacherous past. It never feels like exposition, even though it effortlessly serves as such; this is the sort of writing skill I wish more creators had. It’s something we see throughout the entire one-shot; whenever we need information, it’s conveyed in an exciting, attention-grabbing way. This book never even comes close to being dull or slow, and something new happens on every single page. Surprisingly, the dogs that make up the bulk of “Beasts of Burden’s” usual cast aren’t present here, but they’re also never missed. It’s a smart decision to leave

Begun as a webcomic and funded into print via Kickstarter, Charles Dowd’s “Lilith Dark and the Beastie Tree” is a labor of love, and it shows. The first six chapters, collected here, are cute, spirited and a little rough around the edges. They follow the adventures of Lilith Dark, a little girl whose overactive imagination comes in handy when it turns out that the beasties from her games are real. Though the story suffers from problems common to all-ages comics, there’s a catching zeal here that makes them forgivable. Lilith is a likeably stubborn heroine, with a wide, square face that Dowd deftly transforms from childish pouts to determined scowls. She’s a fun character to follow through the world, and her family dynamic will be familiar to any child who’s watched a cartoon. Her sister, Becky, is responsible and a little high-strung; her brother, Dewey, is a Harry Potter doppelganger who draws geeky monster designs in his notebook. However, the first third of the book feels like s

I wish Evan Dorkin and Jill Thompson’s “Beasts of Burden” existed when I was a kid. As an adult, I love reading every new tale when it’s released, but there’s something really special about this series. It takes itself just seriously enough but still has a light enough touch that the weight of the stories don’t hold down the concept. It’s exciting, fun and engrossing, and even when we have what amounts to an extended action sequence as we do here, I still feel like diving in to the book was time well spent. In “Hunters and Gatherers,” The Watch attempts to find out the secret of the invisible creature that has been eating local animals, forcing cats and dogs to put aside any animosity they have to work towards the greater goal of saving their kin. Evan Dorkin packs more nuanced character moments into this issue full of canines and felines than most superhero work on the stands today. The ease with which he moves from voice to voice, character to character, is a huge part of what mak

Avatar has made little secret of its plans to adapt as much Alan Moore work as possible into comics and “Fashion Beast” #1 is the latest addition to their canon. Writer Anthony Johnston and artist Facundo Percio are tasked with bringing this series to comics using an unproduced screenplay as a base. Not just any screenplay, though — one written in the 1980s as a collaboration between Alan Moore and Malcolm McLaren, who was better known as the manager of seminal British punk band, the Sex Pistols. The task seems thankless, but as it turns out, this comic is quite close to being a fairly typical Alan Moore experience. Which is to say, it’s actually very good. Whether Johnston and Percio have compensated for the translation between screen and page, or whether the rich visuals were part of Moore’s own directions isn’t clear, but this is an inventive, tightly-written and enjoyable comic. The story is allegedly a retelling of Beauty and the Beast, but the setting is strange and the charac

When the long-departed publisher Dreamwave re-kindled interest in comic adaptations of ’80s toys and cartoons almost a decade ago, few would have predicted it would lead to this: IDW’s “Battle Beasts” #1 by writer Bobby Curnow and artist Valerio Schiti. It’s fair to say that remaining faithful to the source material isn’t likely to be too much of a concern to the creative team here — after all, the audience appears to be virtually nil. I vaguely remember owning some Battle Beasts, but I don’t recall any comic or TV series associated with it in the way that I remember “Transformers” as the ’80s equivalent of a multi-platform media assault. If this story is in any way based on established lore, it’s still new to me. What the creative team delivers is a completely by-the-numbers interpretation of the property, which pits intelligent mutant animals with weapons against one another in combinations that, at least right now, have absolutely no rhyme or reason to them. The token human intere

If I hadn’t read the “Beasts of Burden: Animal Rites” collection earlier this year and utterly fallen in love with the book, I might’ve had my doubts on “Beasts of Burden/Hellboy.” Sure, there have been some good crossovers with “Hellboy” in the past; I’m quite fond of “Hellboy/Ghost,” and “Batman/Hellboy/Starman” was far better than such a strange mash-up of characters ever should have turned out. But since I had already read “Beasts of Burden” I wasn’t worried, because it’s probably one of the best comics I’ve read this year. And in the case of “Beasts of Burden/Hellboy,” we’ve got a true rarity in comic book crossovers; two books working together and each bringing their A-game to the plate for a truly satisfying comic. Evan Dorkin’s script (with assistance from Mike Mignola) brings everything that you should want to life, here. We’ve got a courageous group of dogs (plus two cats) who fight supernatural horrors that are a wonderful mixture of heroic, cowardly, opportunistic, and f