One More Must Read of the Week!

It's a banner week lads and lasses! First Sweet Tooth from Vertigo and now Strange Tales #1 from Marvel, or should I say Disney, anyway, two great books! I already posted a review of Sweet Tooth, but I really need to discuss the utterly fun Strange Tales #1 from Marvel. too. Yep, that's right, I'm writing a glowing review of a Marvel book!

Strange Tales is a three issue mini-series of little strips by some of the biggest names in indy comics. Yeah! Issue one has quite the assortment, and well worth the $4.99 price tag. I know that sounds steep, but looking at the quality of the creators and the page count, it's not that bad. 48 pages with NO ads!

Stand-outs for me: the She Hulk mini-story by John Leavitt and Molly Crabapple, the Spider-man and MJ story by Junko Mizuno, the Spider-man story by Jason, the Hulk story by James Kochalka, and the two one-page strips by The Perry Bible Fellowship. All 12 mini-stories or strips are very entertaining, but those are my favorites. The She-Hulk story is, I think, my absolute fav out of this issue, for "The Yellow Wallpaper" reference alone! The Mizuno strip is great because MJ looks damn sexy drawn by Junko and Spidey looks so damn cute. I would love to see some kind of Mizuno/Marvel merchandising to come out of this, but I think I'm kidding myself here. I already have Tokidoki and Marvel collaborating, what more could I want? The Kolchalka stip is hilarious, of course, what else could we expect from the man that brought us "Super F@#$ers"? I love Kolchalka most for his "Peanut Butter and Jeremy" comics, but Kolchalka drawing the Hulk is magical! Wouldn't it be great if Disney had a brilliant idea to have Kolchalka write and illustrate a series of Marvel kids books? Again, I know I'm dreaming, but anything can happen with this new Marvel/Disney dynamic!

Another wonderful thing Marvel did with this issue (that is not a typo, Marvel did something GOOD!): a bio sheet at the end of the issue. So if you like the Jason strip, for example, you can find out what else he did etc. Nicely done! I was worried that they weren't going to include this kind of info for the fans that may not be familiar with all or some of these top notch creators. Other creators included in this first issue: Paul Pope, Peter Bagge, Nick Bertozzi, Nicholas Gurewitch, Michael Kupperman, Johnny Ryan and Dash Shaw.

LOVED it!

Now if only I could have this kind of reaction after I read every Marvel comic...