Heidi MacDonald, a longtime journalist and editor who runs comics site The Beat, coined a great phrase several years ago: “satisfying chunk”. More than ever that’s what I’m after when reading new material, with issues costing 3 to 4 bucks
a pop — not just a steep price on the face of it but one that suffers in comparison to copious collections of recent material that easily best the per-chapter price of single issues and usually throw in extras to boot. There’s also a wealth of archival material now available nearly impossible to even imagine a couple of decades ago.
I greatly appreciate series that compel me to reread often, too, and reward my doing
so in different ways: The new Archie is a fresh addition to this list. Batman ’66, while uneven, serves as the light done-in-one sorbet between issues of The Fade Out, which offers satisfying chunks of a longer story that calls for revisiting several issues at a time and has its own value-added extras not found in later collections. Lumberjanes is a delight I’ll read on my own right away then again to my nieces and nephew. I’m utterly captivated by the atmosphere, mythology, and storytelling in the cabinet of wonders that is Hellboy in Hell, whose latest issue drops next week.
So that’s five current, ongoing series that all trump the economics of trade-waiting for me, of varied frequency to be sure — and I’ll stop there before I start qualifying things further. What are some of yours?
Covers to Archie #1 © 2015 Archie Publications, Lumberjanes #3 © 2014 Boom
Entertainment, Hellboy in Hell #3 © 2013 Mike Mignola, The Fade Out #7 © 2015
Basement Gang, and Batman ’66 #6 © 2014 DC Comics. Art: Chip Zdarsky; Noelle
Stevenson; Mike Mignola with Dave Stewart; Sean Phillips; Jonathan Case.
Related: Unread by Me • Rounds of the Night Table [2010] •
March with Archie • Give Me Hellboy • The Uncredeemibles
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