3 posts tagged “scalped”

I've noticed a new trend in my comic book reading.  I prefer books with a lead character versus team books.  With the exception of Fables, my top five books are all solo books.  Here is my list followed by some reasons why I like reading the various titles.

Superman
All Star Superman
Fables
Scalped
Red Sonja
Witchblade
Captain America
Green Lantern Corps
Fantastic Four
Wolverine

I love what Ed Brubaker is doing with Captain America.  He writes an excellent espionage book with the best moments of Captain America history intertwined.  For example, Sharon discovering that the Grand Director is still alive made me smile all day long.  Yes, I remember the Grand Director fondly.  He appeared in one of the very first Captain America books that I ever read and is one of the earliest books in my collection.

I need to stop caring about the Fantastic Four.  I am not sure what Mark Millar was hoping to achieve with his first arc on the title, but I was less than impressed.  At best I was disinterested.

I will miss Grant Morrison's take on the last son of Krypton.  Each and every issue of his run was perfect.  Not only was the lead character done with style, but the supporting cast also shone brightly be it Lois Lane or Steve Lombard.

The writing talent of Jason Aaron is my primary reason for liking both Scalped and Wolverine.

More often than not when people hear the term comic books, the first association that they make with that phrase is super heroes, be it Spider-Man, Superman or Batman.  That is understandable, but that is not the whole truth.  Yes, today super heroes do dominate the comic book market, but even when I started reading them back in the 1970's there was a wide variety of genre choices and super heroes was just one of them.  There were war comics.  There were western comics.  There were even comics that were meant just to be funny such as Archie and Sad Sack.

One of the first titles that I ever read was called Weird Western Tales and introduced a new character called Scalphunter, a white man who as a child had been raised by Native Americans when his family was killed.  Then as a grown man he was never fully accepted by either group.  This man, Brian Savage, had to be one of the most complex fictional characters that I had ever encountered in my early comic book reading.  So with that in mind I was extremely relieved to find when earlier today reading another issue from that era, the stories still rang true and have great emotional impact for me as an adult.  Brian Savage was a man like no other and that made him interesting if not a hero among men.

Oddly enough one of my favorite titles being produced today is Scalped, yet another book centered on Native Americans, except the stories take place today and not in the years after The American Civil War.  In some ways, Dashiell Bad Horse is a worthy successor to Brian Savage.  Both men are caught in violent worlds yet strive for peace of some sort.

Jason Aaron with his writing on the Vertigo title Scalped has filled the void left by Y The Last Man as a must read for me every month.  Of the eight issues that I own, I have yet to read a bad issue.  Each and every installment of the story of life on an Indian reservation leaves me wanting more so I end up going to online auctions to complete the current run.  I love the characters, I love the art and hope that it lasts as long as Y did or at least another couple of years.