Happy April Comic Shop Friends! We’re getting closer to Free Comic Book Day and will have more information about that coming soon! It’s only a month away now, so mark your calendars for Saturday, May 6th!

Coming up this month is Late Nite Comics on Thursday, April 20th, from 8 pm to midnight! We’ll have another 40 long boxes of dollar stock out for you to hunt through, 50% off back issues, and a special guest, Chad Bilyeu. He’s the creator of Chad in Amsterdam and The Re-Up, which you can find on our local comics wall. He’ll have a table during Late Nite, selling his comics, so stop by to check that out!

As always, you can find more information about upcoming events on our Facebook page, website, and Tuesday night videos, now on Facebook and YouTube!

MARVEL COMICS

Following the events of the 2011 Rise of the Planet of the Apes film, this new series, written by David F. Walker with art by Dave Wachter, takes place in 2015, after the ALZ-113 virus has run rampant across the world and the terrorist group Exercitus Viri has taken it upon themselves to kill all apes. Peacekeeper Juliana Tobon is one of the few humans who has pledged to protect apes. But after years of being hunted, the apes are afraid, and Tobon’s promise to protect them is met with distrust. Apes protect apes.

Another great stand-alone issue of I Am Iron Man from Murewa Ayodele and Dotun Akande! This story finds Iron Man at the bottom of the ocean, looking for the last piece of a radioactive asteroid, but he has to contend with a giant fish, and with nature itself.

DC COMICS

Missing The Last of Us? Need more fungus in your life? Then read Poison Ivy! Continuing from the mass lamia infestation at the wellness camp in issue 10, Ivy finds she has more control over the situation than she thought and decides to use her power in a new way.

SMALL PRESS

Lots of cool Small Press books this week!

Based on the real-life British moral panic and subsequent banning of “video nasties,” The Nasty by writer John Lees and artists George Kambadais and Adam Cahoon, is set in Scotland in 1994 and is described as a story about the perception of evil; the power of the genre, the love of a fandom, the need to create art, and of course, crap-your-pants terror! Thumper Connell still has an imaginary friend at the age of eighteen, Red Ennis, the killer from the Labor Day slasher movie series. But Red Ennis may not be quite so imaginary after Thumper and his friends at the local video store come across a copy of a lost cursed film, House of Creeping Flesh!

If you’re into horror movies and the history of censorship of said films, this is the book for you. The Nasty was hyped up by Vault at ComicsPro this year, and it’s great. There are some killer fake movie titles in this book, and I can’t say my favorite here because it’s not family-friendly. Pick it up!

A timely tie-in since WrestleMania was this past weekend, it’s Code Name Ric Flair: Magic Eightball! Writer James Haick III and artist Rafael Loureiro tell a story that purports that Flair was a secret agent for the U.S. government in the 1980s, using his wrestling matches as a cover. “Everything you are about to read is true except what isn’t.”

These last two titles are coming in late, so I didn’t get to read them before writing this newsletter, but these new #1s look pretty good.

From Image is Junk Rabbit #1, written and drawn by Jimmie Robinson. Described as Swamp Thing meets RoboCop, it’s a take on how consumer waste, mass homelessness, and climate disasters alter our world and the heroes that literally rise from it.

And Dark Horse has a new #1 from Matt Kindt and Tyler Jenkins, Hairball, a new supernatural nightmare that is part Junji Ito and part Hayao Miyazaki. A young girl suspects her black cat is behind all her troubles: her parents’ fighting, family plagues, and innumerable horrors, and she tries to rid herself of the creature.