Weekly Treats! The Making Of, Minutemen, Justice League, AVX

Let's start the post with some magic from Brecht Evens. The Anglouleme award-winning The Wrong Place is a quiet masterpiece that took me a little while to discover and is now one of my top recommendations in the shop. To a certain degree The Making Of (Drawn & Quarterly) is more of the same - bright, vivid watercolours with beautifully gentle character-based storytelling - but this time Evens has given himself a larger playground to explore. Instead of three interlocking stories as with his previous book, The Making Of features one long leisurely tale about a moderately successful, mildly neurotic artist from the city who is invited to a small rural town to be the creative director of their biennial and finds his ambitious artistic ego antagonised by the more laid-back, amateur sensibilities and eccentric behaviour of the locals which begins to challenge his notions of art.

Evens art can be quite astonishing at times, particularly in scenic panels and pages. His layouts seem to drift across the page filled with sometimes ghostly representations of his characters, each with their own colour. The enormous variety in the art - the patters, the colours & the way some scenes are depicted through a few simple lines - kept me utterly engaged, fascinated even, with the page juxtaposing a rather simple, but bewitching story.

See here for Brecht Evens blog (worthwhile though it's not in English) and here for a brief interview. 

As for the weeklies, Before Watchmen: Minutemen #3 of 6 (DC) by Darwyn Cooke - “I’m not here to bust you, I’m here to recruit you. How’d you like to work for your Uncle Sam, Eddie?” Or how about Justice League #12 (DC) by Geoff Johns and Jim Lee which features a little smoochy action that apparently the whole world is talking about...

But if that's too girly for you, there are also some more DC annuals out including Green Lantern, Detective Comics and Superman.

And finally, fight fans: AvX: Vs. #5 of 6 (Marvel). Jason Aaron and Tom Raney play marriage guidance councillor to Black Panther and Storm whilst Matt Fraction and Leinil Yu brings us Hawkeye versus Angel (bet there are a few feathers to clear up after that one).

As ever, the full list of releases can be found under the tab at the top of the page.