The New Pull List of Maturity (and Crime)

A funny thing happened when we got home last night after our weekly trip to the Golden Apple. First, staring at the stack of books, I realized that - with the exception of the new Buffy* - our entire haul this week was made up of crime books. Looking at our comics shelf, I then realized that "capes and tights" books make up the smallest chunk by far of our monthly buys.

Of course, genre is a tricky thing: does a book like Powers count as a crime-book-with-superheroes or a superhero-book-in-police-procedural-tights? (With Powers, I settled on the former; Peter David's X-Factor, a mash-up of noir detective with Marvel mutants, I would peg as the latter, if only because it gets hijacked every so often for company crossover slugfests.)

I have to admit I was a little surprised at first, and maybe a little saddened: it was, after all, Spidey, the X-Men, and (sigh) the West Coast Avengers that got me hooked on the medium. But on my recent trip home I had the occasion to haul a box or two of comics out of the attic and flip through them, and it pretty much confirmed the conventional wisdom that the early 90s were not such a great time for spandex and eye-beams, at least where the big two were concerned.

But then I looked down at the stack of floppies we had brought home and snapped out my nostalgia-funk immediately: there may not be much in the superhero genre that's doing it for me these days, but we're in the middle of an excellent crime comics boom-let.

So coming soon: crime comics reviews galore, where we'll be checking in with some old favorites and checking out some new obsessions.

Now if y'all will excuse me, I've got to track down this mope and make with the chin music until he canaries. . .

. . .oh, who am I kidding? I've got to get back to coding old newspaper editorials.

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* As regards a certain surprising (if not wholly unexpected) plot twist: I can't resist the easy joke. To wit: "I'll be in my bunk."