I don’t know if this “Comic Grab Bag” will be a recurring segment on Pop Critics or not, but I thought it might be a fun one to start and we’ll see how it goes.

Of course, with anything regarding my dive into the world of comics, I started off with a mistake. I’ve been wanting to check out The Dark Towers graphic novel/comic book series from Stephen King, but I sort of grabbed the first two comics in the SECOND part of the book adaptation, so I’m going to have to wait until I can read the first.

So far, there is The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born, and then The Long Road Home. I got into this story from the original books by King, and made it about four books in to the long seven-volume series.

The next comic I grabbed was Batman R.I.P. #677. I read #676 a month or so ago and while some of it was a mystery to me because of my lack of backstory, I still enjoyed it and want to see where it goes. I also snagged Batman #675, thinking it was on the Batman R.I.P. checklist, but alas, I was wrong. Still looks like another interesting read from the great mind of Grant Morrison.

I heard amazing things about Kick-Ass, a new series from the creative mind of Mark Millar, who also wrote the recent Wanted comics which is now a motion picture. Atomic didn’t have issues 2 or 3 available, but I snatched up the Director’s Cut for issue 1. Looks very promising from the first two pages.

While I was there, I realized I REALLY wanted to get into whatever brand new series I could, and I spotted another Millar story called 1985, which is only two issues in and thus I purchased the first two copies without even knowing the story.

Now that I’m home, the 1985 plot sounds pretty awesome: “[1985] is about the real world, the world we live in right now, dealing with the villains of the Marvel Universe finding us.” Millar also noted, “This is Marvel’s [Chronicles of] Narnia.” (Wikipedia)

Finally, I spent the bigger dollars on Book One of Rex Mundi: The Guardian of the Temple, which I heard is pretty brilliant. There is also major rumors of Johnny Depp starring as Rex Mundi in a developing movie, so I just had to get an idea of what that will be all about. From Wikipedia:

The series is a quest for the Holy Grail told as a murder mystery. It is set in the year 1933, in an alternate history Europe, where magic is real, feudalism persisted, and the Protestant Reformation was crushed by a still politically powerful Roman Catholic Church.

Rex Mundi is a pretty long graphic novel, and there are four total volumes in the series, so I have my work cut out for me.

I’ll of course be writing reviews of a few of these and keeping you updated on any other “Comic Grab Bags” I do over at Atomic Comics. I’m pretty stoked to be checking out some other stories in the comic book world, as I’ve been pretty focused on the more mainstream superhero stuff lately.