Some comics I'm reading these days

Ahoy.

Not much time to chat today, as I'm drowning under a flood tide of freshman comp papers (oy), but I thought I'd toss up a few covers to some comics I've been reading these days. Not much common ground here, maybe, although four of the five titles are published by Vertigo (all except for Viking), and they are all, I supposed, targeted to "mature readers," which means some swearing and violence. All are available at you local neighborhood comic shop, and they're all worth a look, in my opinion, if you like stories wit' pitchers, as I do. All these books have also been collected into bound volumes containing several installments each, so you can sample them and get a sense of whether it's the kind of thing you want to come back to every month.

Briefly:

The Unwritten - an odd story about a character form a series of children's books (think Harry Potter) who has, apparently, come into reality in this world. But things get interesting as the author explores the idea that fictional worlds a.) have their own physical realities, and b.) can collide with our own. Oh and there's a vampire.

Greek Street - modern-day retelling of the Greek myths--Oedipus, Madea and all the rest--transported to modern-day London's red light district. Lots of nudity, sex and violence, which is to say, it's pretty faithful to the source material.

Northlanders - fairly low-brow comic about Vikings, or at least Norsemen, or at least people who lived in cold places. A series of loosely-connected vignettes of anywhere from one to eight issues apiece, following various characters and their stories from roughly AD 950-1050. The surrent storyline is set in Siberia, but check out the two-parter "The Shield Maidens" for some killer artwork.

























Madame Xanadu - modern-day witch/priestess located in Greenwich Village dabbles in the occult and tries to help people out. Hilarity ensues. MX used to hang with King Arthur, and her horrid sister is Morgana le Fay, so there's all that going on too, fairies and so forth. It's less dumb than it sounds.

Viking - possibly the dumbest book on this list, but it's Vikings, what do you expect? Nicely oversized, with killer painted art, the story is fairly incomprhensible--I'm pretty sure there's a feud, and somebody makes some bad choices and a lot of people get whacked. Beyond that I'm pretty much lost, but the art makes up for a lot. Did I mention it's about Vikings?