Cream of the Comics – 3/21/2007

After The Cape #1
written by Howard Wong, art by Marco Rudy

Hero By Night #1
written and drawn by D.J. Coffman

This week, two books caught my eye, and both of them are new. Just looking at the covers, you can already see that there are some stark contrasts between the two in art style, but if you take a look at the concepts, you can see that both use the ever-awesome superhero genre as a springboard. Keep reading after the jump for why you should buy them, and for preview pages of both to back my story up!

After the Cape is a 3 issue miniseries featuring a man named Ethan Falls, also previously known as Captain Gravity. The plot isn’t the most original thing you’ll ever hear of – the man falls from grace due to a drinking problem – but the real problem becomes that he hasn’t exactly picked up the pieces from there. As a working-class man, he doesn’t have his family’s millions or a butler to help him get his life back in order. Instead, he’s in a bit of a downward spiral, make more and more moral compromises to try to provide for his family.

It sounds good enough on its own, but the real grabber is the art. The high contrast black and whites make for a visually stunning work, one that instantly caught my eye. Sin City springs immediately to mind, though this “chiaroscuro” (it’s a real word, I swear!) art style has been around for centuries, and it makes for a fantastic looking book.

Hero By Night (a 4 issue mini), while still rooted in the superhero tradition, is a little bit less dark – both in terms of art and in story. When everyman Jack King stumbles across the lair of an old vanished superhero – known as Hero By Night – in the basement of his apartment building, he does what anyone would do – he tries to auction the gadgets and costumes off to make a buck. The downside is that the superhero’s old, undefeated arch-nemesis takes notice. Obviously, this can’t go well for Jack.

For the art, Coffman creates dynamic, exciting pages for the superhero material, and transitions smoothly back and forth into everyday life, doing a fantastic job of making both look great. Anyone who writes AND draws their own work gets extra bonus points in my book. And if what I’ve told you so far gets you interested, you can catch up on the original Hero By Night’s journals, which Coffman put online as a sort of webcomic. It’s really clever stuff, and the attention to detail is GLORIOUS.

And now, the preview pages. Enjoy!

After The Cape:

Hero By Night: