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 Written by John Rogers and Alex Irvine
Art by Andrea Di Vito and Peter Bergting
24 pages, color
Published by IDW
I have a confession to make: about 25 years ago, I was a big Dungeons & Dragons geek. Played it all the time with friends, read the novels and comics, even helped maintain one of their official areas on a computer network back in the day. But 15 years ago, I fell away from it all and I haven’t come into much contact at all with the game or products since then. So when a copy of Dungeons & Dragons #0 ended up in my mailbox, well, I couldn’t help but get curious. I’d loved the comics by Jeff Grubb, Rags Morales, Dan Mishkin, Jan Duursema, and Tom Mandrake that DC had published many years ago. Could this be my new "gateway drug" back inside?
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 By Scott Morse
28 pages, color
Published by IDW
One of the things I like about Scott Morse is that you never, ever know what you’re in store for. He jumps genres and formats faster than people can keep up, and often morphs his art style to match. So when I picked up a copy of Strange Science Fantasy #1, the only thing for certain I knew was that the cover reminded me a lot old B-grade movie posters. Turns out that’s more or less what was waiting for me on the inside, too.
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 By John Byrne
48 pages, color
Published by IDW
When actor Andy Hallett passed away in March 2009, it left the publishers of the Angel comic at IDW in a slight quandary. While not the main character of the series, Hallett’s character Lorne had shown up on a fairly regular basis. Deciding that they would at least temporarily retire the character, the Angel: Lorne one-shot was conceived. And as a way to say goodbye to the character? Well, it’s not going to knock you out, but its heart is in the right place.
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 By Berkeley Breathed
288 pages, black and white, plus color
Published by IDW
In the 1980s, my two favorite newspaper comic strips were easy to identify: Peanuts and Bloom County. The funny thing is that especially at an early age, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of Bloom County went over my head. Even as I approached becoming a teenager, I didn’t get a lot of the political humor that Berkeley Breathed infused into Bloom County. So a joke about Cuba sailed right past me, to say nothing of references to various politicians. The thing is, even then, there was always something that would make me laugh. I might not know who was being parodied, but I got the punch line none the less. Now that I’m going back and re-reading Bloom County, though, it’s a very different experience.
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 Written by Clive Barker and Chris Monfette, with creative consultant Robb Humphries
Art by Gabriel Rodriguez
32 pages, color
Published by IDW
When I think about Clive Barker and comics, the first thing that leaps to mind for me is the Hellraiser series from Epic. Barker has a much larger connection to comics than just Hellraiser, of course; numerous stories and novels over the years were adapted into comics, and at one point there was even an entire short-lived line of comic series based off of Barker’s concepts. Hellraiser, especially in the early issues, was a top-notch horror series. Reading the new Clive Barker one-shot Seduth reminded me more than a little bit of those Hellraiser comics, but at least in part it’s a been-there, done-that sort of way.
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 Written by John Ostrander
Art by Timothy Truman
32 pages, color
Published by IDW
It’s been a few years since John Ostrander and Timothy Truman ventured into the world of GrimJack, right? When IDW began their Legend of GrimJack reprint series in 2005, accompanying it was a GrimJack: Killer Instinct mini-series. Since then, it’s just been reprints; or at least, that’s what I’d thought. Turns out ComicMix.com has run an entire new GrimJack story online since then, one that they and IDW are now bringing into print. It seemed like a good a time as any to check back into the city of Cynosure and see just what Ostrander and Truman have done while I wasn’t looking.
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 Written by Juliet Landau and Brian Lynch
Art by Franco Urru
32 pages, color
Published by IDW
The last time I looked at IDW’s Angel series, it had just wrapped up the long-running "After the Fall" story (detailing what happened after the show’s conclusion), and seemed to be trying to find a new direction. To that extent, Angel seems to be working on the latter, opening with a story that takes place before "After the Fall" and focusing on a popular supporting cast character, Drusilla. Honestly, though, I was a little surprised to not see a huge "written by Juliet Landau!" (the actress who played Drusilla) byline across the cover. It’s definitely the greatest selling point of this comic.
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 Written by Elaine Lee
Penciled by Michael Wm Kaluta
Inked by Michael Wm Kaluta and Charles Vess
32 pages, color
Published by IDW
Starstruck has always been one of those semi-mythical comics that you hear a lot about, but probably haven’t read. It’s had several incarnations along the way; a strip in Heavy Metal that was republished in the ’80s as a graphic novel from Marvel’s Epic Comics, which was then followed by a mini-series. It was reprinted by Dark Horse in the early ’90s with the promise of more to come, but that’s when things started stalling out. Two publishers announced plans for various Starstruck material only to go out of business (Tundra Publishing and Marlowe & Co.), and from that point on it’s been curiously absent off of the radar. The idea that Starstruck is back is both exciting as well as a little daunting. After hearing about this project for so many years (and with such a high pedigree of talent), can it live up to its reputation?
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 Written by El Torres
Art by Gabriel Hernandez
32 pages, color
Published by IDW
"I see dead people." It’s a statement that’s echoed through all sorts of media, for as far as history is recorded. So when you create a story these days about someone who is able to view ghosts, you need more than just that as your hook to draw the reader in. With El Torres’s and Gabriel Hernandez’s The Veil, the basic ideas in the first issue might be the same, but they’re able to bring a strong enough voice to the concept that I think they’ve successfully found their hook.
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 Original novel by Richard Stark
Adapted by Darwyn Cooke
144 pages, two-color
Published by IDW
Depending on how you look at it, I’m either the right or the wrong choice to review Darwyn Cooke’s adaptation of the Richard Stark novel The Hunter. Stark (a pseudonym of author Donald Westlake) was the star of no less than 24 novels, and The Hunter was adapted into two movies, Point Blank and Payback. Of those, I’ve read and seen none of them. But I love books like Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips’s Criminal, or Jamie S. Rich and Joëlle Jones’s You Have Killed Me. And in the end, I decided, surely that must be enough to get a good read on Parker: The Hunter and see just what Darwyn Cooke ended up bringing to life in comic book form.
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