We’re getting closer to wrapping up our annual crop of comics gift recommendations. Today, we’re going to talk about I Kill Giants.

This was originally a seven-issue miniseries by Joe Kelly and J.M. Ken Niimura, published by Image Comics back in 2008. I got the first issue of this when it first came out but never ended up getting anything after that. I used to regret that, but I’m actually happy about it now, because I think this story works best as a stand-alone graphic novel, rather than as a series of individual comics.

The story focuses on an eccentric but whip-smart fifth grader named Barbara Thorson. She really is a glorious character — she’s terrifically smart, she’s got a smart mouth that can cut you to shreds from 50 yards, she’s an awesome D&D dungeon master, she knows more than anyone her age should know about obscure baseball trivia, she loves to wear weird animal-ear headgear, and possibly unsurprisingly, she has almost no friends. She lives at home with her older brother and sister, who does most of the work to keep the family going, as their father left the family and their mom is mysteriously absentee.

And Barbara sees fairies and monsters everywhere, tells everyone that she fights and kills giants, and has forebodings of titanic monsters on the way to destroy everyone around her.

Yes, maybe Barbara is a bit more than merely eccentric.

I’d love to tell you more about the story, about her mighty weapon Coveleski, about the secrets in her life, hiding in the upper floors of her house, about the terrors Barbara has to face. But I can’t do it, because there is so much glory in discovering these things for yourself while reading it.

Joe Kelly’s writing is entirely masterful. Killer dialogue and excellent characterization — seriously, you will love the heck out of Barbara even while you’re wishing you could take a switch to her. The plot builds slow, with more and more pressure stacking up. Niimura’s art is pretty amazing. It’s cartoony — almost sketchy — but it’s vastly eloquent at expressing emotion and action and mood.

The ending of this story is going to leave you terrified and breathless and maybe sad, for all the right reasons. It’s one of the few comics out there that gets me choked up every time I read it.

If you haven’t read it, you should read it. If you already have read it, you should get it for someone else and pass the joy along. The trade paperback will cost you less than $20.

I Kill Giants by Joe Kelly and J.M. Ken Niimura. Go pick it up.

I’m already starting to get a bit behind on these gift recommendations, so let’s get back into ’em. Today, we’re going to talk about The Complete Major Bummer Super Slacktacular.

A little history: “Major Bummer” was a humor comic published by DC from 1997-1998. It was written by John Arcudi, with art by Doug Mahnke. It didn’t appear to be within DC’s normal continuity — no other superheroes appeared, and Lou was never mentioned in any other DC books. There was also no one named “Major Bummer” in the comic — the title was part pun and part a thematic mission statement — namely, “Superpowers suuuuck, now let’s have a larf at people being brutally injured.”

Our main character was Lou Martin, a skinny, unmotivated slacker with few interests outside of eating, sleeping, and playing video games. But after a couple of alien grad students accidentally implanted him with a hypertech superheart, Lou was transformed into a superstrong, musclebound, super-smart slacker with few interests outside of eating, sleeping, playing video games, and trying to avoid being horribly maimed by supervillains.

The comic’s supporting characters included a group of misfits who’d received their own superpowers: Gecko (a superhero fanboy who could stick to walls), Val (a gorgeous babe who could fly and had the hots for Lou), Lauren (an elderly, scatterbrained lady who could see the future), and Francis (a condescending artiste with a supersonic scream).

The main villains were a bunch of superpowered thugs: impossibly-skinny claw-slinger Carlos, super-hot density-controlling Nancy, chubby electro-punk Bridget, big-brained weirdo Reggie, and Nunzio. Really, Nunzio was the only one who actually counted — he was a gigantic, red-skinned, lizardy monster who was way, way tougher than Lou was.

Other villains included the alien grad students, Zinnac and Yoof, a transdimensional Nazi thunder lizard called Tyranosaurus Reich, a psychotic, buck-toothed hero-worshiping geek named Milton, a demon-possessed toddler, and Val’s horrible parents.

The violence in this book, mainly directed at Lou, was entirely gratuitous, over-the-top, and ridiculous. Lou gets repeatedly beaten to a bloody pulp by Nunzio and various other threats. He gets bitten, clawed, shot, dropped out of planes, and trampled by elephants. In one memorable panel in the final issue, he even gets used as a club to beat a future version of himself.

DC has never bothered to put this out in a collected trade paperback, which was just insane, because it was such a grand series. Eventually, Arcudi and Mahnke were able to take the entire series to Dark Horse Comics, and they published this single gigantic volume earlier this year. If you missed the original series, this will run you about $30, but it’s really the only way to see what all the awesomeness was all about.

The Complete Major Bummer Super Slacktacular by John Arcudi and Doug Mahnke. Go pick it up.

Well, well, well, looks like it’s time again for the biggest shopping day of the year! Time to go fight your way through wall-to-wall crowds at the mall, while stores offer insulting “doorbuster” sales that require you to get up at dark-thirty so they can squeeze another few pennies out of you. And don’t you just love shopping mall parking on the day after Thanksgiving? You know why they call it “Black Friday,” right? Because it’s EEEEVIL.

But I’m here to offer you an alternative: comics! There are lots of comics and comic-related gifts you can find for the comics fan in your life, or for the person who you want to turn on to comics. So we’re going to spend a few weeks looking through our Holiday Gift Bag to find some good presents that won’t require anything more stressful than a trip to your friendly neighborhood comics shop.

Today, let’s start things off with Daytripper by Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá.

If you’ve read this site for a while, you know that this was my very favorite comic series from last year. It wasn’t available in trade paperback last Christmas, but it is now. And here’s why you should consider gifting it to someone else.

This isn’t a traditional comic story. There are no superheroes or villains, no great battle between good and evil, and the only fights are short, brutal, and generally deadly, just like real life. It’s not really a story about mundane life either — though the main character and everyone he knows are perfectly normal people, there are a few traces of magical realism. It’s definitely not a linear story. We follow our hero from the age of 32 to 21 to 28 to 41 to 11 and older and younger and older. But every chapter ends the same way.

Our hero is a Brazilian named Brás de Oliva Domingos. He’s the son of a famous writer, and he has dreams of becoming a writer himself. For now, he’s employed at a newspaper writing obituaries while working on his own novel. He’s got coworkers, a best friend, a prickly relationship with his father, and everything’s going about the way things do. And at the end, Brás dies.

No, not at the end of the entire story. Brás dies at the end of the first chapter.

And then at the end of the second chapter. And the third.

Brás doesn’t have superpowers. He just seems to die on days that are significant and important to him. The day of his first kiss, the day he meets his wife for the first time, the day his son is born, the day he spends writing obits for dozens of people dead in a plane crash.

You can call it miracles, alternate universes, metaphors, whatever you want. Because the deaths aren’t ultimately any more important than anyone else’s death. We all have death to look forward to, or to dread — we all get to die, from the top 1% to the schmuck at the bottom of the 99% rung.

What’s important is how we get there, right?

And how Brás gets there is what keeps you turning the pages of this story. His life, his family, his friends, his lovers, his trials and triumphs, from the entire stretch of his history, from childhood to old age. I wasn’t able to get enough of this, and I think you’d love it, too.

In a way, I’m still a little surprised it didn’t get more acclaim. It’s pretty much the best comic work that Moon and Bá have done — and both of them have done lots of brilliant work prior to this. The series won an Eisner Award, a Harvey, and an Eagle, and I’ve never heard anyone say a cross word about it. DC never published this as a hardcover, just a regular paperback — and this was definitely good enough for a hardcover. Still, DC’s loss is your gain — you can buy it for less than $20.

Daytripper by Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá. Go pick it up.

Duncan the Wonder Dog: Show One

Awright, lookit this here. It’s a colossal 400-page graphic novel that pretty much came out of nowhere last year, by a guy named Adam Hines, who has little formal art training — and he’s planning on making another half-dozen or more parts of the story over the next quarter century.

Man, where to start with this? The scope of this story is dauntingly huge, especially for a guy like me who’s used to doing light-speed reviews of single-issue comics. But the story, plotline, characters, and artwork on this are all amazing — and the moral questions raised by the story are really a little bit terrifying. How the heck to deal with the entire thing…?

Let’s go with the general background of the story — namely, talking animals. The story is set in a world much like our own, but animals — all animals — have human-level intelligence and can speak. You’d expect some massive changes to the world, right? And there are some — one of the main characters is a wealthy gibbon named Voltaire who runs a megacorporation and lives with his human lover. Animal rights legislation is hotly debated in Congress, and the leading animal rights terrorist organization is, appropriately enough, run almost entirely by animals.

If you’re a sci-fi fan like me, you go into some kinds of stories with certain expectations. We’ve all watched “Star Trek,” right? When the Enterprise encounters a new sapient life form, what do they do? They recognize that it has certain rights and privileges that it gets just because it’s able to think and reason intelligently. But things don’t work like that in the world of “Duncan the Wonder Dog.”

There’s a scene early in the story that I saw reprinted elsewhere, and it really sold me on getting and reading the book. It’s just a short vignette with a human fisherman and a water bird who are working together. The bird is upset because the fisherman isn’t upholding his end of the bargain. The deal was that the fisherman would get the big fish and the bird would get the small fish. The fisherman says, too bad, I need all the fish today — you can have the small fish again tomorrow. “I’m one of the only fishermen who will work you without a snare, but I can put one on if I need to.” The bird knows he’s beat, and he says, “I want… I want to eat today.”

Just that little bit — just five panels all together — completely tore my heart out.

This isn’t a world where humans accept that animal sapience entitles them to equal rights. This is a world that operates almost exactly the way our world works normally — just with the added cruelty that they know their hamburgers came from someone who can think the way they do. In fact, there’s another scene where a couple of men try to persuade a cow on a trailer to go walk into that building over there — all your friends are in there, they say, it’s not like we’d feed you and take care of you and then just send you into a building to be killed, would we? And the cow eventually reveals that she noticed lots of hoofprints going in and none coming out, so she knew it was a slaughterhouse. That’s a sharp, deductive mind in a freakin’ cow — and people in that world valued her only as a steak.

Adam Hines is certainly interested in animal rights, but he doesn’t go and make all humans the villains and all animals the heroes. The story’s most prominent and frightening antagonist is Pompeii, a Barbary macaque who leads the terrorist group ORAPOST. She bombs a university and murders multiple humans in cold blood. In a flashback, after a human ally of ORAPOST is killed, she declares that she wants to cut out the dead woman’s unborn baby to keep for her own. She later discovers and reads a woman’s diary detailing a loving and complex family life — including great amounts of compassion and love for the family’s pets — Pompeii destroys the diary, unable to deal with any evidence of humans and animals living together cooperatively.

To be honest, I see a lot of what drives the story forward — and certainly affects how readers respond to it — as being less about animal rights and human rights, and more about simple empathy. If you have empathy, it’s easy to put yourself in the, um, paws of creatures that have the intellectual capacity of humans but are considered, at best, property. If you don’t have empathy, you don’t see what the fuss is about.

In a way, it’s a story about human slavery and cultural conflicts. We can be a heartlessly cruel species to each other — it used to be you could own and sell people, and there are still people who think other kinds of people are worth less than others. There are countries where the under-privileged are as crushed, as abused, as exploited as valuable pack animals. Are the humans in the story who are comfortable owning and eating sentient creatures really all that different from the rest of us?

I could go on and on about this forever, but suffice it to say — the philosophical and moral background of this story is absolutely fascinating to me.

Art-wise, what’re we looking at? I gotta say, it’s definitely something else. In places, the art is cartoonish — not a bad thing, as we’ve discussed before. Simple cartooning often does a better job of communicating emotion than detailed artwork. But the detailed artwork is also in here. There are deeply beautiful landscapes here, abstract images that go on for page after page, and portions of the story told through typography. And again, this was all created by one guy, over the course of several years, just because he wanted to tell the story and draw the artwork.

Verdict: I think it’s fairly clear this is a thumbs up. Great art, great story, and mind-expanding philosophy? Go pick it up.

The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion

I found this a couple weeks ago and was actually really excited to get it. I’d heard that Will Eisner was working on this a few years before he died in 2005, but I’d never managed to find this in stores and assumed it was out of print by now — I was glad to see I was mistaken.

Basically, Eisner — one of the most important creators in the history of comics, creator of “The Spirit,” creator of what’s considered the first graphic novel — decided a few decades back that he wanted to research and write a history of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” If you’re fortunate enough not to be aware of that, it’s a very old anti-semitic hoax claiming to represent a ploy by Jews to take over the world.

Eisner starts his story all the way back in 1848, with a French writer named Maurice Joly, a critic of Napoleon III. Joly wrote a book called “The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu,” a coded, over-the-top denunciation of Napoleon III as a diabolical dictator who intended all manner of cartoonish evil for France and the rest of the world. Joly’s book was mostly forgotten until 1894, when members of the Russian secret police resurrected it in a bid to influence Tsar Nicholas II. Some creative rewriting of Joly’s book, and the focus was changed from Napoleon III to the ever-popular scapegoats in the Jewish population.

And a couple decades later, Hitler got his rotten hands on it. And from there, it was off to the races.

Artistically, I think this has Eisner near the top of his game, which is pretty awesome, considering that he finished it only a few months before his death. Lots of wonderfully expressive faces and postures — most of the work here looks just as fantastic as anything he ever did on “The Spirit.” It’s a bit of a shock at times to see how much Eisner uses really insulting caricature — one of the characters is depicted as a dead ringer for Rasputin — but on the other hand, a lot of the characters depicted were responsible for the most disgustingly hate-filled rhetoric on the planet, and it’s a bit hard to work up much sympathy for them. So they’re depicted as ugly, barely human cartoons? Well, turn-about is fair play.

On the other hand, there’s a lot less art than you’d probably expect. The entire book is very text-heavy. Page and pages are devoted to side-by-side comparisons of Joly’s “Dialogue in Hell” and the Protocols, along with vast amounts of background and analysis. Eisner was clearly thinking of this less as a comic book and more as a simple history book with some illustrations. But if you’re expecting a fast, cartoon-filled read, you’re not going to get it — reading the whole thing is a bit of a slog.

One of the interesting — and I suppose, depressing — elements of the tale is how frequently the Protocols get debunked, always in high profile exposes in prominent publications and by powerful organizations — and every time, the debunkers allow themselves their moment of triumph and think, “Surely, this is the end of the Protocols. No one will ever believe it now.” And every time, the damned Protocols just keep on going and going. Eisner was at least under no illusions about what effect his graphic novel would have on the people who wanted to believe lies. In other words, don’t get this expecting a happy, uplifting ending — hate always finds a way forward, unfortunately.

Verdict: Thumbs up. But with some reservations. When I said it was a slog to get through, I mean, seriously, it was a major slog to get through. The side-by-side comparison, for example, while certainly informative, ran the narrative straight into a brick wall. This is less a graphic novel and more a graphic historical narrative.

Nevertheless, it’s still worth reading. It may be a slog to read as a comic book, but it’s much quicker to read than a full-length history of the Protocols would be — and it’s clear that Eisner meant it to be that way. He didn’t mean this to be the be-all-and-end-all of Protocol histories — he knew that more complete books had already been published and more would eventually follow. So this was, I think, always meant to be more of a fast summary of events — enough to quickly refute the Protocols and get other readers interested in more of the history (the book includes a nice bibliography).

And again, you get some really outstanding Will Eisner artwork. So you get to enjoy awesome comic art and strike a blow against haters and Nazis at the same time. Sounds like more than enough reason to pick it up…

More gift recommendations for the holidays? Wow, you guys sure are demanding. Okay, fine, here’s another one, just for you: Nextwave by Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen!

I love this comic book so very, very much. It was originally published by Marvel in a 12-issue miniseries in 2006-07, and is now available in two trade paperbacks or a much more awesome Ultimate Collection.

The backstory: Nextwave is a team of superheroes working for H.A.T.E. (Highest Anti-Terrorism Effort) and charged with battling a number of Unusual Weapons of Mass Destruction, like Fin Fang Foom, the Mindless Ones, and the Ultra Samurai Battle Drone. But H.A.T.E. isn’t really what it seems to be — in fact, H.A.T.E. is actually funded by the Beyond Corporation, which used to be known as S.I.L.E.N.T., a large terrorist group, and the entire purpose of H.A.T.E. is to create more Unusual Weapons of Mass Destruction. Nextwave isn’t real happy about this, so they steal a flying machine called the Shockwave Rider and go on the run, pursued by the frequently suicidal Dirk Anger, Director of H.A.T.E, and his hordes of minions, like the broccoli men, the attack koalas, the Homicide Crabs, and Forbush Man.

If this sounds completely insane, you catch on quick.

The members of Nextwave include:

• Monica Rambeau: Formerly known as Captain Marvel, Photon, and Pulsar. Former Avenger. Straight-arrow leader of the team. Can convert her body into any form of electromagnetic energy.
• Aaron Stack: Formerly known as Machine Man. Has extendo-limbs and all kinds of entertainingly pointy weapons he can extend from his body. Hates the fleshy ones. His robot brain needs beer.
• Elsa Bloodstone: Formerly known as Elsa Bloodstone. Monster hunter. Handy with a gun. Handy with pretty much any weapon, really. Vehemently British. Has high-heeled boots and very important hair.
• Tabitha Smith: Formerly known as Time Bomb, Boomer, Boom Boom, and Meltdown. Former member of X-Force. Possesses the mutant powers of blowing things up and stealing all your stuff. Not the smartest cookie in the cookie jar.
• The Captain: Formerly known as Captain Power, Captain Ron, Captain L. Ron, Captain Universe, Captain Ultra, Captain Avenger, Captain Avalon, Captain Marvel, Captain Kerosene, and Captain @#*!, a name so foul that it caused Captain America himself to beat him up, jam a bar of soap in his mouth, and throw him in a dumpster. Totally generic superstrength-and-flight powers. Really kinda sucks at superhero stuff.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most awesome comic in history. Yes, I know I’ve said that a lot and will probably say it again, but I mean it this time. This is the most awesome comic in history.

This is not just because of all the explosions. This is not just because of Dirk Anger and his mad rants. This is not just because of Dread Rorkannu, Lord of the Dank Dimension, who likes cash and the SuicideGirls. This is not just because the team beats up a cop. This is a series that includes everything from naked ninjas to Wolverine monkeys to dancing Mindless Ones to the funniest guest appearance from Fin Fang Foom ever.

It has fight scenes like this:

Yes, those really are Elvis MODOKs. Yes, they really are shooting cheeseburgers at superheroes. Yes, Warren Ellis is a mad genius.

The Ultimate Collection will run you about $35. That’s a bit high, maybe, but anyone who loves awesome comics will definitely thank you for shelling out the extra bucks.

Nextwave by Warren Ellis and Stuart Immonen. Go pick it up.

Man, I still got stuff I want to recommend for your gift list, and time’s starting to get short. So today, let’s look at the infinite awesome that is Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade by Landry Q. Walker and Eric Jones.

You may remember I reviewed the individual issues of this series when it originally came out in 2008-09. I loved it then, and if you didn’t get a chance to read it then, it’s definitely worth the bucks to pick up the trade paperback.

What we’ve got here is an all-ages comic starring the best version of Supergirl ever. She’s still Superman’s cousin (this time from a part of Krypton that got zapped into another dimension when the planet exploded), but this time she’s a gangly, awkward pre-teen with a lot of enthusiasm and imagination, almost as much self-doubt, a poor grasp of her powers, and an even-worse grasp of life on Planet Earth.

Superman doesn’t really know what to do with her, so he gives her a secret identity and enrolls her in junior high. And she, like almost all junior high students, doesn’t like junior high at all. It doesn’t help that she’s the class freak — always asking weird questions about everyday life based on what she knows from futuristic Krypton — but she soon acquires a rival who’s really her much more popular imperfect clone, as well as a best friend who could turn out to be her worst enemy.

Author Landry Q. Walker and artist Eric Jones really turned out a brilliant comic book with this one. The art is whimsical, emotional, and frequently madcap — the writing matches it, maybe even goes beyond. Supergirl’s character is just plain fantastic — charismatic, goofy, awkward in that way that only teenagers can be — and when things get tough, she’s as likely to turn to her wildly creative imagination — often to her daydreams of herself as the hyper-competent and beloved “Moon Supergirl” — as she is to use her superpowers.

I think this would make a great gift for younger readers, both male and female — but it’d be especially appreciated by girls. Supergirl is a lot of fun — she’s frustrated by all the pointless junior high nonsense she has to put up with, but she also wants to be loved and adored by everyone — she reminds me of several girls I knew when I was close to that age. She’s got tons of moxie (Do the kids today still say “moxie”? Actually, did any kids every say “moxie”?) and charisma, and for all her clumsiness, she makes a great role model.

And the great thing about a lot of all-ages comics nowadays is that they’re often very accessible to adult readers, too. This comic is no exception — the dialogue is smart, the characterizations are excellent, the humor is entirely wonderful.

The book is available for about $13, and I’d recommend it for kids and adults — tons of humor, tons of excellent stories, tons of Kryptonite-powered awesomeness.

Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade by Landry Q. Walker and Eric Jones. Go pick it up.

It’s always a little tempting to limit my gift recommendations here to books that will appeal to current comics fans. But it’s also good to point out some comics that lots of comics readers already have, but new readers might not — after all, the best way to improve the health of the comics industry is to bring in a few new readers, right? So if you’ve got a new comics reader on your gift list, you might consider introducing them to The Sandman.

Sandman is the comics masterwork of Neil Gaiman. He started it back in 1989, with a revolving stable of artists, plus Dave McKean taking care of, as far as I can recall, every single one of the covers. It started off as a horror series and quickly drifted into fantasy.

Our main character (though he wasn’t present in every issue and was sometimes present only as a minor side character) was the Sandman — also known as Morpheus, the King of Stories, or Dream. He’s a pale, grim, morose, mostly unemotional guy with a very big job — he is, for lack of a better term, the god of story-telling and the ruler of the dreamworld. Many of the stories are set in modern times, but there are many flashbacks to other periods in history and even a few flash-sideways to other, stranger worlds.

Morpheus is part of a small family called the Endless — cosmically powerful, they far surpass your average god, but they’re even more dysfunctional than any mundane family. His siblings include devious Desire, pitiful Despair, loopy Delirium, somber Destiny, the absent Destruction, and sensible, loveable Death. Morpheus meets more than his fair share of guest stars during the series, including William Shakespeare, Emperor Norton, Marco Polo, Augustus Caesar, Cain and Abel, and even a few superheroes.

There are comics out there that are more highly regarded — “Watchmen,” “The Dark Knight Returns,” and others — but this is a series I go back and re-read much more often than those. The richness of the storytelling, the emotional pull of the plotlines, the feverish glow of pure, glorious imagination — all make the Sandman stories something amazing and unique.

These are also very definitely comics for grownups. There’s some nudity, some cussin’, some sex, plenty of violence, and, as they say, adult themes a-plenty. There may be kids out there that can handle this stuff just fine — and at the same time, there may be adults out there who’ll completely freak out about it. I’ll expect y’all to know the difference when you’re handing out these gifts, okay? But I know for a fact that lots and lots of readers think this series is transcendently awesome.

I spent years aware of Sandman, but unwilling to shell out the dough to read ’em. I finally figured, what the hey, I’ll grab the first volume and see how I like it. And I liked it a lot. I think I ended up getting all the rest of the ten volumes after just two or three months. That ended up being pretty expensive, but I’ve never once regretted buying them and reading them.

Like I said, this is available in trade paperbacks in ten different volumes — getting the whole series can get a bit pricey, so you may want to start out with the first collection, “Preludes and Nocturnes.” It’s a great beginning to one of the greatest comic book series ever.

The Sandman by Neil Gaiman. Go pick it up.

Well, what’ve we got here? Looks like it’s the biggest shopping day of the year, and you can look forward to fighting your way through a few thousand people at the malls and the discount stores, wearing the soles off your shoes walking through jam-packed parking lots, and hitting your fellow shoppers with purses and warhammers and car fenders and walruses and whatnot!

“Oh, help me!” I hear you cry. “Help me, Comic Book Blogger Guy! Help me find the perfect gift for family! Also, where did I park my car?”

Well, sounds to me like it’s time to kick off this year’s “Holiday Gift Bag” series — over the next few weeks, I’m going to offer you some ideas and recommendations for holiday gifts you can give the comics fan in your life. So if you’re tired of getting crushed and pushed around at the mall, head on over to your friendly neighborhood comic shop instead!

We’re going to start out with Richard Stark’s Parker: The Outfit, adapted and illustrated by Darwyn Cooke.

You may remember I’ve already reviewed the first volume of this series, “Parker: The Hunter,” and even reviewed the pre-release preview, “The Man with the Getaway Face.” Well, this is finally the second book in Cooke’s “Parker” series, and it’s heckuva good.

To sum things up, this is superstar artist Darwyn Cooke’s adaptation of the “Parker” hardboiled crime novels by Donald Westlake (writing as Richard Stark). Our lead character is a guy named Parker, who is a criminal who specializes in pulling heists. He’s a mostly unsympathetic guy — cold, grim, unsmiling, merciless. He doesn’t like to kill people, but he’ll do it if he has to, and he won’t even feel bad about it.

After getting plastic surgery to disguise his appearance, Parker’s living the easy life, but a disgruntled associate has clued the Mob in on where to find him. After taking care of that loose end, Parker ain’t happy about it. He’s tired of the Mob breathing down his neck, and he wants to do two things — take out the syndicate leader who’s got it in for him, and hurt the Mob in their pocketbook so they’ll know to lay off him. So after telling a bunch of his heist-artist pals that they should start robbing some Mob-owned businesses, he sets his sights on Bronson, the head of the East Coast syndicate.

This book is just a beautiful piece of craftsmanship. Ain’t nothing like the thrill of opening a book and finding that it’s all put together with black ink and blue ink on creamy off-white paper. You won’t have to hide this in your back office with all the ratty comic TPBs — this needs to go in the bookshelf at the front of the house, with all the fancy books you want to use to impress people.

If you love hard-boiled crime fiction, this was made for you. Parker’s a hard, mean customer, and I’d guesstimate there are eight different heists pulled off in just 150 pages. That’s a lot of crime, boyo. I also loved the great mix of characters — besides Parker, you’ve got charismatic jokester Grofeld, doomed weasel Skim, Monopoly-hating crime boss Bronson, cheery hooker-turned-motel-owner Madge, thrill-seeking Bett Harlow, and bunches more, some never named. This is good stuff all the way through.

If you’re familiar with Cooke’s art, you know you’re getting good stuff — a lot of influence from the more noir-based Warner Bros. animation, with his own unique twists on the formula. Lots and lots of period detail for the ’60s. Cooke loves the ’50s and ’60s, and he loves period details both small and large. You’ll come out of this feeling like you just read a comic created in the ’60s.

Possibly the coolest part of this book is the section where we learn about all the independent crooks who’ve started knocking over Mob operations — each heist is told in a different format. The first with a pure text tale seemingly ripped out of a sleazy true-crime magazine, another in a simple gag-cartoon style, another looking like it came straight out of an economics text book. It gives Cooke lots of opportunities to show off his artistic and cartooning chops, and it’s way entertaining for the reader besides.

“Richard Stark’s Parker: The Outfit” by Richard Stark and Darwyn Cooke. It’s just 25 bucks. Go pick it up.

Pride of Baghdad

This one’s a few years old, but hey, it’s new to me, so I’ll shamelessly review it.

This is a graphic novel written by Brian K. Vaughan and illustrated by Niko Henrichon. It’s based on an incident from the early days of the most recent Iraq war where a number of animals escaped from the bombed-out Baghdad Zoo, with several starving lions being killed by U.S. troops after several days of freedom.

So that’s the core of the story. We follow a small pride of lions from the Baghdad Zoo — Zill, the somewhat spineless male; Safa, an older, half-blind female who wants to stay safe in the zoo’s wreckage; Noor, a younger lioness desperate for freedom; and Ali, Noor’s cub who has never known a life outside of the zoo.

Once the American jets blow a hole in the lions’ enclosure and free many of the other zoo animals, the lions make their escape into the bombed-out remains of Baghdad. They encounter various animals, including a short-lived giraffe, a long-lived turtle, a herd of horses, a bunch of militaristic monkeys, and a very, very bad bear. They also have a run-in with some armored tanks, which are completely perplexing and terrifying to them.

And they all argue a lot. Safa’s need for security and safety clashes with Noor’s rebellious desire for freedom, and both of the lionesses are a little disappointed in Zill’s weak will. And they’re all set on edge by the difficulty in finding food in the city.

And any familiarity with the story of the real lions on the loose in Baghdad will probably clue you in that this story isn’t going to end well for our main characters.

Verdict: Thumbs up. It’s a great story — a fable, I guess — about the prices of freedom, security, and most importantly, war. The lions have to go through a number of trials that the Iraqi people went through during the war — would-be warlords (the monkeys try to kidnap Ali and turn him into a member of their army, random horrible violence (hello and goodbye, giraffe), savage cruelty (the bear is certainly the most terrifying character in the book), and opulence, terror, and starvation all side by side. The environmental horrors of the previous Iraq war also get a mention, thanks to the turtle’s heartbreaking monologue.

Vaughan’s writing is just outstanding in this book — characterization and dialogue are great, and the plotline feels even stronger by weaving in and out of the fable itself. Yeah, it’s a heartbreaker of a story — don’t go into it expecting funny animals, or you’ll be deeply disappointed.

The big standout here is the art — just brilliant, beautiful artwork. Everything Henrichon draws is breathtakingly gorgeous, from landscapes to action scenes to individual animals — the stuff he puts down on paper here is heartstoppingly beautiful. Here’s one of my favorite pages, from just after the pride leaves the zoo.

That’s a fantastically great piece of art — and just about every page has something almost that good.

“Pride of Baghdad.” Go pick it up.