Graphic Novel Roundup: Bad Guys, Fairy Tales, and an Elven Ending

Harley Quinn Vol. 1: Hot in the City (The New 52), by Jimmy Palmiotti, Amanda Conner, and Chad Hardin
Speaking of D.C.: Harley’s had a rough go of things in D.C.’s New 52. She’s been a prominent member of the Suicide Squad, but those stories don’t leave much room for fun. She was getting progressively darker as things went along, so it’s nice to see her get to cut loose and enjoy herself in a solo book. In Hot in the City, out this week in paperback, Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti start things off with a sugar rush that leads Harley to imagine herself as a host of different characters, in 17 different styles with art by a variety of talents. From there, she inherits a Coney Island apartment building frequented by all manner of misfits. Volume two, Power Outage, is also new in hardcover, and continues the story with a demented fight club and a trip to San Diego Comic-Con. The character pitch may be D.C.’s own Deadpool, but there’s a lot of talent aimed at making Harley a major player in the DCU.

Deathstroke: The Terminator Vol. 1: Assassins, by Marv Wolfman, Steve Erwin and Will Blyberg
Another bad guy with his own book, this one’s a fairly chunky collection that takes us back to those innocent pre-New 52 days. It’s pretty rare that a super-villain series lasts all that long, but Slade Wilson’s solo series in the mid-’90s ran for 60 issues. Marv Wolfman took Deathstroke (also, a terminator) straight out of his New Teen Titans run and made him a protagonist/anti-hero with a past always on the verge of catching up with him. Some of the character beats from the Arrow TV series came from this series, which cemented Slade as one of the toughest, nastiest bad guys in the DCU. The ’90s weren’t all bad, after all.

Once Upon a Time: Out of the Past, by Kalinda Vazquez, Corinna Bechko, Pascal Campion, Betsy Peterschmidt, and Vanesa Del Rey
Once Upon a Time is a show that I never expected to like, but its network-TV charms won me over, and I eventually found myself addicted to its mix of crazy soap opera antics and fairy tale shenanigans. The show has built a pretty complex (and/or convoluted) mythology around a huge cast of storied creatures and characters brought to our magic-free world, making it a perfect fit for comic readers. This new volume tells four stories about our heroes back in the enchanted forest, starring the Mad Hatter, Belle and Gold, Hook, and Regina the (sometimes) Evil Queen. They share the show’s own writer/producer Kalinda Vaquez, and each has a separate art team.

Elfquest: The Final Quest Volume 1, by Wendy Pini and Richard Pini
The beginning of the end? I almost prefaced this one with “on a lighter note…,” but the world of  the Wolfrider elves is quite a bit more dangerous than you might expect. Since 1978, and through multiple publishers, Wendy and Richard Pini have been telling the stories of the Wolfriders, a tribe of warrior elves carving out an existence on the harsh world that they call Abode. This volume collects the first six issues of the Final Quest series, in which the Wolfriders, having found what they believed was a sanctuary, face extermination at the hands of a brutal tyrant. If you’re looking to catch up, Dark Horse has several Elfquest omnibus editions, going all the way back to the beginning.

Mortal Kombat X, by Shawn Kittelsen and Dexter Soy
The brutal (I’m told), bloody, and long-anticipated new Mortal Kombat game is out this week, so it’s a good time to check out this digital-first series from D.C. The collection follows the 2011 game and serves as a prelude to X, focusing largely on blind ronin Kenshi, but touching on several different corners of the Mortal Kombat universe. If you can’t get enough MK, this should be just the thing: a little extra story to go with the punching.
What’s on your pull list?