Comics Alternative

On this week’s The Comics Alternative, Derek and Andy W. review four new titles, all of which revisit older characters and licenses. To begin, they discuss the first collected volume of Sam Kieth and William Messner-Loebs’s remastered The Maxx Maxximized (IDW Publishing). Neither of the guys read the series when it originally came out in the early 1990s, so both are looking at this title through unexperienced eyes. This is one of Kieth’s most ambitious works in terms of both story and art, highly deserving of the wonderful recoloring treatment by Ronda Pattison. Both Andy and Derek love this first hardbound volume, and their sole “criticism” is that only the first four issues of the Maxximized series are collected, making the book thinner than expected. Next, the Two Guys with PhDs move on to another 1990s Image property, one originally created by Rob Liefeld and then mastered by Alan Moore. Warren Ellis and Tula Lotay’s Supreme: Blue Rose #1 (Image) is a substantive first issue, tapping into the Moore’s take