indie box: Pounded

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black and white, Brian Wood, indie box, Indie Comics, Oni Press, Pounded, Steve Rolston

What’s inside the short-box of indie comic books this week? The punk-rock mini-series that glorifies juvenile debauchery and ill-advised life choices as only Brian Wood and Steve Rolston could bring you: Pounded!

Did you ever have one of those mornings when only the F word will do? Heavy Parker has, too! In the third and final issue of Pounded, after getting his ass beat, Heavy makes it through four whole pages of a lousy morning with just one word to describe his feelings.

Pounded from Brian “DMZ” Wood and Steve Rolston is a quick read but a fun one. It’s much more guy-oriented than Wood’s work on New York Four and New York Five. I got the impression those were written for a young female audience who finds drama in texting and… texting… and more texting about texting… PLEASE KILL ME! But in Pounded, we get rock and roll, tough talk, sex and drugs in the bathrooms of concert venues, brutal fist fights in the street, and plenty of profanity! Man out with Heavy Parker today. Guaranteed to improve your fucking morning!

Collector’s Guide:
– From Pounded #3; Oni Press, 2002.
– Reprinted in the Pounded TPB (which is more often in stock.)

 

Queen & Country by Greg Rucka

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collection, Greg Rucka, Indie Comics, Oni Press, Queen and Country

 
We discovered Queen & Country on the Totally Top Secret Fifty Cent Rack last year. Someone blessed us by leaving about 2/3 of the series there, and it was easy enough to fill in the rest with VF/NM copies at about a buck a piece.

We have read many of Greg Rucka’s crime and detective stories before, but this is our favorite. Rucka made his mark at DC with his work on Batman in Detective Comics, among others. We prefer his indie short stories like Felon for Image/Top Cow, and Oni Press titles Whiteout and Stumptown. Queen & Country, also from Oni Press, proved as enjoyable as any of these, if not more.

 

 
It takes a while to get into the series if you read it like a novel, due to Rucka’s insistence on action above introspection. We get right into the thick of things with the characters without much context as to who they are. Only as they begin to deal with the consequences of their spy operations do we begin to bond with them and see what they are made of.

 

 
Told in chapters over five or six issues at a time, Queen & Country brings in a different art team for each chapter. Each dynamically different style gives us a new sense of the characters, too. We see them conceptualized anew with each new story arc. You might expect that to throw off the flow of the title, but it only deepened our enjoyment. Rucka’s scripts show us his characters more than tell us about them in exposition. Each art team shows in a unique way.

 

 
We sold a nice collection of the series in single issues on eBay recently. You can find most of the series in stock as single issues and trade paperbacks. The Definitive Edition also collects these plus all the Queen & Country: Declassified spin-offs that delve into our secret agents’ past. It’s a great action/spy/adventure series we hope to read again!