THE (NEW) GREATEST STORY EVER TOLD: The Christian Bible holds a special place in American culture, for believers and non-believers alike. Whether you view it as a holy book or otherwise, our culture has incorporated or adopted a great deal from it, from metaphors to aphorisms to some particularly pointed cuss words. There have been plenty of Bible Movies—think The Ten Commandments, think The Passion of the Christ—but they tend to treat the source material with either a certain amount of reverence or an inoffensive hands-off approach. Aaron & Guera go the other direction. If you've ever wanted a Bible story you could describe with words like "violent," "grim," "filth-flarn-filth," and "raw skulduggery," this is the comic for you.
PEDIGREE: It's Jason Aaron and r.m. Guera, with colors by Giulia Brusco and letters by Jared Fletcher. The majority of the team collaborated on Scalped, a crime series that ran for sixty issues before it ended. Aaron himself is stoked to get the gang back together, as you can see from this interview with Dave Richards: "I'm writing a lot of books, but I get excited when I'm doing something I've never done before. This definitely feels like that. I've never written a book quite like this, and I don't think anybody is doing a book like this. For better or for worse there is not another book quite like this in comics right now. That's really exciting for me too. So I'm happy people will soon have a chance to look at all of it."
SWAGGER: If you've been reading SOUTHERN BASTARDS, Jason Aaron's country crime comic with Jason Latour, you know that nobody scripts a comic like Jason Aaron. His fight scenes have a certain level of savagery, his villains have very human and often venal motivations, and his characters bleed on the page, whether literally or figuratively. r.m. Guera's characters do, too. They're craggy, and lop-sided, and dirty, and wholly human. Guera, especially in this series, doesn't draw superheroes, supermodels, or even just the naturally pretty people we tend to see in comics. Guera's people may have bad hair days or worse, and when you combine that with Aaron's approach to the darker side of humanity, you've got a book full of people doing ugly things in beautiful ways.
THE GODDAMNED #1 is on sale now.