Learning to Cope

Black Hammer #10, 12 (Dark Horse, June and August 2017, $3.99)
Winner of the 2017 Eisner Award for Best New Series, Black Hammer is a wonderful comic written by Jeff Lemire and drawn by Dean Ormston or David Rubin. It's a slightly retro take on superheroes, somewhat in the style of Alan Moore, if not the tone. The general gist of the series is a group of superheroes is trapped in a pocket universe or dimension and learning how to cope with their new day-to-day existence, shades of a Twilight Zone episode.

Abraham Slam remembers an ill-fated new uniform back in his Spiral City days. His new girlfriend Tammy has a run in with her jealous ex-husband. Barbalien misinterprets a friend's intentions (or doesn't).



In #12, Black Hammer's daughter becomes old enough to be entrusted with access to her father's secret hideout. Rubin's artwork serves this flashback well, and I look forward to seeing how it ties into the rest of the story.

I'm not surprised this comic won the Eisner. Lemire is one of the better comics writers active today, and the characters in this series are just astounding. The back-and-forth storytelling showing the connections between past and present is quite effective. And the overall tone is one of memory and mystery—each issue eagerly awaited to see what happens next as the heroes lost in time and space try to return home... and conspire against each other so doing.

Availability: Black Hammer #10 will be reprinted in Black Hammer Volume 2: The Event, expected in January 2018. Otherwise, #10 and 12 are available online.