The Nightly News
By Zak Edwards
January 8, 2009 - 15:06
Image Comics
Writer(s): Jonathan Hickman
Penciller(s): Jonathan Hickman
ISBN: 9781582407661
$2.99 US
Jonathan Hickman just kicked your ass and chances are you didn’t even feel it, I sure as hell didn’t. In fact, he’s been kicking your ass for a couple of years now and not a lot of people have even woken up to it yet. The author of such books like the heavily Philip K. Dick influenced “Transhuman,” “A Red Mass For Mars,” as well as “Pax Romana” (which I am eagerly waiting to get my hands on), has been taking the smaller publishers by storm and, chances are, if you have been reading things not done by Marvel Comics and DC Comics, Hickman is already a name you have heard. The Nightly News, Hickman’s first major contribution to comic books and graphic literature in general, is what comic books will look like and read like in the future. Hickman isn’t fighting for the legitimacy of the comic medium, he’s proving it. In an age where even the relevance of fiction is being contested, Hickman hits back with his tale of a cult fighting something most wouldn’t consider, the media. A group of men and women, all individually effected by the callousness and inaccuracies of journalism, join together under The Hand of The Voice in order to show reporters they mean business. And while this is the premise of the story, Hickman is doing something much grander and scarier; using fiction for a purpose.
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The Nightly News seeks to create an active readership of media, something which should be happening already, and to do it in graphic novel form is wonderfully brilliant. Of course, if you’re reading this article, you realize comic books are an important medium filled with plenty of potential to tell very good stories. Of course, there is an awareness of the pretentiousness exhibited towards comic books. For Hickman to create a piece like this in this format is a commentary on that snobbishness, like I said, he’s proving the legitimacy of the comic book.
So this has been a biased look at The Nightly News, which I would encourage anyone to read and engage with. Simply put, it reminds you to know DC Comics is owned by Time Warner, who owns CNN, who writes nice little stories about DC Comics, and that there is a problem there, a very big problem that effects all of society.
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