Top 5 Under-Read Comic Books – Book of the Week Special Report

Okay, so sometimes the comic book industry is like the Pittsburgh Steelers: Some weeks it just decides not to show up.

I am sure there were some great books this week, but the dozen or so I read were unremarkable and left me with nothing to really expound on.

So, rather than talking about New Avengers AGAIN, (probably the best book this week, but I’m tired of telling you that) I am going to do something special.

During September of 2014 (the last complete month of sales data at the time of this writing) the bestselling book was The Death of Wolverine #1. It sold 261,975 copies. It’s a great little series, but I don’t need to talk about it because you are already reading it.

Below I have complied a list of books that you are, apparently, not reading. These are all currently ongoing series that are criminally overlooked.

With each title I included how much the previously released issue sold. I also included where that number ranked with other books released that same month.

5. Nailbiter
Last Issue Sold: 14,947 copies (September 2014)
Sales Rank: 160th
Was Outsold By: My Little Pony Friendship is Magic, All New Ultimates, G.I Joe, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 10, New Warriors

If Silence of the Lambs was a stage play at the Silent Hill community theater, it would end up looking like Nailbiter.

A small Oregon town has been home to sixteen different serial killers. When an FBI agent goes missing while trying to discover the connection between them, an NSA Agent heads into town to discover his fate, only to end up hunted by yet another new serial killer.

The town of Buckaroo, Oregon, is malignant with broken personalities. One is a character that runs a serial killer themed tourist trap, and another is a woman who wants to deliver her baby in Buckaroo so it can grow up to be the next great serial killer.

These nutjobs help build a sense of unease that saturates every panel. You never feel safe reading Nailbiter. It’s one of the most cinematic books currently ongoing, and you’ll fall into each moody panel as you watch the deliberately paced mystery unfold.

You always feel like you are just a page away from answering Nailbiter’s questions, but by the end of each issue you realize that you had no idea just how twisted things were going to get.

Nailbiter does more than keep you guessing; it keeps you unsure of what questions to ask. It does so without ever feeling lost or meandering. It’s the rare mystery that is never crippled by cheap twists or deus ex machina. It is just getting started and it looks like we have barely seen just how deep the rabbit hole really is.

4. Alex+Ada
Last Issue Sold: 9,453 (August 2014)
Sales Rank: 192nd
Was Out Sold By: Tomb Raider, Transformers Vs. G.I Joe, Groo vs. Conan, Star Spangled War Stories Gi Zombie, Godzilla Cataclysm

Johnathan Luna has made a prolific career in comics by playing with a single concept. What happens when wish fulfillment goes wrong?

All of Luna’s works have been focused around a character having a very basic wish granted: Absolute power, in The Sword; far reaching fame, in Ultra; and simple, limitless sexual gratification, in Girls.

Alex+Ada is the story set in the near future, where a love wounded young man is given the gift of a female automaton who he names Ada.

Ada will follow his every command. She will always be happy to see him, always wait for him, and always attend to his needs. She will never leave him or hurt him. Never judge him, nag him, or be unsatisfied with who he is. She is the personification of the post-break-up emotional Band-Aid.

But Alex is left wanting. He looks at Ada and sees that there is something more present inside her. So, using an underground service he finds online, he makes Ada self-aware.

Alex+Ada is about not knowing what you want. Alex is in conflict about letting Ada stay mindless, but when she gains sentience, he isn’t any more satisfied. Is Ada incapable of filling the hole he has inside, or is he just incapable of ever getting it filled.

An awake Ada now shares a similar conflict as she has no idea what to think of a world that she is seeing for the first time. Ada’s virgin look at a not too foreign future is insightful and humbling. She sees things as they are and struggles to keep facts and emotions in the same mind.

Watching these characters bounce their personal dents off of each other makes for one of the best pieces of character focused storytelling out there. As the lowest selling book on this list, Alex+Ada is in desperate need of acolytes.

3. American Vampire: Second Cycle
Last Issue Sold: 15,400 copies (July 2014)
Sales Rank: 176th
Was Out Sold By: Infinity Man and the Forever People, Aquaman and The Others, Birds of Prey, She-Hulk, Star Wars Darth Maul Son of Dathomir

A gore-laced cocktail of horror, James Bond, and Shakespeare, America Vampire is the lone redemption for the vampire in modern pop culture.

American Vamipire’s mythos is built on the idea that the vampire virus reacts differently within different cultures, giving each nationality of vampires its own unique set of powers.

The American breed is the newest on the blood-sucking playing field, and our heroes, Pearl, a struggling actor from the 1920’s, and Skinner, a brutal yet endearing outlaw from the old west, live a never ending life in parallel to American history.

It’s the Forest Gump story telling mechanic stretched over nearly one hundred years. Pearl tries to live a normal life, while Skinner, morally freed from any consequence by his substantial power, tries to satiate whatever primal urges he feels.

Both continually find themselves sucked into the dealings of secret organizations, vampire racial politics, and world wars. The series wears a gory suit of horror while it dances through themes like, revenge, family, loneliness, love between mortals and immortals, and finding a cause when you know you will outlive most injustices.

American Vampire finished its first act over a year ago and now we see the beginning of its “second cycle.” Start at the beginning, but hurry because you are missing out.

2. Rat Queens
Last Issue Sold: 12,903 copies (July 2014)
Sales Rank: 187th
Was Out Sold By: Adventure Time, Elektra, Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 10, Afterlife With Archie, Sinestro

Fluffing this book up is a little harder than the rest of the books on this list, because the selling point for Rat Queens is extremely simple: It’s the funniest book out right now.

The book’s charm is built by the sweet, lovable assholes that make up its cast. The titular Rat Queens work as a group of mercenaries in a village that continually finds itself getting bullied by some form of medieval nonsense.

The Rat Queens themselves are an endearing group of sarcastic, straight men, with the contemporary mannerisms of street-tough party girls, completely bored by the fantastical drama they stumble into.

The humor of Rat Queens comes from taking the “epic” self-importance out of the fantasy genre. It takes the crazy, over the top things we expect from a world of orcs and squid gods and paints them beige, showing that when the fantastic is made ordinary, it can be laughed at in the same way that we laugh at anything in our lives.

I feel like I might be underselling this book a bit, but it is difficult to explain why something is funny. Humor just has to be felt. The first issue is free on Comixology right now so there’s no excuse for not seeing how right I am.

1. The Manhattan Projects
Last Issue Sold: 13,319 copies (July 2014)
Sales Rank: 186th
Was Out Sold By: Big Trouble in Little China, Batman 66, Batman Beyond Universe, Superboy, Red Lanterns

Anytime I write about The Manhattan Projects I have a hard time figuring out how to begin. The book’s scope is so crushing in its vastness and so unabashed by its own oddity that it is impossible to cliff note.
The elevator pitch goes like this: What if the Manhattan Project (famous for the development if the atomic bomb) was really a cover for much more fantastic scientific weapons research, done with the purpose of making Earth the power house of the universe.

Set at the end of World War II (and the following decade), The Manhattan Projects is a meeting of the finest B-movie sci fi and US history, filtered through a strip of LSD.

The cast is made up of real life scientific juggernauts like Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer. These real people participate in very not-real events, like traveling to other dimensions, secretly ending the cold war, and assassinating presidents.

The absurdity of the plot fills the book with a pleasant levity, but the high stakes of what these characters are doing, and the worldly, poetic way that Jonathan Hickman narrates the story keeps The Manhattan Projects grounded.

There are no rules in this book. You are assaulted with the unexpected on every page, but the strangeness never feels random like in books like Deadpool or God Hates Astronauts. There is a purpose to its oddity, and when things come together it’s like watching someone build a ship in a bottle.

When I read an issue of The Manhattan Projects, my brain has a reaction similar to when sip a top shelf whiskey: There is warm liquid feeling of satisfaction that radiates from the roof of my skull down to the arches of my feet. It is a sonnet written to the freedom that comic book story telling allows, and its place nearly 200 spots down the sales chart is inexcusable.