No More Invisible Girls

I’m not sure whether you mean here favorite comic issue, story, or title, which makes it a little tricky.  I don’t follow current titles too closely.  Most of my comic-book reading is done via libraries, especially since I’m the purchasing librarian at a library in a town with no comic-book shops nearby, but access to a lot of other libraries’ materials. 

I tend to get fed up with titles and mostly follow strong characters, often in series that were cancelled before I ever found them.  My current superhero favorites are the original JLI series and the Jaime Reyes Blue Beetle series, both of which are made up of yay and win, largely because the characters rock.  I enjoyed the first Kate Kane Batwoman collection a lot - the art rocked and the story really opened her up to a lot of possibilities.  “No Man’s Land” is too cool to even begin to quantify, but the bits focusing on Gordon’s Blue Boys (and girls) were probably my favorites.  I love cop stuff for a lot of the same reasons I love superhero stuff; done well, it’s people trying to make the world better and protect those who can’t protect themselves.  (I wanted to be a Knight of the Round Table when I was a kid, which kinda still shows.)

For more indie stuff, I love Castle Waiting by Linda Medley.  The story and worldbuilding are interesting and the characters are snarky and fun.  Not so much-on-the-spot action, but plenty of exciting character histories to go through still.  I own v.1 and 2, and am greatly anticipating more.  Cairo by G. Willow Wilson (published by Vertigo, so sorta indie but not really) is an awesome adventure mixing modern-day regional conflict with Egyptian and Islamic mythology.

For manga, I like humor and/or interesting critiques of gender/sexuality.  One of my current favorites is the Ooku series by Fumi Yoshinaga.  I’ve only read v. 1-5 so far, but I’m planning to get hold of the rest ASAP.  It’s an alt history Imperial Japan where 90% of the male population was killed by a plague, meaning a their social structure’s had to undergo massive changes.  Ouran High Host Club by Bisco Hatori is a humor series starring a plain-spoken, motivated girl who ends up cross-dressing and serving as a “host” (male escort who provides romantic, but not sexual, attention to women) to pay back a debt with a bunch of her oddball (male) fellow students.  I’m also fond of Kurada and Yamata’s Read or Die, about an absentminded bibliophilic superhero who can create weapons etc. out of whatever bits of paper she finds around her.