Almost every new comic book these days comes loaded with some kind of high concept - some crazy twist on the usual things, often with the volume turned all the way up to 11. That is all well and good, and can even be nothing more than pure entertainment, but grounding it with something real can give all that intensity a greater dimension.
That's what happens in Daniel Warren Johnson's quite wonderful Murder Falcon comic. I've liked Johnson's comics for a while - his Superman story in the Red and White anthology that came out a couple of years ago was an absolute stunner. So when my pal Nik, who has been on a Johnson kick for a while, insisted I read more of his work, I was only too happy to follow his recommendations.
So I started with Murder Falcon, and it's the most heavy metal comic possible, full of the power of the chunky riff, the intensity of a thick bass line and the throbbing propulsion of a 20-minute drum solo. It is ridiculously over the top, and with Johnson's energetic art style, full of slashing lines, eye-scorching colours and some very exact perspectives, it doesn't get much heavier
This is hardly a unique storytelling path to take - heavy metal and comics have had a long and occasionally very strange relationship - but the thing that Johnson's comics have that so many of these contemporaries lack is that it still has a foot in the real world, and that juxtaposition of the mundane tragedy of real life mixing with the insanity of interdimensional musical warfare is very tasty.
It's not just about the way the Murder Falcon with the bionic arm on top of your van is beating the snot out of eldritch nightmares from beyond the veil, it's about how someone deals with a cancer diagnosis and how they can lash out out at the people who really care about them.
These are the quiet bits between the shredding solos, and they're all the heavier for their silence.