If you are looking for an all-ages fun comicbook featuring cute and entertaining “kid-like” counterparts to Marvel’s greatest heroes (including Spidey, Wolverine, Iron Man, Hulk and more of your Marvel favorites, then you just might want to dig around for a digest-sized comic entitled Mini Marvels. There are a couple of these affordable digest-sized comics out there all of them featuring the smart writing and engaging art of Chris Giarrusso. For a number of years Mini Marvels adventures appeared in the backs of numerous Marvel comics, well, these digests are the collected versions in hilarious packages!
Well, unfortunately for Marvel Giarrusso is no longer producing Mini Marvels, but have no fear, he has taken the concept of “kid heroes” and created his own group on Mini heroes that appear in the Image Comic, G-Man, and as his many fans have come to expect, G-Man is simply put one of the coolest comics that is out there today! Always funny and extremely entertaining G-Man follows the super exploits of not only young G-Man but his older brother, Great Man along with their super (kid) friends). His most recent book entitled The Cape Crises, explores the origins of magical cloth that give both brothers their super-human powers. The series is cute, funny, insightful, and wonderfully illustrated, and, well everything that a comicbook should be.
Still, what really makes the series work are the delightful dialogue and interplay between all the characters. Yeah, you heard right, Chris Giarrusso’s G-Man is one of the coolest comics we’ve read these days! The Cape Crises offers so much of why we read comics in the first place. It is entertaining, tells a readable story, keeps readers guessing as to what is going to happen next, makes us want to not only turn the page to get to the rest of the story, biut pick up the next issue as well.
Yep, this is truly a very cool comic. The premise of this whole series is that Great Man and his brother G-Man both wear capes made of magic cloth which gives them the ability to fly and super strength. Only Great Man is cutting up the cloth and selling bits of it as flight bands to anyone who has the cash. Although he has been warned that doing this will split up the power and weaken the magic, he keeps doing it, which leads to all sorts of high-jinks.
The various characters that populate this series are unique, and, well, fun to read. There are two series with the characters (In the first, Learning To Fly, the boys first discover the magic cloth and learn about their powers) and we certainly hope that Chris does well enough with this series to not only continue it, but to convince Marvel that they need to produce more of Chris’ Mini-Marvels. In addition to G-Man and Mini Marvels, Chris also has contributed to The Amazing Adventures of Nate Banks (a trio of young readers' prose novels consisting each of 176 pages of text and eight pages of sequential comic art by Giarrusso), and the art on Andy(a comic about a high school freshman who is determined to win over the girl of his dreams). Nate Banks is written by Jake Bell, and Andyis by Marc Dworkin
If you have a youngster who you want to get into comics, put one of these comics in his or her hands. They will love it and thank you for turning them onto this extremely entertaining series. The G-Man comics have a couple of back-up shorts which are written and illustrated by buddies of Chris (including the guys who are produced Marvel’s X-Babies). Seriously, this book is so good that even the back-up stories are fun to read. If you are not reading G-Man, you should be, go out and get yourself a copy now!
If you enjoy any one of Giarrusso works, you are sure to enjoy the rest, so head on over to his website’s store and check out all of the very cool stuff (Including downloads, Icons, and Avatars, as well as on-line comics.
Chris Giarrusso’s website
Chris Giarrusso’s Blog
Mini Marvels Ultimate Collection (Amazon: $19.99)
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