Wolves by Becky Cloonan may well be the best comic I have read all year.
Cloonan is tearing up the sequential narrative world right now. Her tagline is "Comics Rule Everything," and she seems to really mean it. Her work on Vertigo Comics’ American Virgin with Steven T. Seagle was what first brought her to my attention, but it was her work on Demo with Brian Wood that really made me wide-eyed with admiration of her as an artist. She is an amazing talent, and the rest of the comic world has finally catching up to her. She’s teaming up with Tony Lee to produce a MacGyver series for Image Comics, and she’s putting her touch on Marvel’s Doctor Doom, working with Nick Spencer on a four-issue series Victor Von Doom featuring a teenaged Doom.
Wolves is Cloonan’s self-published comic. The book contains approximately 300 words in about 80 panels of beautiful black and white art which span 24 pages. Within the confines of these limitations, though, Becky Cloonan is able to tell a complete story full of all the depth and emotion of a book 20 times its size.
