Roy of the Rovers

It should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me that I am not much of a sports person. I don’t play any, and I don’t really follow any. However, I am obviously a comics person, and a fan of British comics on top of that. Even so, it surprises me a lot that one of my current favorite comics is a series about soccer (or football, in the UK). But that is exactly the case with Roy of the Rovers, the recent revival of the classic British football comic.

Stumptown

I’ve been a fan of Greg Rucka’s writing since his first comic, Whiteout. He was a novelist before that, but I came to his novels after his comics. I loved them, too. He’s done a lot of work for DC, and some for Marvel, but what I love the best are his creator-owned comics. Right now, he’s got two series ongoing: Black Magick, a supernatural thriller about a cop who is also a witch, and Lazarus, a series set in the near future where a handful of ultra-rich families own and control the entire world, with the rest of the world entirely subservient to them. (My joke is that I like Lazarus just fine, but I prefer reading fiction.) Truth is, both those series are fantastic. But I think my favorite Greg Rucka comic may be his Portland-set private eye series Stumptown.