Holiday Gift Guide 2015: Comic Book Collections Part 1

If you’re not coming to Biff Bam Pop! for insightful readings and interviews on your favourite television shows, movies, video games or music, then you must be coming here for the comic books! Right? Right!

And what would a Holiday Gift Guide be, here on Biff Bam Pop!, if we didn’t make mention of some of the great comic book collections that should be under the tree, or given as a gift for every fan this season?

Here it is, then:

Over the rest of the week, we’ll be listing some of the cheaper, more moderate, are quite expensive trade paperback and hardcover collections of some of the best comic book reading you or a loved one will likely experience this year! Let’s hit the more affordable ones first, shall we?

Follow me after the jump for all the winter holiday horror, detective sci-fi, comedy and heroic fiction that needs to be read!

Biff Bam Pop! Editor-in-Chief, Andy Burns, kicked off the 2015 edition of our Holiday Gift Guide with a few select comic books picks in IDW’s Sal Buscema The Incredible Hulk Artist Select Series as well as the new collections of Marvel’s Star Wars Volume 1 and Darth Vader Volume 1. Just so you know, more fantastic comic book selections in the Star Wars universe will be found in our the third – and most expensive – comic-book related Holiday Gift Guide, later this week. Timely, no?)

Let’s take a look at a few more hot titles.

Harrow County Volume 1: Countless Haints

I could swear I had the first issue of Harrow County as a Wednesday Run spotlight earlier this year. I didn’t, but I should have. Now, seven months later, it’s one of my favourite monthly comic books to read. And the first volume, a softcover collection containing the first four issues of the series is available right now.

Harrow County Volume 1: Countless Haints is a quaint, lovely, coming of age story about a young girl in the south. It’s also absolutely horrifying: a gothic take on rural farming and the lives of the inhabitants of small-town U.S.A.

Here, young and pure Emmy discovers she’s the mighty offspring of a witch that the townsfolk had executed years ago. She’s mighty in the sense that she begins to see (and command) all the haints of the land: ghosts, ghouls, goblins, the restless dead and even flayed skin come-to-life, invoking the power her slain mother had shown – as well as the deep-in-the-bones ire of the townsfolk.

And good, good Emmy, you see, has a twin sister…

Written by Cullen Bun and hauntingly and beautifully illustrated by Tyler Crook, Harrow County Volume 1: Countless Haints was just recently picked up by Syfy to be developed in to a television series. Soon, everyone will know about Emmy and her haints, but you can still get in on the ground floor. Visit your local comic book shop or pick up the paperback collection for $12.33 at Amazon. A loved one who loves elements of horror, will absolutely love Harrow County Volume 1: Countless Haints this holiday season.

Outcast Volume 1, 2

 The success of The Walking Dead television series at AMC has opened up a lot of doors for writer Robert Kirkman. His latest open portal is Outcast, a monthly comic book series, just over a year old now, that was picked up and made into a television series by Cinemax, set to debut in early 2016. It’s going to star Patrick Fugit (Almost Famous) with important appearances by Brant Spiner (Data of Star Trek: The Next Generation fame).

Outcast is the story of troubled Kyle Barnes, a man looking to reconnect with his estranged family, who soon realizes that all of the distress in his life has been because he is an “outcast” – a being, human or otherwise, with the ability to see and disrupt the denizens of hell from entering our earthy existence. They’re looking to escape their confines – taking over our bodies in the process. Biff Bam Pop! originally featured the first issue right here.

Written by Robert Kirkman and darkly illustrated by Paul Azaceta, Outcast is another horror story for those that love films like The Exorcist. The upcoming television series should prove popular, and you can get in early with Outcast Volume 1: A Darkness Surrounds Him and the Outcast Volume 2: A Vast and Unending Ruin paperback collections, either at your local comic book shop or for a cheap $5.60 or $9.93 respectively at Amazon.

Oh. And here’s the trailer for the series:

The Fade Out Volume 1, 2

 After horror, a little detective fiction, please!

That’s what you’re getting with the complied The Fade Out: Act One and The Fade Out: Act Two. The period piece noir series has been a monthly highlight for me over the last year and the series, eleven issues in, is finally coming to its conclusion. But you can revel in its put-the-pieces-together plot by picking up the first two volumes in the series – an excellent and affordable holiday gift for a friend of great storytelling, detective fiction, or the history of cinema in California.

The Fade Out is a grand story that takes place during the golden age of Hollywood, featuring protagonists and antagonists neck deep in the cutthroat and dirty-under-the-silver-screen façade, film industry. Written by fan-favourite Ed Brubaker (Criminal, Velvet, Gotham Central, Daredevil) and long-time collaborator, artist Sean Phillips (Criminal, Fatale, John Constantine: Hellblazer), it’s the story of a lost-the-plot screenwriter and his boozing and black-listed partner, who is still gifted with talent, caught up in a murder conspiracy that goes all the way up to the top movers and shakers of Hollywood.

This is a town that likes its secrets kept buried. And The Fade Out is a story you need to unearth.

You can find both paperback volumes at your local comic book shop, of course, or at Amazon.com at the great price of $6.28 and $9.53.

Descender Volume 1: Tin Stars

A new genre for you to choose a gift from this holiday season. First horror, then horror, then detective comics – and now science fiction. Finally!

Descender Volume 1: Tin Stars harkens back to some of the more favourite science fiction stories from the late 1970’s and early 1980’s – stuff found in the pages of Heavy Metal Magazine and Epic Illustrated and those DC and Marvel titles you loved as a kid like Omega Men and ROM. It made our Wednesday Run in March of this year. Written by the acclaimed Jeff Lemire (Sweet Tooth, Essex County, Hawkeye, The Underwater Welder) and supremely illustrated by fan-favourite Dustin Nguyen (Batman: Hart of Hush, Batman: Li’l Gotham), Descender is essentially a story about a boy being hunted across the galaxy for the secret he keeps. Only this boy is a robot, and the secret he keeps might lead to universal armageddon at the hands of a rebellious sect of androids, they themselves hunted to near extinction!

For Descender, the film A.I. is an influence, to be sure, but so is Stand By Me. Collected here are the first six issues of the monthly series, which will catch any reader up, as the latest issue of the overall story was just released a few weeks ago.

Descender is a wonderful and exciting romp though a detailed cosmos, full of aliens and worlds and political sects – but at it’s heart is a young boy (an android, sure), widening his eyes amidst the beauty and the mayhem that life offers – everyone.

Your local comic book store will have the paperback collection of Descender Volume 1: Tin Stars, as will Amazon.com for the affordable price of $6.40. Make it a gift for the sci-fi lover this year!

Archie vs. Predator

What would the holiday season be without Archie. you know, versus a Predator? It’s the crossover everyone has been waiting for!

There are lots of Archie fans out there, and chances are that you know one of them. That’s what makes this particular crossover of characters and genres so compelling – it’s so different than the Archie anyone has seen before!

On a Spring Break trip to Costa Rica, Archie and pals party on the beautiful beach – but soon, the games they are playing are for all the marbles, when a teenage Predator hunts the gang back to Riverdale! Sure, it’s ridiculous, but under writer Alex De Campi and artist Fernando Ruiz, it’s ridiculously fun!

Once again, your local comic book shop or book store should have the hardcover collection of Archie vs. Predator, but there’s always Amazon.com who has it for an affordable $17.99.

Be sure to check us out tomorrow with a few more fantastic comic book offerings for your friends and loved one this holiday season. The next set of collections will be of a slightly higher dollar figure, but they’re brilliant reads, one and all! See you there!