Street Angel Volume One: The Princess of Poverty

One of the oddest and most original works to surface in quite a while, this series drops an instantly disoriented reader smack dab into the seedy, violent streets of Wilkesborough, an urban hell just one step removed from a demilitarized zone. On any given day, all manner of havoc is wreaked by ninjas who are apparently a local minority group; mad scientists; renegade robots; time-traveling Spanish conquistadors led by Cortez himself; drug dealers; an Irish spaceman named CosMick; demons; a two-fisted Jesus Christ; a well-tailored Incan sun god; and a former super-bad dude from the 1970s known as the Afrodisiac. The only person who can deal with the freewheeling chaos is Jesse Sanchez, a homeless 12-year-old martial arts/skateboard prodigy known and feared as Street Angel. The world of the story offers little explanation for its strange happenings, expecting the reader to accept it at face value, and adjusting to its weirdness is just one small element of the freewheeling cornucopia within the pages. Replete with gravity-defying skateboard showboating, shattering kung fu throwdowns, intriguing characters and outrageous situations, this first volume of, hopefully, several is everything that many comics seem to have forgotten how to be: unapologetic fun. (July)