The good thing about buying second-hand comic books is that it is a smaller collection of choices, cheap prices and you can be exposed to comics you either never knew about or wouldn't normally buy because you couldn't afford it.

My favorite second-hand store guy recently got the almost complete collection of the Black Hammer comics written by Jeff Lemire, best known for writing Essex County, Animal Man and Sweet Tooth.

So for a month... and a half... I will post about my new favorite Lemire comics. He made a whole little universe based around the comic we are gonna talk about.

Lemire has a way with narrative that is quite extraordinary. He writes heartbreaking as well as heartwarming tales of living with trauma.

And boy oh boy is there a lot of baggage the characters in "Black Hammer" deals with.

Stop me if you heard this one before:

Seven superheroes unite as an enormous god-like being arrives on Earth, ready to consume the planet. Through team work, courage and some good ol' fashion luck, the team of heroes manage to beat the world eater.

... Aaaaand then they are on a farm.

WHAT?!

Yeah, after saving the world, the seven heroes somehow ends up on a farm in a little town out in nowhere. They don't know how exactly they ended up there, but... well, they are there. More importantly, they can't leave, or they will die. Why and how? They don't know.

So, not knowing what else to do, the seven heroes just kind of... live on the farm, pretend to be a (dysfunctional) family, interact with the locals, hoping that something will somehow save them from the mundane countryside town or find out where exactly they are.

... for ten years.

A lot of superhero comics are telling us stories about who the heroes are when they are not fighting crime or saving people. But the comics still have to include the superheroes do... well, super stuff. In "Black Hammer" we see a gang of heroes forced to be mundane, it is impossible for them to do anything more amazing than driving a tractor, have an awkward conversation with the neighbors or drink a cup of coffee.

As always, it is the characters who makes the story work. The seven heroes are homages to classic superhero concepts rather than specific heroes. We have Abraham Slam, a Golden Age crime fighter without powers who is getting too old to pick fights and is therefor the one who accepts his situation better than his friends, possibly even enjoying his new life. We also have Golden Gail a very pissed-off lady in her fifties stuck in her immortal kid-body since the magic word that makes her change back to normal adult for some reason doesn't work. Not to mention Barbalien(as in barbarian alien), a Martian shapeshifter who has experience hiding who he truly is... and I'm not talking about him being a visitor from another planet.

Despite them being in a dull farm, the comic has a rather unsettling tone and a creepy as heck mystery as we wonder why the heroes are on a farm, who or what sent them there, if there is some sort of scheme at play, if they even are in their own dimension, so on and so on. I highly recommend this comic... as well as "Black Hammer: Age of Doom" that is part two of this mystery series where we get some answers to what the heck is going on. But more about that in next blog :)