Confessions of a Comic Book Guy is a weekly column by Steve Bennett of Super-Fly Comics and Games in Yellow Springs, Ohio.  This week Bennett reviews some good and unexpected comics.

Even when you can read everything for free I know how hard it is for retailers to find the time to read everything, so this week I'd like to review a couple of good and unexpected comics that I've recently come across, but they come with a couple of provisos.

First, these are solely my opinions, your individual results may vary, and just because I like these comics I understand that it doesn't automatically mean you'll be able to sell them in your stores.

I confess IDW is a publisher I probably don't pay as much attention as I probably should.  Initially all their titles seemed to be both horror, which admittedly is not always my first choice of genre material, and drawn in an extremely sketchy art style that I didn't find appealing.  In short, to me they all pretty much looked like 30 Days of Night--a series that I wasn't all that crazy about.  That was my impression of IDW anyway and as we all know once an impression has been established it's a pretty hard thing to shift.

Furthermore I wasn't that big a fan of the work of writer Steve Niles and I was fairly certain the last thing that any of us, retailers or readers, wanted or needed was yet another 'paranormal investigator' series.  Yet in in spite of all of the above I find myself a big fan of IDW's Doc Macabre by Steve Niles and Bernie Wrightson, but then it's hard not to love a comic when the second issue opens with the line "the ghost stole my keys."  There's a beautiful simplicity at work in the premise, execution and especially the character of Doc Macabre, a.k.a.Chad Martin, an overgrown boy inventor type who becomes a monster hunter because it's just so cool.  I've never seen this take on the genre before, which is exactly what I'm looking for in a comic these days.

I also really enjoyed the just completed Mystery Society miniseries from IDW created by Niles and Ashley Wood and drawn by Fiona Staples (who, it's just been announced, will be drawing Jonah Hex #66).  Before reading it I would have also said nobody needed yet another supergroup of paranormal investigators but here again Niles neatly inverts reader expectations and genre conventions to come up with something that seems wholly original.

Then there's  Ian Churchill's Marineman from Image which is, as you might expect from the name before the title is written and drawn by British artist Ian Churchill.  Churchill is probably best known for his slick style and zaftig female figures but there seems to be quite a bit more heart to his work here so I'm going to go ahead and assume that this is a labor of love for the artist.  It's the adventures of Steve Oceans, a.k.a. Marineman, who's more of an extreme athlete/television personality than an Aquaman imitator, just a good looking guy who does good things for the right reasons, essentially a throwback to the kind of straightforward heroes found in British comics (I'd say Marineman is Garth by way of Typhoon Tracy if there was much chance the majority of you knew who either of those characters were).  As of #2 Churchill is still in the process of establishing the basic premise but the series seems to be a slightly old fashioned, but never dull, adventure story that comes with a "save our oceans" subtext, and try as I might I can't find anything wrong with any of that.

I realize admitting to be a fan of Golden Age Canadian superheroes places me into a very small minority but that's why I ordered Moonstone's Northern Guard.  I'm happy to report that you don't have to be a fan of Golden Age comics, let alone know anything about Golden Age Canadian superheroes to enjoy this title.  Although we'll probably never be able to convince Marvel or DC of this the last thing that any of us need is yet another bunch of superheroes (the extremely brief life of the latest incarnation of the Archie heroes is plenty proof of that), so luckily Northern Guard is written by Ty Templeton, not someone normally associated with standard superhero comics.  He's come up with a premise that's more of an adventure series featuring people with powers that's set ever so slightly in the future that's still recognizably 'superheroes' but can easily be differentiated from everything else currently on the shelves.  It also features some extremely nice art from David Cutler.

And finally, shipping today is Thor the Mighty Avenger #8, the last issue in the series, something I think I can safely recommend sight unseen.

The opinions expressed in this column are solely  those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.