The Comic You Need to Read This Week: "Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred" #5

There’s a lot of good stuff this week: “Silk Spectre” #1 is a surprisingly quiet story of teenage romance and rebellion, “Night of 1000 Wolves” #2 continues the sturdy, violent horror of the first issue, and “Planetoid” lays the groundwork for what looks like an interesting ongoing series.

But David Hine and Shaky Kane’s mix of short stories tied to their Bulletproof Coffin universe wins out for me this week.

If you haven’t read “Bulletproof Coffin”, here you go. Spend the eighteen bucks. “Coffin” takes a story that could collapse into guffawing at crappy ’60s pop culture, or eat itself in metacomedy, and instead strikes a perfect balance of parody, superheroics, pulp adventure, and Kafkaesque weirdness, while serving as a commentary on the nature of comics, comparing what they mean to the reader and what they mean to the creators…two very different things.

It’s also really funny.

“Disinterred” develops various aspects of the universe, and as a miniseries, it’s less unified and more experimental, designed to develop the overall weirdness of the universe it’s set in. Issue #4 was something of a deliberate mess, with the panels placed out of order.

Issue #5, however, is a satire/tribute to the gory ridiculousness of the Topps trading cards like “Mars Attacks” and “Dinosaurs Attack!”. Presented as a bubble-gum card series, it manages to fill in the backstory of the Hateful Dead, and capture the gory, troubling air of these trading cards while simultaneously tying into the main series.

Love it or hate it…you won’t forget it, that’s for sure.

What’s your choice for this week?