What Do You Mean They're Not Superheroes?!: Alright Mister Lapham ... You Win ... (or alternately: You Had Me at Hello)

David Lapham has been one of my favorite comic creators for the last 6 years or so. I first discovered his work when I started reading the second Stray Bullets hardcover while working at the Saint Charles location of The Fantasy Shop. I just remember looking at it there on the independent shelf and thinking "I've heard good stuff about Stray Bullets ... and I've never read any. But we don't have the first Hardcover." And eventually I broke down and read it anyway. And I was totally enthralled. And since then I have read anything and everything his name has graced. Some were better than others but they were all, in my opinion, very good. When he works with established characters he brings a bit of himself to them and there is something interesting about adding his interesting mix of noir, excitement, and nihilism to those characters. But it's when he creates something wholecloth that I get really excited. So when he announced that he was going to be doing some work under the Vertigo umbrella I was excited. I loved Silverfish and have spoken about it before on the show and have recommended it to quite an awfully large amount of people in the stores I have worked in since it was released. Then Young Liars came out and I got even more pumped because it was like what I imagine reading Stray Bullets on LSD would be like (or perhaps more likely what reading Stray Bullets would have been like if Lapham himself had been on LSD during the whole creative process). And when it was recently announced that the series would be ending with the forthcoming #18 I was saddened ... not because I thought "Why aren't people reading this book?!?! It should have been the next Sandman!!!!", because it simply wasn't that kind of book. I was saddened more because I had really grown attached to that book in a way that I tend to about a lot of the non-traditional books that I encounter. 

And then ...

Today I hear about something new coming down the pike.

http://www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=21126

It's hard to explain why I am excited about Sparta. U.S.A. but there is something about the mix of suburban life, magic, high school football, betrayal and David Lapham makes me smile ... like ten feet wide.