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If Jack Kirby grew up on kung fu movies, he might have made something like Kagan McLeod's Infinite Kung Fu. It's a nearly 500-page comic book epic about a team of good kung fu masters who have to fight evil kung fu masters for the fate of the blah-blah-blah. Because this is comic books, the kung fu styles involving lizard powers and pulling your own limbs off, Splitzam-style, and beating your opponents with them. It's hard to get the gist of martial arts across in a comic book—part of the reason why it works on film is because it's so kinetic and high-speed—but McLeod manages. This is a book with several sweeping battle scenes (including an zombies versus a highly trained cadre of kung fu experts, along with a giant robot tank in the shape of Buddha's head a couple of spiritual journeys, betrayal, and an entire mythology). It's like five years' worth of 1970s Marvel comics shoved into one thick, dreamy package.

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One-named Canadian cartoonist Seth produced a comic book called Wimbledon Green a few years back. he drew it entirely in his sketchbook, so it wasn't as perfectly drafted as his other work. It felt a lot less affected, and it was an enjoyable lark. But it was also full of in-jokes about comic book collectors and so it wasn't very accessible to non-nerd fans. His new book, The Great Northern Brotherhood of Canadian Cartoonists, is also an inside joke—it's a book-length tour of a nonexistent Canadian cartoonist society's headquarters—but it feels alive in a way that Wimbledon Green didn't. Seth's love of the history of cartooning is on full display here, with riffs on old superhero comics and science fiction adventures (the spacefaring Eskimo is a special delight). It's a melancholy journey through nostalgia, but the sketchbook style makes it feel warmer, more vibrant than some of Seth's more serious stuff. If you've ever loved an old comic, this is the comic for you.