With so many big names and big events plastered across the shelves of your LCS, sometimes great comics get left behind - buried in longboxes until someone comes along to find these Hidden Gems.

Written and drawn by Jonathan Hickman
Published by Image Comics

The American news media is currently not the respected institution it has been in the past, and it has been a constant target of ridicule and dirision. In a time when we are given more choice than ever in where we get our news, straight objective reporting of current events seems to be a dying art. The main networks seem to be more concerned with pushing a corporate and/or political agenda then simply reporting on what is going on, and the lack of confidence many of us have in the media is reflected constantly in our current pop culture, from TV comedy programs such as The Daily Show and The Colbert Report to online blogs and podcasts. Superstar comics writer Jonathan Hickman’s 2006 miniseries The Nightly News captures our generation’s ambivalence towards the mainstream media and uses it to tell an original and informative story about a group of people devoted to bringing down the established news companies.

The main protagonist of The Nightly News is John Guyton, a disgraced former reporter and member of a radical terrorist cult known as The Voice, whose mission is to discredit and destroy the corporate news machine. Most of The Voice’s recruits are people whose lives have been ruined in some way or another by the media’s shoddy and/or inaccurate reporting and are looking to get revenge by such means as sniping reporters on the job at news sites and bombing popular bars where newspeople hang out. One of The Voice’s most recent recruits is revealed as a double agent and kidnaps Guyton, bringing him in front of another group who tries to deprogram him of The Voice’s teachings. The majority of the book deals with Guyton’s struggle between his thirst for vengeance and his distaste of the Voice’s extreme measures, as their list of targets continues to grow.

 While the story of The Nightly News is unusual enough for a comic, Hickman’s visual and narrative style in the book is even more unique. His figures are mostly static, and his panels are disjointed and at times non-existent. His art has a muted color pallette, with various abstract shapes appearing in the middle of the image, giving the image a chaotic, almost psychadelic look. Througout the story, Hickman also peppers in some facts recounting the many times the media has been purposefully inaccurate or otherwise irresponsible. There are also several humorous footnotes included throughout the mini, which help to offset Hickman’s occasional preachiness. All this extra stuff can make the mini a difficult read at first, but despite the initial trouble some may have with them, these asides provide an fascinating context to the book’s events and makes it a lot more enjoyable. It’s not often that one learns something about the world around them from reading a comic book, but after finishing The Nightly News, many readers may not look at the news networks or major newspapers the same way again.

This was Jonathan Hickman’s first major job in comics, and it has to go down as one of the most impressive debuts of the past decade. While it doesn’t offer a lot in the way of visceral thrills, the original way in which this story is told and illustrated makes it a worthwhile and satisfying read. Hickman is now enjoying great success at Marvel, writing Secret Warriors, Fantastic Four, and S.H.I.E.L.D., and while his current work is great, it would be nice if he eventually got back to something as subversive and different as his first book.  All six issues of The Nightly News are available online or at your local comic shop, as is the collected edition. The book is recommended for anyone who worries about the current state of our media, but its dark humor and fascinating art style should be enough to please any discriminating comic fan looking for something a little different. The series as a whole gets 4 out of 5 Televised Assassinations.