In the 'Comics 101' section of the current Entertainment Weekly (March 17), four EW scribes provide short reviews and letter grades for four recent graphic novel releases, all of which are set in the past.  The top mark goes to Dark Horse's Billy the Kid's Old Timey Oddities ($13.95), which gets a 'A' thanks primarily to writer Eric Powell (The Goon) who fashions a fascinating narrative in which a bunch of sideshow freaks hire Billy the Kid to take on Victor Frankenstein.

Image's Battle Hymn and NBM's Bluesman series (see 'NBM Has Bluesman') both earn B+'s.  B. Clay Moore's Battle Hymn ($14.99) is set during World War II and features a superpowered team of Nazi fighters, but with a wonderfully subversive twist, while the two Bluesman volumes ($8.95 each) brilliantly evoke the dangers facing an itinerant black musician in the Jim Crow south during the 1930s.

Eureka's Graphic Classics: Arthur Conan Doyle ($11.95) features the most famous protagonist (Sherlock Holmes), but reviewer Hannah Taylor gives the book only a 'B-'--finding the master detective's deductions (as presented here) 'quaint and a bit too elementary for today's CSI zeitgeist.'  More's the pity that Holmes' reasoning based on his powers of external observation can't compete with the intrusive post-mortem forensic gore that passes for crime fiction these days.