Don’t tell anyone, but I think this is a stealth reprint collection. If it were in prose, I might even go so far as to call it a fix-up. Roz Chast is one of the giants of contemporary cartooning, a New Yorker mainstay since the late ’70s and the author of the major memoir Can’t…
When I was a lad, the standard bio-for-young-people format was a small hardcover, heavily illustrated but written in prose, in short, punchy chapters and topping out at maybe a hundred and fifty pages. There were a lot of them: I recall shelves in classrooms and school libraries full of the things, some of them in…
I’m running close to a decade behind reading Peter Bagge’s books – but, the weird thing is, I seem to still be reading all of his books, just with that big time-delay. I have no explanation, and may catch up one of these days: cartooning is time-intensive work, and even someone as prolific as Bagge…
It’s not usual for a creative team to accrete members over time. OK, sure, you can think of bands that got bigger as they got successful enough to add, for instance, a horn section, but those accretions tend to be semi-separate: The Fantastic Desperadoes with the Horns of Doom! People get replaced, of course. But…
This book was shorter than I expected, so today’s post should be quick. Last time around with Jim Benton, I read and enjoyed his all-ages graphic novel Attack of the Stuff but noted that I might be getting to the end of the all-ages bits, leaving only the definitely-for-middle-graders books. (And, don’t get me wrong:…
I fight with my tags, here on the blog. They tend to proliferate, with a core that I use a lot and a loose penumbra of things that I thought I’d use more often (Circles of Hell! Class War Follies! High Finance! Kids Today! Pedantry!) but just have a few random posts. And there are…
First of all: this volume contains two things, which it does say pretty clearly: the title is The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell & The Fate of the Artist , after all. There’s one new book – Campbell dislikes the term “graphic novel,” so I’m going to see if I can consistently avoid it…
I admit this is a weird thing I do: I read full books from webcomics that I don’t follow. But I want to argue that it isn’t weird. First, why would I want to read a book of a comic where I’ve read all of the comics already? Well, OK, yes: if you like a…
This strip isn’t exactly new to me – I’ve seen a bunch of Buni cartoons over the years, all over the place – but it’s not one I ever made an effort to read regularly. So I’m coming at it as a mostly-uninformed reader: I know it’s wordless, that the title character is happy and…
There aren’t all that many books where the format is an inspired choice – most books are what they are, arranged in the same way as a thousand others much like them. Every so often, you see a novel in epic verse, or a non-fiction book of advocacy that’s basically one big infographic, but those…
A cynical reader, such as me, could look at that title and think “oh, good, they’re finally ending this repetitive superhero waffling that never actually goes anywhere.” But that reader would be wrong. This is not “last” in the sense of anything actually ending. This is a superhero “last,” meaning it’s about something in the…
First up, I have to answer the question I had when I picked up this book: yes, that tin man. Well, one of those tin men, to be clearer. Justin Madison’s debut graphic novel Tin Man is set in a version of L. Frank Baum’s Oz, and his tin man, Campbell, has the familiar shape…
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