I used to read a lot of strip-comics collections: I assembled a full set of Doonesbury back in the day, kept up with Dilbert until the writing on the wall was too obvious to ignore [1], and had multiple books from probably a dozen other currently-running strips over the years. But, somehow, the past decade…
Andi Watson is a criminally underrated maker of comics. He’s done great work for almost three decades now, but I never see him included on the list of greats. Maybe it’s because he never dabbled in the core Wednesday Crowd (is it still Wednesdays? I lose track, and the big day was Friday way back…
This is a flashback: you need to know that first. Guy Delisle’s comics career has been mostly circling the lands of memoir – a series of longer, more serious books about his travels, created when he was a working animator and/or lived in interesting places of the world (Shenzhen , Pyongyang , Burma Chronicles, Jerusalem…
My problem is that I’m always comparing books with other books, or just wanting things out of them that they never promised. This is, of course, a Me Problem, and I try to tamp it down when it hits. I have a major case today, but I’m going to try to be fair to Nayra…
I may be spoiled. It’s been a while since I hit the end of a graphic novel (or bande dessinee, in this case), realized it was the kind of “Part One” that doesn’t have a real ending, and couldn’t get the next book immediately. But In Shadows, Book One , by Mallié and Hubert –…
This is nearly everything, but not quite everything. Mudman ran for six issues from Image in 2011-2013, and the first five of those issues were collected in Mudman, Vol. 1 . It’s clearly a teen superhero comic, another one in the long line spawned by Spider-Man, and slightly more conventional than creator Paul Grist’s previous…
Anyone who’s traveled in the lands of SF has heard the complaints about worldbuilding: too much research and not enough life, a love of one’s own creations, special pleading and crank ideas. But most of fiction never went that far down the rabbit hole to begin with; most genres could use more worldbuilding, more thought…
[youtube Jumping in at volume four, you might want a <a href=” for Latecomers. Or, perhaps, you might want to know what happened in earlier Back to Basics books. This is a humorous, more-or-less autobiographical comics series originally published in France in the early Aughts, soon after the events depicted. Cartoonist Manu Larcenet moved from…
Books aren’t just catapulted out into the world willy-nilly, no matter what some people might think. There’s always a complex calculation on the publisher’s side, to figure out who the audience is and how best to get to those people. The books that don’t have any clear audience, or obvious way to reach them, are…
Comics take a long time to make – especially if the creator has other things to do with her life. (Like: making money, living, family…all of those usual things.) So there are wonderful creators a reader could almost forget about, just because it’s so long between new books. Megan Kelso is a wonderful creator, a…
Just over a decade ago, Jason Shiga made a big, complex story engine in book format, called Meanwhile… , telling a choose-your-own-adventure-style story with clusters of comics panels connected by “pipes” and numbers, driven by the reader’s choices. It was twisty, it was complex, it was inventive, it was brilliant, it was a hell of…
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden is a world-famous 1963 semi-autobiographical novel, and the 1977 movie based on it, about one woman’s mental illness and survival. It’s also a bland 1970 country song by Lynn Anderson. And a number of other books as well. Probably other things. Titles can’t be copyrighted; the evocative ones…
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