Endings are harder than beginnings: any story-teller will tell you that. So if I quibble that The Golden Age doesn’t end as well as it begins , I’m largely saying that it’s a story, and that’s what stories do. Reading the second half , though – the graphic novel or bande dessinee The Golden Age,…
Does this count as a foreign comic? It’s written by an American (Micah Stahl) but drawn by a Belgian (Bram Algoed), and was originally published in Dutch – this edition is a translation, and comes from an outfit (Europe Comics) specifically devoted to bringing Eurocomics to Amerireaders. That’s foreign enough for my purposes, but there’s…
I feel like I did this already, but that was a decade ago, so maybe I need to do it again. Also, and probably more importantly, the last time I talked about this book, it wasn’t actually available at my end of the Pacific at all, which made my praise slightly beside the point for…
I have two theories about John Allison’s best stories, or maybe two versions of the same theory. One goes that his best works are organized around triumvirates – I should perhaps say triumfeminates – such as Bad Machinery and Giant Days , which allows the three main characters to bounce off each other in complicated…
It’s an odd thing: while actually reading a Beasts of Burden book, it’s entirely plausible – my disbelief is reasonably suspended. But both before and afterward , in retrospect, it all seems silly and I struggle to write about it in a non-dismissive way. If that tone sneaks in, I don’t really mean it. But…
If something works, you do it again. Brian Gordon’s Fowl Language comics – originally appearing online starting in 2013, and ramping up after he lost his cartooning-for-Hallmark-Cards job a couple of years later – were a hit online, and then a hit in their first book form, Fowl Language: Welcome to Parenting. So, a year…
Some titles are meant to be taken literally; this is not one of them. Peter Pan is not a character in this story, and no one is searching for Peter Pan the person. Or for any fantastic element, actually. But Peter Pan is also a metaphor – though usually a metaphor for a certain kind…
If that cover image trips any warnings on whatever computing device you’re reading this on, I apologize – but it is the cover for this book. The Muse is an album-length graphic novel, written by Zidrou, drawn by Oriol, translated by Matt Madden, and published – only electronically; there’s no print version in English –…
Americans are more likely to take this book’s cover wrongly. There’s a young man, tying something around his neck, and a title that could be a vivid, short, violence-tinged name. Americans are likely to jump into some kind of superhero explanation , either real in the world of the story or imagined by the protagonist…
Sometimes there are things that you know you like, but you realize you’ve never really dug into. Brian Gordon’s comics strip Fowl Language is like that for me: I realized I’ve been seeing it randomly probably since it started (2013, I think), but never actually tried to read it. So I did. I grabbed this…
Stories don’t have to be told forwards. Sometimes a story can be told best in reverse. The description of Jodi Lafebre’s graphic novel Always Never makes it sound like a late-in-life love story: mayor Ana and Zeno, who has been for decades almost equally a doctoral student in physics, a commercial sailor, and a bookstore…
I’m not crazy about adaptations , by disposition. I’d generally rather see new stuff in Creative Format X, rather than a Format X version of a story that worked well in Format Q. I seem to be in a pretty small minority in that, though. The world demands movies from their comic books, TV shows…
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