The world might not have expected a homage to The Fearless Vampire Hunters. The world may not have needed a homage to The Fearless Vampire Hunters. The world may not have wanted a homage to The Fearless Vampire Hunters. But the world got one. Mike Mignola has been making comics about vampires (and similarly ghoulish…
I have a hard time telling if I’m supposed to take this seriously. I mean, the volume subtitle is “Fourgy,” and there’s a food truck, apparently a franchised operation, called “Wide Wiener,” with a humorously double-entendre theme song. But it also has a melodramatic comic-book plot, and a more kitchen-sinkly dramatic human story. So I…
“Aw, this is a sequel to somethin’!” – Crow T. Robot I never read Kings in Disguise. On the Ropes is a sequel to Kings in Disguise. So anyone who is looking for a comparison to Kings in Disguise will be disappointed. Anyone wondering how many consecutive sentences I cram Kings in Disguise into, though,…
The hardest thing, for me, is to write on a book about normal people’s normal lives — without the genre trappings of excitement and violence, without the framework of some standard plot, without being able to do the Hollywood high concept thing of matching a new work with X and Y from the past. When…
“There’s a world going on underground,” a great man once growl-sang, and Satania just is the book to explore that hidden underground world. One might think the naked redhead at the center of the cover is Satania, but no — she’s Charlie (short for Charlotte), the teenage force behind an underground expedition to find her…
We all love a good story. And a behind-the-scenes story can be even better than the story told in the book itself. “Heroic editor spends years of his life trying to assemble a massive, global collection with contributions by the best in the field, but the book never sees the light of day” is a…
Is Tom Gauld our most erudite cartoonist? From the evidence of his work, he well could be — there’s a parade of authors both classic (Shakespeare, Austen) and genre (Ballard, Gaiman) and modern literary (Franzen, Mantel), and a dazzling awareness of tropes and ideas and genre furniture in his work, and it’s hard to think…
Yeah, it did take me until now to finally read Herbie. It is so much exactly the kind of thing that I would like that the delay seems weird, but it’s a big world, and you can only do one thing at a time. I finally got to this particular thing, and can finally talk…
Oh, look — another comics series I’m still poking my way through, a year or so after it ended! There are ten volumes of the collected Chew, so I’m three or four years behind at this point. I don’t see any particular reason to be concerned about this — not reading a book right when…
Note: I didn’t plan to read this book and have the review land on Halloween — that was purely random. But it’s nice when things work out so appropriately, isn’t it? There are books where you wonder why anyone ever thought they were a good idea — how they could possibly have come into existence….
This is not a limited series. I know: I was surprised, too. But Peter Bagge’s afterword, which explains the history of Sweatshop , makes it clear that it was intended to be ongoing, and that he would have been happy to keep it running for a much longer time. That didn’t happen: Sweatshop got a…
We really don’t need any more origin stories. OK, maybe if it’s integrated — a quick flashback during something else — it’s not so bad. But, please, not a whole story just to show us how the guy we already know got to the place we’ve seen him. Boooo-ring. Writers Kurt Busiek and Len Wein…
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