The great thing about history is that it never stops being history. It might technically get older, but, realistically, a hundred years is the same as a hundred and twenty. Old is old, dead is dead. So I can read the tenth anniversary edition of a book four years later without feeling any guilt, because…
Boulet is one of those European Cartoonists who are so cool they only need one name, like Herge. (And several others — I feel like there’s a lot of them, but can’t be bothered to research the question right now.) Or maybe it’s not a coolness thing — perhaps it helps them avoid the social…
I can’t claim any connection to the cartoonist Shannon Wheeler, despite the name similarity. Oh, he lives in Portland, as does my brother — but I think that’s as close as it gets. The Wheelers are a vast clan, with our fingers in all of the world’s pies, and Shannon’s branch is very distant from…
I didn’t remember Neil Gaiman’s story “Troll Bridge” well. In fact, if you’d asked me about it, I would have assumed some confusion on your part with Terry Pratchett’s short story “Troll Bridge,” and tried to lead you in that direction. But story titles can’t be copyrighted, and even good friends can use the same…
I’m in danger of turning into a broken record on this subject: Geary has been doing the same thing brilliantly for so long that I’ve run out of different ways to say it. Black Dahlia is the seventh in his “Treasury of XXth Century Murder,” which followed eight similar books in the “Treasury of Victorian…
It’s a cliche that creators resent their fans who like best the “early funny ones,” but I have to be that guy for just a second. Rick Geary has had a wonderful career: he has a quirky but devastatingly precise line and has made several dozen excellent graphic novels about historical murders over the last…
Of course Paul Riforati is not Michel Rabagliati — he has a different name, see? But Rabagliati has now given us about 1200 pages of comics — not all of which have made it into the English language, true — about Riforati and his life. They may all be completely fictional: Paul may just be…
Trust is a tricky thing in stories: you have to trust the person telling the story will do a good job to keep rewarding that person with your attention. Brian K. Vaughan had my trust and hugely lost it, in his Ex Machina series with artist Tony Harris, and I’ve been giving each of his…
I have no idea why someone said, in the year 2016, “Hey, what this world really needs is a Betty Boop comic book!” It seems like an odd and unlikely thing to say, even if one happened to work in licensing for an entity that happened to own the rights to Miss Boop. But it…
The Mystery Tweens are solidly becoming Mystery Teens in The Case of the Forked Road , which means the boys have all seemingly lost 50 IQ points and keep punching each other for no reason. [1] So any mystery solving will be left to the girls, this time out. Since this is a volume seven,…
This time, it definitely is the end. The previous volume finished up reprinting the fifty-year [1] run of Charles M. Schulz’s comic strip Peanuts in twenty-five volumes, two years in each book. (See my posts on nearly all of those books: 1957-1958 , 1959-1960 , 1961-1962 , 1963-1964 , 1965-1966 , 1967-1968, 1969-1970 , 1971-1972…
If you keep going long enough in a creative field, eventually someone will collect your stuff. If you’re reasonably successful, they’ll even collect the oddball stuff — the one-offs and blind alleys and test-beds and experiments that you made as you were working towards (or in between) the works that you were better known for….
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