I have not read as many books as I wanted to this year, nor have I written about as many of the ones I did manage to read. (I didn’t manage to save as much from the flood as I would have liked, either; it’s a low-batting-average kind of year.) But the year is not…
Perhaps someone more plugged into this particular format war can comment, but, for myself, I’ll just mention the two things that happened over the last week in the world of ebook formats. First, EPUB 3.0, the next generation of the format used by most electronic reading devices, was officially made a Recommended Specification at the…
So, let me get this straight. If the people administering an award are so incompetent that they can’t even manage to communicate effectively with each other, and mangle their own list of nominees, the only way to “preserve the integrity of the award and the judges’ work” is to ask the author you just screwed…
Sometimes words and pictures come together in the same story. There’s more than one way of accomplishing this — comics is the most obvious, with the story told in a sequence of pictures and text (captions and/or dialogue), but there are other options — and books for pre-adults have typically made more use of pictures…
The Unclothed Man in the 35th Century A.D. By Dash Shaw Fantagraphics, September 2009, $19.99 Dash Shaw seemed to appear out of nowhere with his massive 2008 graphic novel [[[Bottomless Belly Button]]] – but, of course, for those who were paying attention, Shaw had been an up-and-comer for several years before that, regularly contributing stories…
One of the great symbols of Japan to a Western audience – equal to pagodas, kimonos, and that exaggerated white makeup – is the katana. (Well, any vaguely Japanese sword, to be honest – it doesn’t have to be precisely a katana as long as the profile is right and it’s declared to be incredibly…
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth Written by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos H. Papadimitriou; Art by Alecos Papadatos; Color by Annie Di Donna Bloomsbury, September 2009, $22.95 Ever so often, there’s an object lesson that proves the saying so many of us like to make: that comics aren’t just for adventure stories, that they’re suitable…
The Best American Comics 2009 Edited by Charles Burns; Series Editors Jessica Abel and Matt Madden Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, October 2009, $22.00 Long ago, the wise minds at the “[[[Best American]]]” series of annuals at Houghton Mifflin – now covering everything from sportswriting to mystery stories – realized that they didn’t need to wait for…
Superheroes die. It’s one of their best tricks – dying, tragically, to stop the Big Bad from doing whatever it is he’s doing. Luckily, another one of their best tricks is to come back from the dead – which they need to do, of course, since someone needs to star in their monthly comics, and…
Most of us, it’s safe to say, will never be told that our sin is our very being. (Unless we were brought up in the Deep South, in which case we’ve heard it twice a day and five times on Sunday.) We’re also not going to learn that the odd new girl in our high…
Vatican Hustle Greg Houston NBM, December 2009, $11.95 There are stories that are inextricably mixed up with their original media, stories that would make very little sense translated into another form. Imagine a Gothic Romance novel as a puppet show, or a John Wayne Western as an opera. Until the moment I opened this book,…
Comics don’t have to be bad for you, you know. They can be edifying and uplifting, partaking of the greatest glories of the finest books even written. At least, that’s what the purveyors of various adaptations of “the great books” – curiously, nearly all of which were conveniently out of copyright and thus didn’t require…
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