This one was a professional transition – it collects the first six issues (plus stories from issues seven and eight) of the second series of Usagi Yojimbo , from Mirage – but, within the story, there’s no indication of that. Creator Stan Sakai didn’t reboot the series, drop into long explanatory flashback stories for the…
I never want to discourage creators from stretching, from trying new things and talking to new audiences. But, sometimes, it just doesn’t really click. In the late ’90s, Peter Bagge had been making sarcastic comics about grumpy twenty-something slackers in Hate for more than a decade; his work was really closely associated with not just…
For some reason, I thought this book was in comics format – maybe just from an assumption that’s how Lemire works, or that he draws so quickly that it would nearly as easy to do it that way as in text. But I was wrong: this is a conventional prose memoir, albeit one with lots…
I sometimes look at a Groo book and think “that will be a quick read, and an easy one to write about.” And then I’m wrong on both counts. It happened with the three-book Friends and Foes series in 22-23, and it just happened again now. Groo looks quick and breezy, but it’s a wordy…
As I write this, the reruns of Richard Thompson’s great Cul de Sac daily comic on GoComics have hit the summer camp sequence of 2010, introducing Andre Chang , a boy who wants to draw comics and is bigger and louder – especially in his comics – than anyone else. Andre is lovable and amusing,…
When a creator you like turns to creating works for younger readers, you have two choices: follow him along, and check out the new stuff, trying to have an open mind, or to avoid the new stuff and grump about how creators should keep doing the things you discovered them for, grumble grumble. OR –…
This was Richard Sala’s first book; this edition is (at least for the moment) Richard Sala’s last book. Sala died in mid-2020, alone at home, of what turned out to be a heart attack. He didn’t die of COVID, but I have to believe he’s one of the many, many people who would have had…
Comics are about sex less often than most artforms. Call it a lingering prudishness, the hangover from long decades seen as a medium just for kids, or just the fact that drawn sex is inherently a bit more fleshy than the written kind. But it’s true: comics avoid sex a lot of the time, and…
I read The Incal at least thirty years ago, during the burst of Mœbius republications from Marvel. As I recall, I thought it was OK space opera, with an annoying main character and more mystical mumbo-jumbo than I preferred. (At the time, I was much more enthusiastic about the Blueberry stories, a long Western series…
If this were a TV show, it would be a pilot that didn’t get picked up: it obviously aimed to start a series, and, a decade later, it didn’t. There are a lot of plot points, themes, and ideas that aren’t completely explained or fleshed out here – but of course there would be, if…
I’ve been known to bemoan the fact that the caption was basically wiped out of mainstream US comics in an extinction event roughly congruent with the big ’90s crash. I’ll admit that captions may have made a comeback since, like tiny mammals after the Chicxulub impact, but I read mainstream comics only rarely these days,…
I try not to be a gatekeeper. I have standards and expectations – and, like everyone else, some tropes and styles and story-structures I like better than others. But I like to think I can take the how and what as it comes. So I haven’t mentioned the syndicated comic “strip” Last Kiss here before,…
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