Love Is a Peculiar Type of Thing By Box Brown Self-published, no company name; February 2009, $10.00 It’s not often you find a book about someone named Ben created by someone named Box – the standard in comics is the other way around – but this is that book. In case you’re confused by the…
A Mess of Everything By Miss Lasko-Gross Fantagraphics Books, April 2009, $19.99 According to page 119, the heroine of this story writes comics as “Miss Lasko-Gross,” but her legal name (at least at this point, when she’s in high school) is “Melissa Anne Lasko Gross,” and the two last names are from both her mother…
Just when you think you’ve gotten the hang of Asian comics – you can read right-to-left without blinking, speak of shojo and shonen with ease and have even been known to bring up seinen in casual conversation – you get caught up short with the realization that Japan is not the entirety of Asia. There…
Jim Butcher’s The Dresden Files: Storm Front Vol. 1: The Gathering Storm Adaptation by Mark Powers; Illustrated by Ardian Syaf Del Rey, June 2009, $22.95 It’s never a good sign when anything gets named “[[[The Gathering Storm]]]” – that’s possibly the most generic title in a world filled with blandness and non-specificity. I suppose it’s…
The Collected Doug Wright: Canada’s Master Cartoonist, 1949-1962 Edited by Seth and Brad Mackay Drawn & Quarterly, May 2009, $39.95 Some claims come with the seeds of their own mocking built right in, and I’m afraid that “[[[Canada’s Master Cartoonist]]]” is right up there with “the premier crimefighting vigilante of the Quad Cities area” –…
Life’s tough when you’re a teenage girl – sometimes, it’s even almost as tough as those teenage girls think it is. This week, three “normal girls” with gigantic eyes try to get through their massive problems…most of which, as you might have guessed, have to do with boys. Orange Planet , Vol. 1By Haruka FukushimaDel…
The Eternal Smile: Three Stories By Gene Luen Yang and Derek Kirk Kim First Second, May 2009, $16.95 Three years ago, Gene Luen Yang’s graphic novel [[[American Born Chinese]]] – a three-stranded partly autobiographical and partly allegorical story of growing up Asian-American – was published to massive acclaim (National Book Award nominee, Michael L. Printz…
Some people stay in the same place their entire lives: joining the family business, marrying their childhood sweethearts, growing old in the bosom of their loved ones underneath the spreading chestnut tree their grandfathers planted. But they’re boring, so there aren’t many manga about them. People who go different places and do new things, on…
There’s something about the comics form that just lends itself to stories about people in outlandish costumes trying to beat the snot out of each other, often in unfeasible ways using silly powers or items. From giant mecha to Asterix to Spider-Man, it’s just not comics unless you get something ridiculously large dropped on your…
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. III: Century #1 : “1910” By Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill Top Shelf, April 2009, $7.95 The usual rule in comics is that nothing with two or more colons in its title – not to mention two or more separate numbering schemes – is nothing but rubbishy hackwork, and…
A Drifting LifeBy Yoshihiro TatsumiDrawn & Quarterly, April 2009, $29.99 It’s hard, sometimes impossible, to avoid a tunnel-visioned view of the world – not to have one’s mental map of things resemble that famous Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover, with familiar things reassuringly large and the rest of the world a small, distant blur. And…
Showcase Presents: Ambush Bug Vol. 1 Plot & Pencils by Keith Giffen, Script by Robert Loren Fleming, Inks by Bob Oksner (for most of the stories) DC Comics, March 2009, $16.99 We all have to look back at the comics of our youth once in a while. It’s not always a pleasant experience, particularly when…
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