Slow Storm By Danica Novgorodoff First Second, September 2008, $19.95 This is Novgorodoff’s first full-length graphic novel; she was an Eisner nominee last year for the one-shot [[[A Late Freeze]]]. She’s got an assured, pseudo-outsider art style, with big blocks of color and slablike faces, but her writing isn’t quite up to the same level…
Essex County Vol. 3: The Country Nurse By Jeff Lemire Top Shelf, October 2008, $9.95 The finale of the “[[[Essex County]]]” trilogy – which will be available in October, so start saving your pennies now – draws together the first two graphic novels in the series, but at the expense of not being as coherent…
Swallow Me Whole By Nate Powell Top Shelf, September 2008, $19.95 Ruth and Perry are stepsiblings, somewhere in the South – people say “shoore” for “sure,” biology teachers can’t even say the word “evolution,” and the kids’ slowly-dying, live-in grandmother is called “Memaw.” It also seems to be sometime in the late ‘80s, from the…
It’s unofficially been Blues & Jazz week here in my reviews – and, if you’re wondering how Erotic Comics fit in there, you don’t know what the word “Jazz” means. So, for Manga Friday, here’s the first book in a series that retells the life of blues legend Robert Johnson from a very different perspective….
Erotic Comics: A Graphic History from Tijuana Bibles to Underground Comics By Tim Pilcher with Gene Kannenberg, Jr. Abrams, March 2008, $29.95 We’ve reached an interesting point in modern culture, when even something as disposable and downmarket as sexy comic books can be the subject of a classy art book from a major publisher. Abrams…
Bluesman By Rob Vollmar and Pablo G. Callejo NBM, August 2008, $24.95 [[[Bluesman]]] was published once before, as three album-sized collections, but this is the first time the entire story has been collected between two covers. It’s a moody tale, told in black and white – but mostly in grays, from the background to the…
Ah, high school! The greatest time of our lives, right? The time when we all were either on the student council or locked in a life-or-death struggle with the evil student council, when we harnessed powerful robots to save the world, and when the most attractive member of whatever gender we fancied suddenly fell into…
[[[Fables]]] is one of the big successes of the current version of the Vertigo line, where every book has a Hollywood-style high concept: all males on Earth are killed – except one!; New York’s mayor can talk to machines!; Refugee fairytales live in the modern world! And, in another Hollywood-esque twist, Fables even has a…
To make up for Manga Friday being so “adult” and off-limits to kids lately, how about some reviews of books that are made for kids? Here are three very different ones – two of ‘em are even “educational!” Robot Dreams By Sara Varon First Second, September 2007, $16.95 But let’s start off with a book…
The ACME Novelty Date Book, Vol. 2: 1995-2002 By Chris Ware Drawn & Quarterly, December 2007, $39.95 In typical Chris Ware fashion, this is an attractively (and extensively) packaged book – so much so, in fact, that what this book precisely is isn’t immediately clear. Is it some kind of notebook, journal, or calendar, perhaps?…
Half by accident, I realized my manga reading this week included four shojo books – for girls – but that none of them were about dating, boys, or relationships. That’s probably not as unlikely as I think it is, but it’s my theme for the week, and I’m running with it. (Think of it as…
Ordinary Victories: What is Precious By Manu Larcenet NBM/ComicsLit, August 2008, $15.95 [[[Ordinary Victories]]], in France, is a series of four graphic novels about a photographer named Marco Louis. TheyâÂÂve been very successful, selling hundreds of thousands of copies of each book. But those books are each only about sixty pages long, so theyâÂÂve been…
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