Since last week was big swords, I’d hoped to do big guns this week – but I didn’t have enough books to make it work. So, instead, we have two brand-new manga series (first volumes published at the end of November) and two older, pretty well-known series. (“Old” is a relative term here – one…
Classic Illustrated Deluxe # 1: The Wind in the Willows Novel by Kenneth Grahame; adapted by Michel Plessix Papercutz, 2007, $13.95 (paperback) / $17.95 (hardcover) I’ve wasted a lot of time not writing the review for this book, mostly because I suspected it would be one of the shortest in my career. (And both you…
This week: four manga series featuring protagonists who carry very large, sharp objects. Hmm… Overcompensate much? I’ll take them in size order, starting with the smallest and least impressive: Togari, Vol. 1 Yoshinori Natsume Viz Media, 2007, $9.99 In Togari, Tobei has been in hell for the last four hundred years (being tortured unceasingly, yadda…
This is the second of the “Graphic Classics” series I’ve reviewed for ComicMix, and Mark Twain has essentially the same strengths and weaknesses as Bram Stoker. It’s exceptionally wordy and takes a while to read, since it incorporates big swaths of the original Twain stories as narration or extensive dialogue. I’m not sure if there’s…
This week: three manga series featuring sex and death in high school. (I don’t know about you folks, but if my high school was like some of the ones in manga series, I wouldn’t have bothered to graduate.) Case in point: Sundome by Kazuto Okada, a story about a young woman who may just be…
The Museum Vaults is the second of four graphic novels created through an unlikely publishing partnership: noted American art-comics publisher NBM and France’s cultural powerhouse museum the Louvre. All four of the stories will be about the Louvre in some way; the first book, Nicholas De Crecy’s Glacial Period, was published early in 2007. Museum…
Paris collects a four-issue mini-series set in that city in the early ‘50s, written by Andi Watson and illustrated by Simon Gane. Watson is fairly well-known these days as the writer-artist of such relationship-oriented comics as Slow News Day and Love Fights, but I haven’t heard of Gane before. (From a quick perusal of his…
This is another complicated bit of backstory: in 1979, Kaoru Kurimoto started a series of epic fantasy novels about a warrior-type named Guin who woke up amnesiac with a leopard mask permanently affixed to his face. There are at least a hundred and eighteen novels in the main series, plus some unspecified number of “side…
I’m often most interested in the decadent phase of an artistic movement, the point when it starts turning on itself. Snarky parody, convoluted derivative plots, art that’s clearly a rip-off of someone else’s style – this and more amuses me. So I’m happy that I finally gave in to temptation and picked up Even a…
The animators of Blue Sky Studios were finishing up their work on the movie Robots in late 2004 when a group of them decided that was the perfect time to do a collection of more personal stories. (A similar impulse is behind the Flight series of anthologies, to which more miscellaneous animators, illustrators, and cartoonists…
I’ve long harbored a suspicion about the “Mammoth Books” – you’re familiar with them, right? Big fat reprint anthologies, on a wide range of subjects (fiction and nonfiction, photographic and comics) published by Constable and Robinson in the UK and imported to this side of the pond by the now-defunct Carroll & Graf? – were…
There are plenty of comics writers and artists (and combinations thereof) who have never been fashionable, but who do good, interesting work, and even dive in and out of “mainstream” comics as they go. I’m thinking about people like P. Craig Russell, Eddie Campbell, and – most to the point right now – Bryan Talbot….
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