The Gotham police force has been around for pretty much as long as there’s been a [[[Batman]]]. But aside from James Gordon, the cops have always amounted to essentially cannon fodder, either dying at the hands of the rogues or vainly attempting to bring in the Bat during his various stints as a wanted man….
Like so many of the great cartoonists, Raymond Briggs operates almost in disguise, using his innocuous-appearing drawings and simpleton characters as a front while he delivers thoughtful commentary and a piercing wit. The British pioneer of the graphic novel field (he was, at the very least, a contemporary of Will Eisner’s, though Briggs is too…
Though you can’t go to a comics convention panel without hearing some fan decry crossovers, it’s readily obvious why they keep appearing and tying up comics series: Crossovers sell. As editors and creators quickly point out, slapping an event label on a comic cover can immediately boost sales by a healthy margin. And when books…
The past few months have brought a swell of attention to indie comics writer Elizabeth Genco, who scored a coup by having a story included in the Tori Amos Comic Book Tattoo collection from Image Comics, and then her graphic novel Blue — a modernization of the Bluebeard legend — sold well in part thanks…
By my count, there are four good reasons to buy [[[The Sandman Presents: The Dead Boy Detectives]]], now out from Vertigo. First, it’s cheap, at a slight $12.99 for some 100 pages of comics. Second, it’s a heckuva good mystery yarn with plenty of occult elements. Third, it’s part of The Sandman world, and there…
This year marks the 20th anniversary for The Sandman, Neil Gaiman’s famed comic book series from Vertigo. And, no surprise, the DC imprint is putting out a bunch of Sandman material to celebrate. We’ve already seen the anniversary poster (see below), and a few other projects and events were just announced. The fourth volume of…
There’s something so unabashedly original about writer G. Willow Wilson that it’s nearly impossible to not enjoy her comics projects, like last year’s graphic novel [[[Cairo]]] and this week’s new series [[[Air]]]. Wilson brings an entirely new voice and outlook to comics, keeping relevant to contemporary culture while digging into issues like terrorism, nationalism and…
I may as well just get this out of the way up front: in my opinion, Final Crisis #3 is one of the worst comic books I’ve ever read. Coming into this event season, I had high hopes for DC to regain some of the Infinite Crisis magic, but after three issues (sorry for the…
A few years back, Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón came up with the novel idea of retelling the 9/11 Commission Report in comic book form. Now they’re back with something of a sequel, After 9/11: America’s War on Terror (Hill and Wang, $16.95). While their earlier book was a simple recreation of an existing document,…
Kurt Busiek’s brain is about average-sized, I assume. And yet it contains this entire city, detailed down to every last resident’s personality and scrap of trash in the street. His mastery of [[[Astro City]]] is on full display in the latest collection of the WildStorm series, The Dark Age ($29.99). Busiek ventures back to the…
This is probably the tardiest and possibly the funniest review of The Dark Knight you’ll see, as TV writer Ken Levine writes on his blog about how much it must suck to live in Gotham City. Jesus! You can’t swing a dead cat without hitting six mob bosses. And then there’s the town’s super psycho…
Here’s a story that might be more suited to PBS’s Antiques Roadshow than a comics audience, but it’s pretty cool nonetheless. A man in Woodbury Heights, New Jersey picked up some old printing plates and then, years later, he checked them out and found some were of little-known Will Eisner cartoons. This article in the…
