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Hi, It’s Me Again by Asher Perlman

I bemoan the sorry state of single-panel cartoons a lot here – because I like them, and because they used to be a massive tide rolling across popular culture, so there were many more of the things I liked, albeit mostly before I was born – so it’s nice to be able to balance that out now and then.

Asher Perlman’s first book of cartoons, covering a decade or so of toil and strife, was published last fall: Well, This Is Me . It was a best-seller, says the publisher, and I believe them. The reason I believe them is because they backed it up: they published what looks very much like a sequel to the first book just about exactly a year later, which is the time-honored model for a publisher that has found a good thing and wants it to continue as long as they possibly can.

The 2025 Asher Perlman collection is Hi, It’s Me Again , featuring the same character (and a variation on the joke) from the cover of the first book. Again, “hey, this is a sequel!” is a reaction you aim for when the first thing did well, so I am happy for Perlman and for comics-in-book-form in general.

Like the first book, it has three new short page-formatted comic sections to organize it (Introduction, Interlude, Epilogue), all with the “real” Perlman taking to another character about his work, in the usual half self-deprecating, half self-aggrandizing manner appropriate for comedy.

In between are two big sections, transparently called Part One and Part Two, each with eighty or ninety single-panel cartoons. The whole book is just about two hundred pages long, so it has almost that many pages of Perlman art and gags.

The only remaining major regular outlet for single-panel cartoons is The New Yorker, and Perlman does appear regularly there. According to the copyright page, nine of the cartoons here first appeared in that magazine – it’s possible that some of the others appeared elsewhere, but likely the vast majority of them are new to this book. (At least as far as the general public goes; my guess is that they were part of Perlman’s weekly “batches” over the past who-knows-how-long, though potentially reworked or finished for this book.)

As always, it’s difficult to say anything specific about a pile of nearly two hundred individual cartoons. Perlman has a fine modern cartoon style, with confident lines mostly of a single weight and various tones overlaid for texture and depth, and his ideas and punch lines are funny. (At least, I think so, and I’m the one reading the book.) A lot of people liked the first book; if you were one of them, this second book is more of the same stuff you already liked.

If you weren’t one of them, well, a lot of people liked the first book, so the odds you’ll like this one are solid – give it a try, won’t you? Help keep single-panel cartoons alive; it’s your civic duty.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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REVIEW: A Brief History of a Long War: Ukraine’s Fight Against Russian Domination

A Brief History of a Long War: Ukraine’s Fight Against Russian Domination
By Mariam Naiem, Yulia Vus, and Ivan Kypibida
112 pages/Ten Speed Graphics/19.99

As the horrific Ukraine War continues, nearing its fourth anniversary, along comes this wonderful graphic novel.

A Brief History of a Long War: Ukraine’s Fight Against Russian Domination niftily blends a contemporary account of a young woman fleeing for shelter during yet another bomb attack from Russia. As she finds companionship among other victims of Russia’s aggression, they all share reflections of Ukraine’s contemporary situation, while flashing back to the 9th century, when Ukraine can trace its history.

Yulia Vus & Ivan Kypibida provide detailed illustrations that show the evolution of the country and its inhabitants. With a simplified color scheme, it’s very easy to follow. They take the award-winning journalist’s words and bring them to vivid life.

While Vladimir Putin has wanted Ukraine since he wrote about it in 1997, Russia’s grip on the country dates back centuries, showing how the two are inexorably tied. Depending on your point of view, Ukraine was always a part of Russia and should remain so, while others contend its independence was undermined time and again, and the people should decide their fate.

They do not shy away from the various religious and ethnic controversies, such as the “linguicide” during the 1860s, which banned Ukrainian from being spoken by its natives or the Holodomor famine of the 1930s, which killed over 3.3 million people.

We have a frighteningly short attention span and memory, so let me remind readers that in 2004, Russia poisoned the independently-minded Viktor Yushchenko in the country’s presidential election. He recovered and won the office, only to see his rival, Viktor Yanukovych, replace him in the next election. He enriched himself while turning the country into an authoritarian state that leaned toward Putin, setting the stage for the 2014 seizure of Crimea and moving the pieces, resulting in the 2022 invasion.

Obviously, you can’t fully cover 13 centuries of complex history in 112 pages, nor can you cover all sides of the independence-versus-reabsorption issue that has confronted the Ukrainian people since the dissolution of the USSR. And yes, it isn’t very objective toward the people currently being victimized. It’s also challenging to tell this story when it lacks a definitive ending.

Still, this work provides greater context and vibrant images to help Westerners better grasp the issues at stake. As a result, this is a worthy addition to classroom libraries.

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Laser Eye Surgery by Walker Tate

In a city somewhere, there’s a tall man, bald on top. We don’t know his name. We don’t know his job, or if he has one. We know he lives in a small apartment, plagued by a mouse he keeps trying to catch, and that he eats some kind of canned food, maybe exclusively, and gets big packages of the cans in the mail. We think he’s some kind of a nut, or a hermit, or similar – one of those urban types who radiate a “don’t talk to me” aura as you see them stalking down the street or ranting on a corner or staring intently at something you can’t see.

This man has bad eyesight: he wears glasses sometimes, contacts sometimes. One day, he finds a flyer about eye correction – a local clinic is offering a two-eyes-for-the-price-of-one deal, with the testing upfront thrown in free and satisfaction guaranteed. He puts the flyer away, but remembers it when, the next morning, he accidentally steps on his glasses, breaking them.

So he goes to the clinic, which we readers see is shadier than he realizes. He’s tested, has the operation. He seems to stay in that clinic, just lying on a table recuperating, for many days, and eventually goes home, his sight hugely improved. But he has floaters – more than before, sometimes overwhelmingly so. (As someone who has had his optometrist say to him “you have a lot of floaters” basically every yearly visit for two decades, I sympathize but also think he’s over-reacting. But I think his deal is to over-react.)

Things escalate; the man, as we may have expected, tends to be paranoid and subject to conspiratorial thinking…and may also be right.

This is Laser Eye Surgery , the first graphic novel by New York cartoonist Walker Tate. Tate works in thin lines, tightly defined and precise, almost mechanical but with life and energy to them. His writing is laconic and minimal; the story told mostly through images.

The defining image, in fact, is of this man, striding at pace – often away from the viewer, usually at an angle. Always without eyes – either his face is turned away or Tate just doesn’t draw that level of detail. His eyes show up in close-up, and drive some imagistic sequences where the floaters wander about and proliferate, in a way we think the man considers deliberate.

Tate tells this story quietly, with an assurance that the reader will pick up the nuances and connect the dots – there’s no narration, and minimal details. This is a book about seeing, and so the reader must see it. I don’t know if I got all of the things Tate was trying to say, but I’m impressed by the power of his images and by the confident way he constructed this story; I want to see more of his work.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Jim Henson’s The Musical Monsters of Turkey Hollow adapted by Roger Langridge

I knew I was going to be writing this post on Thanksgiving morning, so I picked an appropriate book. Of course, since time flows forward, you’re reading this much later, untethered from any holiday (unless you celebrate Three Kings’ Day, in which case, go you), but that’s the reason for it.

Jim Henson was the kind of creative personality who generated a lot of ideas. My sense is that most of them never happened; I don’t know what that meant for his focus on the projects that did happen, but the work was generally top-quality, so I don’t suppose it matters. He generally worked with screenwriter Jerry Juhl, who put Henson ideas into a usable form, and they were credited together with scripts for a lot of projects that did come to fruition.

As well as a lot of things that are still sitting in trunks at the Henson Company, or Disney, or wherever.

One of those was a script from the late ’60s for a Thanksgiving special, to include both Muppets and live-action actors. So not quite an early precursor to Emmett Otter’s Jug-Band Christmas, but clearly coming from the same strand of Henson’s creative output. The special was never made; it’s ’60s enough that I doubt it ever would get made now.

But, about ten years ago, the Jim Henson Company decided, for whatever reason, they wanted to get this project out into the world somehow, and connected with cartoonist Roger Langridge. Langridge took the Henson/Juhl script, turned it into four issues of comics, and drew it all, with colors by Ian Herring.

And that’s how we got to Jim Henson’s The Musical Monsters of Turkey Hollow .

Somewhere fairly rural in New England, in a region with a lot of turkey farms, is the small town of Turkey Hollow. Living there is Timmy Henderson, a boy who wants to learn to play his guitar but is finding it difficult, his hippie-ish older sister Ann, their aunt and guardian Clytemnestra, the grocer/mayor/sheriff/postmaster Grover Cowley, and nasty evil landowner Eldridge Sump.

Sump wants to drive the Hendersons from their land, for the usual I’m-evil, I-want-to-take-everything reasons in stories for children. He is thoroughly one-note, and you probably can already picture him in your mind: black clothes, white hair, little round glasses, goatee, sharp face, always scowling and declaiming.

Timmy is out practicing his guitar in the woods one day near Thanksgiving, and a meteor – which we saw crash-land three hundred years earlier in a prologue – opens, with five furry “monsters” emerging. They don’t talk, but they’re musical Muppets – each one makes a particular sound/note, and they help him with his song. He tries to hide the monsters from everyone else, but Ann and Aunt Cly soon find out, and love them just as much as he does, including at least one musical number. (This was going to be a musical, so the cast breaks into song every ten pages or so.)

Meanwhile, Sump has heard the monsters, and wants to use them to force the Hendersons off their land. He’s also got a plot – possibly originally unrelated – to steal all of the other turkeys from all of his neighbors for unspecified reasons, which he puts into action, framing the monsters. The monsters are thrown into jail for eating turkeys, even though we readers know they only eat rocks.

Timmy helps the monsters escape jail – because it’s difficult to hold rock-eating monsters in a stone building – and it all comes to a head on Thanksgiving, with a thug hired by Sump running around with a shotgun trying to kill the monsters, Grover investigating both real crimes and the ones Sump alleges, and other tomfoolery.

In the end, there’s a song, good wins out, and the missing turkeys are found unharmed and stolen in Sump’s house – so they can all be slaughtered and eaten in the final scene. (I mean, yes, that’s how it works, but you don’t expect it to be so blatant in a story for kids.) Oh, and Grover finally admits he’s hot for Aunt Cly, so they start dating.

This would have been a perfectly cromulent 1968 TV special, which would have been re-run annually for much of the ’70s and then probably half-forgotten, with revivals now and then. It wasn’t, but it’s a comic now, so that’s close enough. It’s not a lost classic, but it’s a very Henson-y thing, with all of the music and found-family stuff, and this package also includes photos of the puppets Henson’s team built for the network presentations back in 1968 and some other historical material, which adds to the package.

If you’re looking for a Thanksgiving-themed comic to read – and I was – there’s not a lot to choose from, but this is a solid choice. Langridge always does good work, particularly when trying to depict music on the page or when doing Muppet-adjacent stories, so this fits well with his strengths.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Predator: Badlands hits Home Digital 1/6, Disc 2/17

BURBANK, CA (December 30, 2025) – A bold new chapter in the legendary Predator franchise arrives January 6 when Predator: Badlands unleashes its pulse-pounding sci-fi action on Digital, including Prime Video, Apple TV, and Fandango at Home. The hunt continues in the new year with the film’s arrival on 4K Ultra HD, Blu-ray, and DVD February 17.
 
Director Dan Trachtenberg steers the Predator franchise into bold new territory, with audiences enthusiastically embracing his vision. Predator: Badlands has emerged as the highest-grossing entry in the franchise’s 38-year history, earning $183 million worldwide and surpassing the previous record holder, 2004’s Alien vs. Predator ($177.4M). The film’s success is matched by strong audience and critical response, boasting a 95% Rotten Tomatoes® Verified Hot Popcornmeter score and an 86% Certified Fresh Tomatometer critics rating.
 
Predator: Badlands deepens Yautja lore by introducing new characters, Dek (Dimitrius Schuster-Koloamatangi) and Thia (Elle Fanning), following them on an underdog hero’s journey shaped by an unlikely alliance. Blending themes of survival and self-discovery with intense combat, striking visual effects, and moments of humor, the film delivers a high-stakes action adventure on both a visceral and emotional level. Fans can explore the world of Predator even further with exclusive bonus features, including behind-the-scenes featurettes that spotlight the film’s bold production design and visual effects, along with deleted scenes and additional insider content.
 
For the ultimate collectors within the Predator storyscape, a limited edition 4K SteelBook® dramatically captures the scale and intensity of battle with the Kalisk, while highlighting the unexpected alliance between Dek and Thia.

Film Synopsis
Set in the future on a deadly remote planet, Predator: Badlands follows Dek, a young Predator outcast from his clan, who finds an unlikely ally in Thia and embarks on a treacherous journey in search of the ultimate adversary.

Bonus Features*
• Deleted & Pre-Visualization Scenes with Optional Audio Commentary:
o Sand Trap – An early animatic version of Dek’s very different first encounter with Thia.
• Squirt Canyon – The full version of Dek and Thia traversing the water-filled trench while trying to survive Genna…and each other.
• Tessa vs. Abe – Tessa faces off against a superior synth in this deleted scene and storyline.
• Razor Grass – The original previsualization of Dek, Thia, and Bud’s first hunt together…sort of.
• The Outpost – Thia takes Dek to a small Weyland-Yutani field facility where they experience a few things that ended up being used elsewhere in the final film.
• Super Power Loader Extended – Special additional moments during Dek’s climactic final battle with the Super Power Loader and the Kalisk.
• Featurettes:
o Embodying the Predator – Meet the talented team of designers, performers, and effects artists responsible for bringing one of cinema’s most terrifying creatures to life on screen in ways we’ve never seen before!
• Authentic Synthetics – Get up close and personal with synths Thia and Tessa as star Elle Fanning walks us through the process of crafting two characters who may look the same but have evolved in surprisingly unique ways.
• Building the Badlands – With razor-sharp grass, killer trees, and terrifying animals, never has a planet been more deadly than Genna. Uncover how a team of artisans built this threatening landscape, transforming real locations into the dangerous environments seen on screen.
• Dek of the Yautja – For the first time, director Dan Trachtenberg has given audiences an extended peek at Predator culture. Follow the evolution as filmmakers reveal the process behind developing the Yautja’s home world, spacecraft, and family dynamics.
• Audio Commentary: Watch the film with audio commentary by Director Dan Trachtenberg, Producer Ben Rosenblatt, Director of Photography Jeff Cutter, and Stunt Coordinator Jacob Tomuri.
*Bonus features may vary by product and retailer

REVIEW: The Awakening of Roku

The Awakening of Roku
By Randy Ribay
279 pages/Amulet Books/$21.99

I was once again invited to the world of Avatar: The Last Airbender with the most recent offering in their Legends series of young adult novels. After previously entering this world, with no prior knowledge, with City of Echoes, I am now tasked with evaluating Roku’s story, a follow-up to Randy Ribyay’s 2022 book The Reckoning of Roku.

We know Roku today as a powerful Airbender, but this duology takes us back to his beginnings, notably his training and emergence as a promising young avatar. We open, three years after the previous book, in the dead of winter as Roku leaves his master, feeling the time has come to go out on his own.

En route to Agna Qel’a, he is forced off-course when he encounters an illness that has spread to the people of a Northern Water Tribe settlement. As he tries to help them, he discovers there is much more to this than a mere disease. He winds up partnering with his good friend Gyatso and a gifted waterbender named Makittuq.

We come to learn that their Tribal Chief Tiguaa had been harboring vital resources for profit. The illness that drew Roku’s attention proved to be one of many, including one that made even placid animals aggressive, threatening the villagers.

Ribay does a nice job deepening the friendship between Roku and Gyatso. Even after years of training, our hero harbors self-doubts as he continues to master the four elements, culminating in airbending (his opposite element). Sozin, who those far better steeped in this lore are aware, knows to be a Fire Lord, but here he is younger and a good companion to Roku.  He spends time trying to get Roku to confess his love for Ta Min, referencing their meeting in the previous volume, but Roku never finds the courage to do so, showing his youth and naivety. Their established friendship foreshadows events to come.

Similarly, introducing the Water Tribe nicely expands the world. It gives us greater insight into the reality of the time the story is set in, well before the events of the animated series.

His style is clear and draws you along without losing you. As a novice to this reality, I had little trouble piecing things together. This book successfully delivers action, character growth, and more profound lore, even if its style differs from previous entries. 

Jed McKay Wraps up 32 Year Avengers Run in March

New York, NY— December 23, 2025 — Superstar writer Jed MacKay closes out his time with Earth’s Mightiest Heroes this March in AVENGERS #36. Three years of dark mysteries, epic quests, and cosmos-shattering battles come to a head in a giant-sized, can’t-miss final issue, featuring artwork by current series artist Farid Karami. To celebrate this pivotal moment in Avengers history, original series artist C.F. Villa returns with a special farewell variant cover that mirrors Stuart Immonen’s cover for the debut issue of MacKay’s run.

From the introduction of the Twilight Court and the Ashen Combine to Kang’s temporal machinations and Blood Hunt, it’s been an era of dramatic triumphs and epic stakes. Now, everything Jed MacKay has built comes crashing down in this startling finale that will redefine the Avengers’ future!

On leaving the title, MacKay said, “It’s sad to say goodbye to the Avengers after the last few years of chronicling their adventures, but we certainly had some fun- introducing them to the Impossible City, putting them against their old nemesis, Kang, and even putting them through their paces in the blood-soaked first-ever Red Band event! I got to work with some of the best artists working today on some of the biggest characters Marvel has, and I’ll always remember my time with Earth’s Mightiest Heroes fondly!”

AVENGERS #36 will also set up the next era of Avengers. Fans curious about what’s next should look no further than this summer’s ARMAGEDDON, including upcoming lead-in stories to the event like Wolverine: Weapons of Armageddon; Captain America #6, the start of the next arc of Chip Zdarsky and Valerio Schiti’s Captain America run; and the recently announced Comics Giveaway Day™ title, Armageddon/X-Men #1 CGD 2026.

Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Time Trout by Doug Savage

First up: I know I missed one. In between the original Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy  and this book, there was Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Disco Fever, which is unavailable from any library near me, digitally or physically. (In fact, none of the nearby libraries seem to have any of the Laser Moose books in dead-tree form, which shocks and annoys me.) I may have to read it in a bookstore at some point, assuming I remember.

But I’m pretty sure there weren’t any shocking revelations or major change in Disco Fever: this is a middle-grade graphic novel series about a moose who shoots lasers out of his eyes and his best friend the slightly more reasonable rabbit, and that’s going to be the whole point. Oh, and they fight crime. Well, maybe not crime as such, since they’re out in the woods – but they help nice people and foil miscreants, so basically the same thing.

OK, so maybe Laser Moose gets a little wild with his eye-lasers, and cuts off the deer Frank’s leg once in a while. These kinds of things will happen when you’re defending the forest. And, anyway, Doc the raccoon can sew Frank’s leg back on. Again.

Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Time Trout is just what the title implies: another adventure of Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy, in which they meet and help out a time-traveling fish. A time-traveler from the polluted far future came back to their bucolic wilderness and dropped his time gizmo, which the fish immediately ate. (Because “I thought it might be a grasshopper. I tend to eat anything in the river, just in case it’s a tasty grasshopper. You don’t want to find out that it was a grasshopper later, when it’s already gone,” which makes just as much sense as anyone’s motivation in this series.) 

This makes the fish travel semi-randomly in time: a big purple vortex appears repeatedly to pull him off when he thinks about past events and then again to return him to the present day. Our heroes – plus the evil Aquabear from the first book – get caught up in the shenanigans, with the usual time-travel complications, including changing the past and seeing how current-day things actually got that way. Oh, and dinosaurs. Time-travel stories are required to have dinosaurs.

In the end, Moose and Rabbit put (nearly) everyone back in their proper times, get the time gizmo back to the traveler, and watch the fish follow the traveler off to the future in search of adventure.

It is aimed at middle-graders, which may be a detriment for some readers. I love the goofy tone, and the plot’s zippiness, and creator Doug Savage’s clean cartoony lines, all of which make it a lot of fun and solidly land it in that genre. Graphic novels for pre-teens can often be substantially less serious than those for older readers, and I appreciate that a lot. Savage is particularly good at that kind of thing.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Graylight by Naomi Nowak

Naomi Nowak published three graphic novels in the Aughts – I missed the first one, Unholy Kinship, but covered the second one, House of Clay, for ComicMix at the time. And now I’ve finally found my way to the third book, 2009’s Graylight .

At the time, I referred to her as “a cartoonist resident in Sweden, of Hungarian-Polish ancestry” and noted that she seemed to work in English. She might not be making comics, but she seems to still be in Sweden, and still making art – paintings and jewelry, these days. I don’t want to say art is art – I like to see narrative work, and have a bias in that direction – but it’s great to see artists having what looks like a reasonably sustainable career, making the things they want to.

Graylight is an allusive, imagistic book, colored out to the edge of the pages in tones that look just a bit desaturated to my eye – a unique, particular palette surrounding and supporting Nowak’s complex lines and complicated page structures. Lines defining people sometimes fade out or end unexpectedly, while objects – especially thematically important ones, seem to be closer to the surface of the page and shown in more detail.

The underlying story isn’t as complex as the way Nowak tells it: there’s a young woman, Sasha, in this unnamed village that we assume is somewhere in Sweden. She’s a bit flighty and self-centered: we see her with her friends and meeting a reporter, Erik, in town to interview a famous reclusive author, Aurora, who lives in the woods nearby.

Sasha impulsively – we think she does everything impulsively; she’s that kind of young person – goes along with Erik as his “photographer,” though we don’t see her holding a camera at any point. Aurora and her grown son Edmund are not happy there’s someone else with Erik for the interview, so Sasha flounces off, but not before (impulsively) stealing a book from Aurora’s house.

Sasha, over the next few days, starts a no-strings relationship with Erik – this somewhat frustrates him, since he wants more. 

There’s also something of a curse that starts to hit her, in ways Nowak presents almost entirely imagistically. Aurora knows she has stolen the book, and believes Sasha has the same kind of power she does – she’s a witch, more or less, and calls on two others like her to make the traditional trinity to call down her curse on Sasha.

There’s also what the book description calls a love triangle – Edmund hangs around, watching Sasha during the days before the curse comes on – but it’s not entirely clear if he’s in love with her, fascinated with her as an example of the outside world he’s unfamiliar with, or just keeping an eye on her for his mother. In any case, he eventually comes to see her, as the curse starts affecting her more strongly, and retrieves the book and breaks the curse (these may be the same action).

Again, Nowak tells this story through gesture – drawn in an idiosyncratic way – and allusive dialogue and imagistic pictures, rather than by explaining in any detail. It’s a visually fascinating book, full of striking images, with a story that I suspect different readers will take in somewhat different ways.

So many comics are easily pigeon-holed; it’s refreshing to find one as specific and different, in both style and substance, as this one.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Dear Beloved Stranger by Dino Pai

Everyone has one book in them, they say. Usually the “how I got here” story – whatever was unique or special or striking about childhood or life in general. I don’t think that’s dismissive; I like to think of it as celebratory: everyone can make at least one work of art, if they put in the time and effort and have the drive.

And when I come across a book that is “how I got here,” I wonder if this was the one book, or the springboard to a continuing career.

Dino Pai’s first major work was the 2013 graphic novel Dear Beloved Stranger . It’s somewhat autobiographical: Pai was a new graduate from art school, and his central character here is a new art school graduate named Dino. I never want to assume with semi-autobiographical stories, though: “semi” is a huge territory, and just using your own name doesn’t mean any particular moment or thought is taken from life.

Stranger is largely about the desire to create: Dino is out of school, looking for a job without much luck so far, and feeling stuck. So he starts making a story, after running into former classmate Cathy. That story is the story we’re reading, more or less, framed by letters to an unnamed “Dear Beloved Stranger.” I thought there was going to be some romantic tension with Cathy, or that she was the one Dino was writing to – I’m not sure if that was my misreading, Pai making that a possibility deliberately, or an unfortunate choice in the work.

But Cathy is really just the catalyst here, so making her an attractive classmate, of the gender Dino is attracted to, feels like a distraction – she could have been a male classmate, or a teacher, or some other mentor, and that would have made that role more distinct from the “Dear Beloved Stranger.” (Of course, maybe the answer is Pai wanted that ambiguity, or simply that “Cathy” was the real person in Pai’s actual life, and that bit is less “semi” and more fully autobiographical.)

The book is in multiple sections, in somewhat different art styles: the story of the young artist Dino, the work he’s creating, and how they merge together in the end. Pai moves from mostly greyish tones for the “real” scenes and soft colors for the fantasy sequences, both with an attractively detailed, just-this-side-of-fussy style.

We do learn who the stranger is in the end; I won’t spoil that here. It’s personal and important for Dino, and probably equally so for the real Pai, but I did wish it had been weaved in earlier in the book, and that Cathy wasn’t there as such an obvious red herring. But the story is satisfying; we feel for Dino and think that Pai did well in this first major work.

And if we then search to see what he’s done since – which I did – we find that he’s mostly been working in animation since then, making stories, but that he seems to have done some comics as well. I’m always happy to see that: I want creators to keep creating, for the people who make “here’s how I broke through and actually started making art” stories to keep doing that, in whatever ways they can and want to. So Dear Beloved Stranger was the beginning, but there’s more after it: this launched Dino Pai, and he’s been going since then.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

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