The Awakening of RokuBy Randy Ribay279 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,…
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…
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…
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…
Charley Butters is probably dead. He was a painter in his mid-life during the later 1950s, so by the time of this 2015 graphic novel – set, as far as I can tell, basically contemporaneously – he would have been at least in his eighties. But there are two more books in this series, so…
Most lives don’t have a specific story. People do things, they live and die, and it doesn’t form any particular shape. Famous people are more likely to have stronger story elements – there’s at least a rise, possibly a fall, probably phases or eras – but that only means better raw materials for a biographer….
MegalopolisBy Francis Ford Coppola, Chris Ryall, & Jacob Phillips160 pages/Abrams ComicArts/$25.99 While curious, I did not go to see Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis. I had read about the trouble shoot, the confused critics, and the box office doldrums, and never got around to it on streaming. Thankfully, Abrams ComicArts has provided us with a graphic…
The Essential PeanutsBy Mark Evanier336 pages/Abrams ComicArts/$75 I was growing up during Peanuts’ peak period, the 1960s-70s, and you couldn’t go anywhere without seeing images of the gang. Yes, I bought some of the Fawcett paperback collections from the Bookmobile and was thrilled that Apollo 10’s command capsule and lunar module were named Charlie Brown…
Art Baltazar and Franco have been making a very particular kind of comics for twenty years or so – kid-friendly versions of popular superhero and superhero-adjacent properties, bright and happy and light-hearted, colorful and zippy, full of rubber-hose cartooning and vibrant colors, with usually a cluster of short related stories with minimal plots but a…
The first volume collecting the Miller/Janson run on Daredevil included fifteen issues of the title series, plus two “try-out” issues of a Spider-Man comic Miller drew before that. Daredevil was published bi-monthly in those days, so that was a longer swath of time than comics readers these days realize: issues dated from February 1979 through July 1981….
Making Nonfiction ComicsBy Eleri JHarris & Shay Mirk272 pages/Abrams ComicArts/$29.99 There are numerous books available on how to write comics (I co-wrote one and am editing another), as well as on how to draw, letter, and color comics. However, no one really focuses on content like this excellent volume, which concentrates entirely on the growing…
I have two ways I could start with today’s book, neither of which has much to do with the book itself. I could mention I read another graphic novel by Renaud Dillies a decade ago, Bubbles & Gondola , and only vaguely remembered it when I saw a thumbnail image of the B&G cover at…
