Globetrotters: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s World TourBy Julian Voloj & Julie Rocheleau184 pages/Abrams ComicArts/$25.99 Elizabeth Jane Cochran liked to write under various names, beginning her journalism career as “Lonely Orphan Girl” for the Pittsburgh Dispatch before adopting the more familiar name Nellie Bly. As Bly, she checked into New York City’s Women’s Lunatic Asylum for 10 days…
Spider-Man Panel by PanelBy Stan Lee, Chip Kidd, Steve Ditko, and Jack Kirby384 pages/Abrams ComicArts/$60 After the success of Fantastic Four Panel by Panel, this book was inevitable. Thankfully, we get not only Amazing Fantasy #15, but all of Amazing Spider-Man #1. As with the first book, the first few hundred pages are composed of…
I felt lazy yesterday, and wanted a book I could read quickly and then write something quickly here. I may have been too lazy, if that’s possible. (I have my doubts.) So I read John Lustig’s Last Kiss: Casual Fridays . It’s a short, digital-only collection of that strip from 2013 – much like Sex Day…
The Avengers in The Veracity Trap!By Chip Kidd & Michael Cho64 pages/Abrams ComicArts/$25.99 Plain and simple, this book is a valentine to Jack Kirby. Chip Kidd and Michael Cho combine to produce a story that has the look and feel of an early 1960s Avengers story, evoking the King’s art style before it took an…
This one was a professional transition – it collects the first six issues (plus stories from issues seven and eight) of the second series of Usagi Yojimbo , from Mirage – but, within the story, there’s no indication of that. Creator Stan Sakai didn’t reboot the series, drop into long explanatory flashback stories for the…
I never want to discourage creators from stretching, from trying new things and talking to new audiences. But, sometimes, it just doesn’t really click. In the late ’90s, Peter Bagge had been making sarcastic comics about grumpy twenty-something slackers in Hate for more than a decade; his work was really closely associated with not just a…
For some reason, I thought this book was in comics format – maybe just from an assumption that’s how Lemire works, or that he draws so quickly that it would nearly as easy to do it that way as in text. But I was wrong: this is a conventional prose memoir, albeit one with lots…
I sometimes look at a Groo book and think “that will be a quick read, and an easy one to write about.” And then I’m wrong on both counts. It happened with the three-book Friends and Foes series in 22-23, and it just happened again now. Groo looks quick and breezy, but it’s a wordy comic, and…
Knowing what needs to be said in a story, and what can just be implied, is always tricky. We can all think of works that fail in both directions – overexplaining, or leaving things too murky. I think The Unlikely Story of Felix and Macabber doesn’t quite explain all of the things it should have –…
The best creators are unique, with styles and concerns different from everyone else. You know their work clearly: it is what it is, and it is intensely itself. Julia Gfrörer draws thin lines, mostly all the same width. Her stories are set in the deep European past, told straightforwardly with a cold but not unsympathetic…
The Velvet Underground were famously the band who had only a very small fanbase while they were around – but, the joke went, every single one of those fans started bands of their own. So they were massively influential, which is nice, but not usually what people start rock bands to achieve. Koren Shadmi’s 2023…
I’ll probably be short here – my time is limited this morning and my old instincts in writing about mysteries (from doing reader’s reports for a decade and a half for bookclubs) is to explain everything in order, using every character’s name prominently. And that is, frankly, a lousy model for writing about mystery stories,…
