Matt Kindt has been making stories about spies since the beginning of his career – but he’s found a new take this time. Spy Superb has a title that echoes his early success Super Spy (and its loose Lost Dossiers follow-up), and that is definitely intentional – but Kindt is substantially less serious this time out than…
The fourth collection of Stan Sakai’s long-running Usagi Yojimbo series collects a long – some would say “epic” – storyline that started in 1989 and ran through six issues of the comic. It’s largely the “gather all of the popular, previously separate, supporting characters” arc, and it has the same largely historical accurate but softened for…
Do you ever find yourself complaining about the genre premises of a work? It’s not helpful, I can tell you. And it can waste a bunch of mental energy while reading until you realize that’s what you’re doing. For example, in a graphic novel mostly aimed at teen readers, with a mostly teen cast and…
Conceived by Barbara Pyle and media mogul Ted Turner, Captain Planet was an ecological hero way ahead of his time. The animated series ran for years with some nifty design work by Neal Adams and his Continuity Associates. Each episode featured an adventure and a lesson (of course). It endeared itself to a generation of…
Okay, I get it. The West Wing is a fantasy. But it’s not just a liberal fantasy television series. It is a series that celebrated patriotic Americans who all thought they were working to create a better country. The staffers in the west wing of the White House and their president strove to bring their…
With supposedly-nonfiction books, I’ll focus tightly while reading on how true they are, looking for any crack in the verisimilitude that might imply some fiction has made its way into the mix. I think that’s pretty common: we want to know what kind of stories we’re being told, how constructed they are, to know how…
In spring 1994, I was reading a series of articles in The New York Times about pilots for the forthcoming TV series, and they profiled a series featuring six twnetysomethings trying to adjust to adulthood. It sounded promising so my wife and I sampled the NBC series the following September. And Friends has been running…
I often find I’m thinking about or focused on the wrong things in the books I’m reading – that I need to specifically tell myself to ignore something so I can move on. For example in Julia Gfrörer’s short, dark, creepy 2013 graphic novel Black Is the Color , the story opens on a wooden…
This graphic novel says it’s based on a folktale, and I have no reason to doubt that. Whether it’s an ancient, well-known folktale or one made up by creator Nancy Peña to fit the story she wants to tell…there I do wonder a bit. It’s such a wonderfully visual story, one perfectly aligned with Peña’s illustrative,…
From 1973-1985, two generations of Saturday morning television were raised on the exploits of DC Comics’ stellar array of heroes on ABC’s Super Friends. While the exact title changed through the years, the Hanna-Barbera series continued to display heroes and heroines as models of truth, justice, and the American Way. There are many who, having…
Across 39 episodes, HBO’s Succession deftly explored familial dysfunction and corporate malfeasance, drawing inspiration from numerous sources, notably the Murdoch empire and its aging patriarch, Rupert. But the show went beyond that with side trips into egotism, child rearing, negotiating communication post-divorce, and the consequences of decisions, both those made and those avoided. As a…
The obvious thing to start out with would be a joke about how only the French would make a 250-page graphic novel about cooking. But I don’t want to be dismissive: this is a both heavily-researched and user-friendly overview of something that’s hugely important for everybody – we all gotta eat, and the vast majority…
