This is not a sequel to Hedra . There’s no way it could be set in the same universe. But they’re from the same creator, from the same year, in the same genre, with a similar feel and with SFnal technology that works roughly the same way. So maybe it’s a companion piece, or another…
The book is not nearly as puckish as the cover suggests. Anyone looking for a Little Nemo-inspired imaginative adventure should look elsewhere; this is a memoir by a French visiting nurse about one particular patient of hers, an old woman with an unspecified dementia-related condition. And this is all true, as far as I can…
Cathy Malkasian’s 2017 graphic novel Eartha is a metaphor for social media. It’s more than that, too, but that’s the log-line: it is centrally an argument against fake “connectivity” and the addiction to bad news. (Whether the problem it metaphorizes is even our current problem in 2024 I’ll leave as an argument the reader can have;…
This is the one where things become both more and less complicated. On balance, probably less overall, by the end, which is unusual for the mid-point of a series. For any Gen Z readers coming to Scott Pilgrim for the first time (or, I guess, older people who managed to miss it): this is a six-book…
This may be me being cynical, I’m sorry to say. And that’s not anything a nice, brand-new YA graphic novel needs. But I am struck by the way that memoir has so taken over YA comics that everything else bends to that format – even a book like this, which is entirely fictional. Pearl is…
The Mythmakers By John HendrixAbrams Fanfare/224 pages/$24.99 In 1976, SUNY-Binghamton offered a comparative literature course focusing on C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. Unfortunately, I was a freshman, and it was a senior seminar, so I ignored it (my clever wife ignored that prerequisite and took it as a freshman anyway). Thanks to this graphic novel,…
When DC Comics unleashed the Crisis on Infinite Earths in 1985, it had two missions: celebrating 50 years of the publisher and cleaning the continuity, making the comic books more accessible to entice new readers. Throughout 2024, a year shy of the maxiseries’ 40th anniversary, the three-part direct-to-disc project was cleaning up or clearing out…
Apple+ debuted in November 2019 but needed a hit show to become synonymous with the streaming service, and they had to wait until August 14, 2020, when Ted Lasso arrived. The series features a fresh take on a character created by Jason Sudeikis for NBC Sports’ 2013 coverage of the Premier League. His then-girlfriend Olivia…
I don’t have the highest opinion of the work of Alexandro Jodorowsky, to put it mildly. (See my post on the Moebius/Jodorowsky product Madwoman of the Sacred Heart for a fuller rant.) I tend to think Moebius had massive tendencies towards self-indulgence at best, and that Jodorowsky fed into those, adding a soupy Euro mystic…
You know how, when you’re a kid, there are rigid rules to life that just seem to be there: generated by the kids themselves, random, unquestionable and bedrock? Zerocalcare’s graphic novels are set in a world – well, they’re memoirs, officially, so it’s the world inside his head, the real world as he sees it…
This book is one of the few records that a strip called Please Keep Warm ever existed. Well, there are launch announcements and excerpts elsewhere, but the actual GoComics strip has fallen into the memory hole, never to be seen again. The strip launched in February of 2017; this book came out in the summer of…
This is the remaining two-thirds of John Allison’s attempt to see if he could reconfigure the essential Britishness of his writing and port Tackleford wholesale to its American equivalent: Spectrum, South Dakota. (No, I don’t quite see it, either. I’m thinking some old mill town in western Massachusetts would be better, or somewhere in coastal…
