Philip is about forty. He has one of those jobs you can do from anywhere, on a laptop, so he does it from his apartment, alone. He lives in a British city, probably mid-sized – not very specific, not very special. His apartment is garden-level, which means he looks out his window, while typing on…
I didn’t know this was wordless going into it. Wordless books pose a challenge to the critic, for all the usual dancing-about-architecture reasons, but this is sweet and lovely and expressive, so let’s see what words I can dig up that Juan Berrio didn’t need. Kiosco is a horizontally-formatted graphic novel, generally one big wide…
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…
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…
I try not to be a gatekeeper. I have standards and expectations – and, like everyone else, some tropes and styles and story-structures I like better than others. But I like to think I can take the how and what as it comes. So I haven’t mentioned the syndicated comic “strip” Last Kiss here before,…
The single-name thing seems to have leapt from Eurocomics and landed on North American shores – well, we’ve always had it in other fields, like music (Cher! Madonna!), but comics-makers are embracing it as well. I may be concerned that our Strategic Name Reserve is in danger of being depleted – there aren’t that many…
As far as I can tell, this 2018 book is the only collection of the “Sketchshark” comic – more than that, it’s creator Megan Nicole Dong’s only book to date, and “Sketchshark” was the title of her (long-abandoned) Blogspot site and maybe the original title of the (only mildly abandoned) related Tumblr , which now…
I have to start, as usual, with my biggest criticism, and get it out of the way. I’m sorry to slam Axelle Lenoir and her publishing team so hard, but it has to be said. What If We Were… only has a three-period ellipsis in its title. This is wrong. When an ellipsis ends a…
How do any of us choose the next book to read? Looking at a big list of possibilities – all things you don’t know well, all things new and different – what sparks the thought “that one”? This time, it was hair. On the cover of Time Under Tension , her major 2023 graphic memoir,…
There are times when I don’t have much to say here. I read a book, I mostly liked it, I’ve already read a number of things by the same creator, I don’t have anything particularly new or specific to say this time. And that sounds so horribly minimizing, doesn’t it? But “this is good stuff,…
This strip isn’t exactly new to me – I’ve seen a bunch of Buni cartoons over the years, all over the place – but it’s not one I ever made an effort to read regularly. So I’m coming at it as a mostly-uninformed reader: I know it’s wordless, that the title character is happy and…
A.J. Dungo obscures the central theme of his first graphic novel for a long time. The cover copy only hints at it. I have to assume that’s all on purpose. And, to be a fair reviewer, I feel like I should do the same. But know that In Waves is a true story, that it’s…
