First up, this is not non-fiction; there’s a disclaimer on the copyright page: “This book is a work of fiction inspired by actual events.” It does use the real names of all of the people involved, was written or co-written by the main character, and roughly follows the real history as far as I can…
[youtube Jumping in at volume four, you might want a <a href=” for Latecomers. Or, perhaps, you might want to know what happened in earlier Back to Basics books. This is a humorous, more-or-less autobiographical comics series originally published in France in the early Aughts, soon after the events depicted. Cartoonist Manu Larcenet moved from…
I may have this wrong, but here goes: Ordinary Victories is a series of four somewhat autobiographical bande dessinees by French cartoonist Manu Larcenet, originally published in French from 2003-2008 and published in two omnibuses in English soon afterward. The current English-language editions are back to being published individually, and seem to only be available…
I am lucky. I am a con man. I am a fraud. I am uppity. Let me explain…
Of course Paul Riforati is not Michel Rabagliati — he has a different name, see? But Rabagliati has now given us about 1200 pages of comics — not all of which have made it into the English language, true — about Riforati and his life. They may all be completely fictional: Paul may just be…
I’m guessing that comics began edging into my toddling into our flat when I was somewhere just north of infancy: five, six, somewhere in there. Paperbacks, though – different story. The first modern paperbacks weren’t published until 1935, just four years before I burst, noisily, into my parents’ existence. So, the publishing venue and I…
If you keep going long enough in a creative field, eventually someone will collect your stuff. If you’re reasonably successful, they’ll even collect the oddball stuff — the one-offs and blind alleys and test-beds and experiments that you made as you were working towards (or in between) the works that you were better known for….
Karen Reyes is ten years old in 1968, and she loves monsters. Monster movies, monster magazines, the idea of monsters — imagining that there are real monsters around her in her normal Chicago life. She’s also seriously bullied and outcast, with no real close friends as the book begins. And she’s telling us her own…
When I was eight years old, I was racing my new Tonka toy truck up and down the concrete sidewalk on my block. I was doing so by bending over and pushing the truck as fast as I could with both hands. The truck slipped out of my hand, and my momentum carried me quite…
Every once in a while, I’ll come across a picture of me from back in my twenties and thirties or even earlier. I look at myself and what I was wearing and how I wore my hair (I had more hair back then to wear). I sometimes had a mustache, I sometimes had a beard,…
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi is our penultimate book in the ComicMix Challenged Challenge — and probably our favorite book of the bunch. This is a first hand account of Marjane’s childhood in pre- and post-revolutionary Iran. This graphic novel not only takes the roots of very serious current events issue and breaks it down so…
Sunny Side Up By Jennifer L. Holm & Matthew Holm 216 pages, Scholastic Graphix, $12.99 Unlike so many of the offerings from the Scholastic Graphix line, this one requires paying attention to the structure as we jump around both time and place. The semiautobiographical memoir brings the timelines together as Sunny Lewin experiences her brother’s…
