Early success is the most dangerous kind. Great success for something you did quickly can be even worse. When the two are combined…well, it’s hard for your career to be other than disappointing afterward. Nicolas wasn’t Pascal Girard’s first comics work, or first book — but it was really close, on both counts. And it’s…
I am in great danger of dancing about architecture here, so I’ll acknowledge it, first, and then try to move on. Nat Turner is a nearly wordless graphic novel: it contains only narration taken from The Confessions of Nat Turner (a contemporary account), and some sound effects. All of the characters in it are silent…
Doreen Green is still cute, still a bit chunky, still indomitable, and still the most upbeat character in comics. But she’s now a second-year student in Computer Science at Empire State U — which state is weirdly referred to as a “second-year alum” more than once — which means she’s that much closer to actually…
I’m not a lawyer. But I’m a lot more familiar with lawyers these days, having spent the last three years working with a bunch of them (including more “recovering lawyers” than one would expect) and marketing things to lawyers all day every day. So maybe this time I came back to Batton Lash’s long-running “Supernatural…
Lands of epic fantasy have one big continent, with an irregular coast. There may be islands off the coast here and there, but there’s only one continent, only one world. There’s one kind of people on one side of the continent and another kind over on the other side. Those groups don’t get along all…
A family of six flees a war-torn country, after American troops abandon it and let “invaders” from the other half of what used to be the same country conquer the portion they used to protect. The family has to sneak out by boat, crammed in with others, across an open sea, and hope for help…
[youtube Once again I see that I read the first book of a trilogy nearly a decade ago (The Color of Earth, in 2009), carefully shelved the following two books, and left them there for “someday.” Well, “left them there” is understating it: I had to move these books around repeatedly, looking at them over…
Children know more than adults give them credit for. They know huge things, things too big for words, things they try not to think about. As they get older, they can corral those huge things with words and tame them into the pieces of normal life. But kids can’t do that yet: the world is…
It’s taken two library systems to get me caught up on Zander Cannon’s giant-monsters-in-prison comic series, and that seems a lot more complicated than it should be. But any system that gets books you want to read into your hands is, in the end, a successful system — so I’m not going to complain. Cannon…
If a webcomic is intended all along to become a book — if it’s being created as a book, and put up online as a teaser or buzz-builder along the way — is it somehow less of a webcomic? I’m sure there are webcomics purists who will insist it is: there are purists for everything,…
As you might be able to tell from the year in the post title, I’ve gotten more than a little lackadaisical about keeping up with this annual series of the best in comics created by North Americans. (I reviewed 2006 at the beginning of 2007, 2007 later in 2007, 2008 in 2008, 2009 in 2009,…
To be a sad sack, a character has to be sad. If she’s just as put-upon by life, but has a chipper attitude the whole time, she turns into something else. I’m not sure if we have a name for that something else, but maybe we can start calling her a Lucky Penny. Penny Brighton…
