There’s not a whole lot to say about this book as a book, so it might be time for some Book-A-Day behind-the-scenes. You see, to keep the hopper fed — especially early in the year, which sets the tone and energy for the whole project — I’m making sure to read at least one book…
Reading a book at four-year intervals is probably not the best way to keep it in the front of one’s mind. But I read the first two volumes of Shoulder-A-Coffin Kuro (one and two) back in 2010, and then the third in 2014, so, since it’s 2018 now, I couldn’t continue any earlier than now,…
I believe I’ve had this book on the shelf for ten years, which means it’s one of the small number of things that survived my 2011 flood. (That destroyed my entire basement and somewhere around 4,000 books.) I’m not sure why or how this book survived, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t managed to read…
We all regret our twenties. Some of us regret how quickly we settled down and got boring, and some of us regret that we didn’t settle down and get boring, at all or quickly enough. I’m one of the former; I think Julia Wertz is one of the latter. Museum of Mistakes is the big…
This book has more panels introducing its characters than any comic I’ve ever seen in my life. I know it was originally published as twelve individual issues of the Jack Staff comic, but it’s much more common than that — so often that I started to think this had been serialized somewhere, no more than…
For those of you scoring at home, this is the major Brandon Graham comic that does not include a random hardcore sex scene thrown into the middle (The one that does is Multiple Warheads . Graham toiled in the sex-comics vineyards for several years, and one sex-comic idea blossomed or transformed into an idea that…
I am so glad middle school is far behind me. I even gladder my two sons are past those years as well, and that I don’t expect to have any other kids to shepherd through those years. And I don’t think it’s purely Schadenfreude when I read a story about middle-schoolers — but there might…
Jennifer Hayden is a middle-aged New Jerseyan, telling stories here about her growing kids and family life — so why did it take me so long to get to a 2011 book so close to my own life and experience? (I’m generally all over that stuff: don’t we all love to be validated by art…
The world might not have expected a homage to The Fearless Vampire Hunters. The world may not have needed a homage to The Fearless Vampire Hunters. The world may not have wanted a homage to The Fearless Vampire Hunters. But the world got one. Mike Mignola has been making comics about vampires (and similarly ghoulish…
I have a hard time telling if I’m supposed to take this seriously. I mean, the volume subtitle is “Fourgy,” and there’s a food truck, apparently a franchised operation, called “Wide Wiener,” with a humorously double-entendre theme song. But it also has a melodramatic comic-book plot, and a more kitchen-sinkly dramatic human story. So I…
“Aw, this is a sequel to somethin’!” – Crow T. Robot I never read Kings in Disguise. On the Ropes is a sequel to Kings in Disguise. So anyone who is looking for a comparison to Kings in Disguise will be disappointed. Anyone wondering how many consecutive sentences I cram Kings in Disguise into, though,…
The hardest thing, for me, is to write on a book about normal people’s normal lives — without the genre trappings of excitement and violence, without the framework of some standard plot, without being able to do the Hollywood high concept thing of matching a new work with X and Y from the past. When…
