There’s a point where, as a reviewer and critic, you either need to engage fully with your material or just walk away from it. Holding it at arm’s length doesn’t do anyone any good. And I’m very aware that all of my posts about the great female-centric comic Lumberjanes — see my posts on volumes…
Alan Moore famously has a love-hate relationship with superhero comics. Well, I mean, a lot of people love or hate superhero comics, and plenty do both. The difference is that superhero comics hates and loves Moore back. In the late ’90s, after he’d cast a magic incantation cursing DC Comics and all of its wares,…
I spend more time than is reasonable worrying if I’m doing things right. Even worse, often what I mean by “right” is “fitting the rules I made up myself, which I haven’t bothered to clearly codify.” Obviously, a healthy person would not spend time on anything like that, but I am a blogger, and so…
I read the first volume of Martian Confederacy nine years ago, around the time it came out, but clearly didn’t love it enough to jump into the second book any time quickly. But time wounds all heels, and, during a business trip recently, I remembered that I had The Martian Confederacy, Vol. 2: From Mars…
Hey, remember Minx? (Don’t worry, a lot of people don’t.) DC Comics launched that imprint in 2007 to great fanfare, with a raft of interesting creators (many from outside the comic-shop) world and a focus on fiction for teen girls that was unusual for comics of the modern era. It flopped in barely a year,…
This book came out of a particular moment, and a particular place — England, in the mid-80s, during one of its periodic frenzies about “offensive” material in comics form. But it’s more generally applicable, to any nation that claims a heritage from an Abrahamaic religion (which includes, I’ bet, 95%+ of the people reading this.)…
I do like titles that end with “by {insert author};” they save me time and space on my post titles. Perhaps I should do a year where I only read books like that. (I rely on you readers to talk me out of patently stupid ideas like that one.) I have a feeling Liz Prince…
Gilbert Hernandez is a cartoonist of extremes. Just looking at his work related to the Palomar/Luba set of stories, he ranges all the way from the joyous porn of Birdland to the (equally joyous, in very different ways) kid-friendly stories from the turn of the century about Venus. Venus also appeared in stories that aren’t…
Andi Watson, I think, started off expecting to tell stories of action and adventure in comics, with a fantastic flair, but kept finding those stories turning more personal and character-focused as he told them. (I could say “more mundane,” but that sounds like an insult. It isn’t: life itself is mundane. But it sounds that…
I’m pretty sure this has been published in one volume, at least once. But the current edition is two volumes, and that’s what I read. (Long before that, it was published as fifteen comic book issues, and I had those as well, before my 2011 flood. But all things must pass.) “This” is the first…
Now, I know that I tend to focus on the negative, even when the positive is much larger and objectively more interesting. I usually blame that on “editor brain” — when you spend years pulling apart stories for a living, it forms a habit that you just can’t break. So let me say up front…
Some historical moments date much faster than others, and that can be deeply amusing if you lived through them. Y2K is the great recent example: it was a huge deal before it happened, and was forgotten and ignored almost immediately afterward when the popularized apocalypse failed to actually happen. Kyle Baker’s graphic novel I Die…
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