Here’s a lesson I could stand to learn: if I pick up a book in a field I’ve been following reasonably closely for my entire adult life, and that book came out during my adult life, and I can’t remember hearing anything in particular about it, it’s very likely that’s because the book is not…
2011’s installment of Love and Rockets was very much the continuation of the year before: Jaime finishes up “The Love Bunglers” here, in four devastating chapters, and Gilbert continues to circle Hollywood with his characters Fritzi and Killer in two stories, one of them “fictional” within the world of Love and Rockets and one of…
Anyone who does a graphic novel about his father’s secrets and history has a long shadow to contend with. (It’s art spiegelman’s Maus, in case you’ve forgotten.) The closer that father was to WWII, the clearer the parallels. If the father was Jewish…even more so. Now, a creator doesn’t have to engage with that at…
This is not a collection of the Squirrel Girl comic. Somehow, in 2016, while I think they were also putting out the regular comic monthly, creators Ryan North (words) and Eric Henderson (pictures) also created this unpaged-but-clearly-at-least-a-hundred-pages-long OGN as well. I’m not totally clear on where it fits into continuity, if you’re looking to read…
This will probably be the last time you see me grumble about Ms. Marvel. I just checked the local library system, and they do not have the next volume — the NYPL might, since it is vast and contains multitudes, but I don’t have the easy access to that system that I had when I…
Comics are not movies: obviously. The two forms do have some things in common, and can use similar visual language — they’re both storytelling mediums with limited space for dialogue and various ingenious ways to show time passing, among other parallels. But, even at best, they’re parallel: they can do similar things in different ways….
I’m going to start out with a potted rant; regular visitors may want to skip it. A graphic novel is not “by” the writer. It is not “illustrated” by the artist. It is an inherently collaborative work equally created by both of them. (Assuming there are only two: it could easily be more.) Crediting a…
I don’t have an accurate record of when Dave Sim first said Cerebus would run for 300 issues. But my guess is that his plans became real during this storyline. The first volume of Cerebus, which I covered last month , saw Sim moving rapidly from an amusing Thomas/Smith Conan parody with an oddly funny-animal…
In a serial medium, there’s always the need to make sure the audience keeps up. So each new installment needs to do some work to give backstory, either with the potted “who they are and how they came to be!” box or flashbacks or whatever. And when the story is moving quickly, one of the…
I don’t want to call Multiple Warheads just a stoner comic — for one thing, I’m about as far from a stoner as you can get, and I like it quite a bit. But there’s a definite free-and-easy, anything-goes vibe to it that will appeal to the cannabis-inclined among us. Brandon Graham started Multiple Warheads…
What do you do with the quirky minor failures of a major creator? Well, you can ignore them, and that’s what happens most of the time. You can also try to spiff them up a bit, and get them walking two by two, in hopes that they’ll look more impressive in company. If the creator…
I have two ways I could start this, and I don’t know which one to take. So my indecision will instead be the actual starting point, and I will provide you with two options: Last time out, I noted that Sex Criminals seemed to be sliding in the direction of being a superhero comic about…
