This week, I Love (And Rockets) Mondays leaves behind the lands of carefully tended and curated reprints and heads into the off-road weeds of messy serial comics. We’ll be back to carefully-tended a couple of times before the end, but Love and Rockets was a serial comic to begin with, and that’s how nearly all…
Flipping the script is a great way to freshen things up. The standard take on Young People Today is that they’re poor and stressed out, so how about giving your heroine more income than she knows what to do with and a give-no-fucks attitude? OK, sure, she still lives in a dumpy apartment with two…
An indy comic with bold, dark-outlined computer art and a cast off oddballs investigating weird things…I smell the ’90s! I kid, I kid. But Oddjob does feel very much of a particular era in comics. This book collects the full Slave Labor Graphic series of the same name (which followed a series of minicomics, some…
The cliche is that the happiest-looking people have the darkest secrets. I don’t know if that’s consistently true in real life — how would you design a study to test that, anyway? — but it’s a surefire winner in fiction, where contrast and irony are the go-to tools. Nate Powell’s new graphic novel Come Again…
No one’s perfect, y’know? You’re always going to have to deal with some things that aren’t exactly what you’d want when you’re in a relationship with someone. Sometimes it’ll be a dealbreaker — there’s an entertaining double-page spread in this book headed “Douchebags I’ve Dated” with some examples — but some things you might just…
First up, the consumer note that I wanted but didn’t get: this is indeed Volume 1 of the books reprinting the 2012 Captain Marvel series written by Kelly Sue DeConnick. (It contains twelve issues and the second volume has five more.) That was preceded by comics called Captain Marvel (just by Marvel, with various people…
It is pretty hard to have a team-up book where one of the two team members has no way to actually know the other one’s name. (Not to mention everyone else in the world, who know that name by some kind of comic-book-world telepathy, I think.) And, on an entirely different level, it is hard…
Comics has not been a terribly fertile ground for good science fiction. Oh, there’s been a lot of space opera, since comics are excellent at depicting coruscating beams of lambent force striking overwhelmed ray-screens and control panels exploding with showers of colorful sparks. But actual stories about people and their societies, in which the details…
I haven’t read Dave Sim’s Cerebus in years. At least ten, probably more like twenty. I fell off the horse sometime before the big ending — Cerebus famously was a self-published series whose creator declared he would do three hundred issues, monthly, and by gum he did it — during what I think of as…
I’m just focusing on the work in this series of “I Love (And Rockets) Mondays” post, and not getting into any behind-the-scenes stuff. But it’s clear that Gilbert Hernandez, for whatever reason, just generates more Love And Rockets-related material than his brother Jaime in the same amount of time, which I can imagine is an…
Dave McKean is a deeply classy cartoonist, the kind whose work is as likely to be first shown on the walls of a gallery as in a publication somewhere. And even his comics that do appear alongside other comical funnies are more serious and elevated than their peers — aiming to be Works of Art…
One good joke can you pretty far. Ask anyone who’s ever headlined a sitcom or had a popular stand-up act. [1] Or a big comic strip, more to the point. The early days of newspaper strips are a treasure trove of great examples: the same artists would have dedicated space in their paper, but not…
