This book looks very much like it’s going to be a parody of The Family Circus. There’s a male cartoonist, his beautiful and pearl-wearing wife, their four chibi children, and the round single-panel that encompasses all of them. But creator Benjamin Frisch apparently wasn’t interested in a re-run of the Dysfunctional Family Circus, and so…
I don’t know why the story reprinted in I Can’t Believe It’s Not the Justice League so obviously positioned itself as a one-time one-off. As a former editor and current marketer, I’m strongly against interrupting customers while they’re buying your stuff, but I’m not DC Comics. And this book does make it clear, in little…
You know, I think Gabby Schulz may just be a tad bit dramatic. It’s a feeling I have — partially based on my readings of his earlier books Monsters and Welcome to the Dahl House , partially because he can’t seem to decide if he is “Ken Dahl” or “Gabby Schulz,” and partly because Sick…
Reading comics digitally is weird for me: it’s so disconnected from the physicality of a real book, and (at least the stuff I have, mostly publicity copies) generally lack covers and explanatory copy, so it dives right into story without any explanation as to how or why or who. I also tend to have stuff…
Once again, I’ve gotten to a book several years too late, and that’s confusing me. I read the first Labor Days book (written by Phillip Gelatt and drawn by Rick Lacy, neither of whom I know from anything else) back in 2009 and reviewed it for ComicMix then. And then I got a spiffy digital…
Everyone gets older, in any world that tries to be real. Most comic-book worlds don’t try — how old is Peter Parker now? And how old was he in 1966? Jaime Hernandez’s comics world is real — or as real as it wants to be, with only minor occasional eruptions of superheroes and prosolar mechanics….
I have never been so tempted to take Jacob and Arnold Pander’s surname so literally. Perhaps it’s because Girlfiend started off as a screenplay, but this thin (but stylish) story of a runaway vampire girl and the boy she meets in the big city (Seattle) feels like a collection of second-hand attitudes and moments in…
It can be hard to praise things for being small without sounding condescending. Oh, what a quaint house! Aren’t you a darling little man! What an adorable book! I’m going to try to avoid that pitfall today. But what I like best about this graphic novel by writer Jamie S. Rich and artist Megan Levens…
Today’s story is about reading procrastination, or about good intentions, or maybe just how there’s more things we want to do in the world than there are things we have the time to do. Fifteen years or so ago, Dark Horse was humming along with its Star Wars comics program — a few things tied…
The romance of monkeys in tin cans continues to elude me. It was one of my pet peeves back when I was working at the SFBC — an endless stream of stories, all by men (it was always men) who imprinted on an Apollo launch early, with another piece of special pleading about how Man…
Last week, I looked at what Jaime Hernandez did right after the ending of the first Love and Rockets comics series in 1996. At the time, that could have been anything: completely different comics work, gallery paintings, film work, becoming a hermit in darkest Upper Slower Slobbovia. But, as it turned out, Jaime continued the…
You might think the stories in this book would feel like a break, but they don’t. Penny Century collects work from Jaime Hernandez from the great Love and Rockets hiatus: from right after the end of the first comics series (in 1996) through 2002, just after the start of the second series. One might assume…
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