There are two ways of discovering beginnings. If you were there at the time, you see it as it happens, and watch as it becomes itself and turns into middle. But most of us aren’t there at the time, particularly for creative works — the point of beginnings is that creators come out of a…
I’m here because I’m looking backwards. Why else would any of us be reading the first collection of a nearly thirty-year-old comics series? [1] I recently read the first collection of the current Shade the Changing Girl series, which reminded me of this Peter Milligan/Chris Bachalo/Mark Pennington version, which began in 1990 and ran through…
Let’s say there was a little-known Disney comic: Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories: Mickey’s Quest, which was published somewhere obscure for most of the 1960s and entirely forgotten since then. And let’s say there was a serial in that comic, called “Mickey’s Craziest Adventures,” a single page a month for almost that entire decade, with…
Any self-respecting family story needs a flashback. Whether it’s a Ross Macdonald novel finally explaining just what horrible thing happened twenty years ago in Canada or a family saga that stops in the middle of Chapter Two to explain just how Sadie McGuffins first came to the Maritimes from Scotland as a teen domestic servant…
I don’t want to oversell my expertise here: I’ve never worked in a law firm, and my professional work is generally marketing to attorneys within companies rather than firms. So I may be just saying that one thing I’ve never experienced personally matches another thing I’ve never experienced personally. [1] But Hartley Lin’s Young Frances…
Why does someone go on a pilgrimage in modern Europe? The obvious reason would be religion, but that’s rarely the central purpose these days. It’s not part of general cultural life for Christians — not the way the hajj still is for Muslims — and many of the people who make those journeys aren’t particularly…
I don’t read enough books aimed at kids to really know the shapes of subgenres these days, and so it’s dangerous for me to speculate. But I’m pretty sure the 5 Worlds series is not the only graphic novel series these days marching down the trail that Kazu Kibuishi’s Amulet series blazed. I’m not saying…
When religious people talk about the dangers of pure scientism, they’re talking about Jimmy Yee. Maybe a bit about his creator, Jason Shiga, too. But Yee is the poster boy for why believing in only what you can prove is really, really bad: he murders an appreciable fraction of the entire human race during this…
Dungeon Fortnight #2 Hyacinthe was still basically an innocent at the end of the two albums collected in The Night Shirt, but the back half of the Early Years sub-series, collected in the English-language book Innocence Lost , definitively turns him into the older, cynical Keeper that we see in Dungeon Zenith. He starts off…
So, there’s a world where all of the superheroes get their powers from food. It’s not actually weirder than any other superhero universe, to my mind, but it’s definitely weird in a different direction. I like that, since superheroes tend to be all too much of the same thing all the time, but I know…
I can’t prove this is the best strategy, but I tend to read a book first and then research it afterward, when I’m trying to figure out what to write here. As you may have noticed, I can be opinionated, so I try to minimize the chance of having strong opinions about something before I…
Alan Moore is a deeply self-indulgent writer, always wallowing in his particular obsessions and loves. He gained huge fame for the times his obsessions lined up well with those of a wide audience — and, of course, for being really good at making compelling stories out of those obsessions. But the downside of being a…
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