Knowing what needs to be said in a story, and what can just be implied, is always tricky. We can all think of works that fail in both directions – overexplaining, or leaving things too murky. I think The Unlikely Story of Felix and Macabber doesn’t quite explain all of the things it should have…
The best creators are unique, with styles and concerns different from everyone else. You know their work clearly: it is what it is, and it is intensely itself. Julia Gfrörer draws thin lines, mostly all the same width. Her stories are set in the deep European past, told straightforwardly with a cold but not unsympathetic…
The Velvet Underground were famously the band who had only a very small fanbase while they were around – but, the joke went, every single one of those fans started bands of their own. So they were massively influential, which is nice, but not usually what people start rock bands to achieve. Koren Shadmi’s 2023…
I’ll probably be short here – my time is limited this morning and my old instincts in writing about mysteries (from doing reader’s reports for a decade and a half for bookclubs) is to explain everything in order, using every character’s name prominently. And that is, frankly, a lousy model for writing about mystery stories,…
Matt Kindt has been making stories about spies since the beginning of his career – but he’s found a new take this time. Spy Superb has a title that echoes his early success Super Spy (and its loose Lost Dossiers follow-up), and that is definitely intentional – but Kindt is substantially less serious this time…
The fourth collection of Stan Sakai’s long-running Usagi Yojimbo series collects a long – some would say “epic” – storyline that started in 1989 and ran through six issues of the comic. It’s largely the “gather all of the popular, previously separate, supporting characters” arc, and it has the same largely historical accurate but softened…
Do you ever find yourself complaining about the genre premises of a work? It’s not helpful, I can tell you. And it can waste a bunch of mental energy while reading until you realize that’s what you’re doing. For example, in a graphic novel mostly aimed at teen readers, with a mostly teen cast and…
New York, NY— October 20, 2024 — Just now at the Women of Marvel Panel at New York Comic Con, talent from across the industry, including Editor Sarah Brunstad and writer Stephanie Phillips, assembled to talk about Marvel’s legacy, tease upcoming issues some of Marvel’s women-led titles, and reveal this year’s Women of Marvel one-shot:…
With supposedly-nonfiction books, I’ll focus tightly while reading on how true they are, looking for any crack in the verisimilitude that might imply some fiction has made its way into the mix. I think that’s pretty common: we want to know what kind of stories we’re being told, how constructed they are, to know how…
I often find I’m thinking about or focused on the wrong things in the books I’m reading – that I need to specifically tell myself to ignore something so I can move on. For example in Julia Gfrörer’s short, dark, creepy 2013 graphic novel Black Is the Color , the story opens on a wooden…
This graphic novel says it’s based on a folktale, and I have no reason to doubt that. Whether it’s an ancient, well-known folktale or one made up by creator Nancy Peña to fit the story she wants to tell…there I do wonder a bit. It’s such a wonderfully visual story, one perfectly aligned with Peña’s…
From 1973-1985, two generations of Saturday morning television were raised on the exploits of DC Comics’ stellar array of heroes on ABC’s Super Friends. While the exact title changed through the years, the Hanna-Barbera series continued to display heroes and heroines as models of truth, justice, and the American Way. There are many who, having…
