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…
Well now. Debuting at the New York Comic- Con, five minutes to give you a really good idea of where they’re going with this one. Coming this December 21 from Warner Brothers and DC Comics. Starring Jason Momoa, Amber Heard, Patrick Wilson, Temuera Morrison, Dolph Lundgren, Willem Defoe, Djimon Hounsou, and Nicole Kidman.
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…
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…
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