This is the third collection of Will Henry’s Wallace the Brave daily strip; it follows Wallace the Brave and Snug Harbor Stories . Usually, with a series, the advice is to start at the beginning – but any half-decent newspaper comic has to be capable of standing on its own, every single day, out of…
This is all true, as far as I know. Zoe Thorogood says this book is the story of six months in her life, as filtered through her own head. But everything everyone ever sees or knows is filtered through their heads, so that’s reality as best we know it, always. It’s Lonely at the Centre…
The first time this book was translated into English, a decade and a half ago, the title came out as “What Is Precious.” This time, in a translation by Mercedes Claire Gilliom that I think I found more colloquial than Joe Johnson’s back in 2008, the title is Precious Things . What difference does that…
Literary fiction is identifiable in any format: the story of unhappy people told with care and grace and close attention, from outside. It’s not necessary that it be set in the recent past, but that helps: sometime just long ago to be before the working lives of the audience, but still familiar – say, fifty…
Stories about old people who are happy and content being old, who stoutly resist fantastic temptations otherwise, are I think always the products of much younger people. Actual old people are much less sanguine about looming death, I find, less likely to smile indulgently at mantlepiece pictures of themselves in their younger days, sigh contentedly,…
I say this a lot, but audiences are important. If you’re putting something out into the world, and don’t have a sense of who would care about it, it might be because no one will. But “people like me” is a valid answer. “People like me at age 10” is an even better one. People…
I have no idea why this very specific and distinctive book has such a generic-sounding title. I could make up stories of epic battles behind the scenes, with different factions jockeying for utterly different titles (How Daisy Saved the World! My Y2K Story – Really! The Second-Worst Journey in the World! What I Did on…
I have children, but I didn’t carry them: I’m the other parent. I have children, but their birth was a long time ago: my younger son was born in 2000. Which is to say I inevitably read a book like Kid Gloves , Lucy Knisley’s comics-format memoir of her pregnancy and the things that came…
I used to read a lot of strip-comics collections: I assembled a full set of Doonesbury back in the day, kept up with Dilbert until the writing on the wall was too obvious to ignore [1], and had multiple books from probably a dozen other currently-running strips over the years. But, somehow, the past decade…
Andi Watson is a criminally underrated maker of comics. He’s done great work for almost three decades now, but I never see him included on the list of greats. Maybe it’s because he never dabbled in the core Wednesday Crowd (is it still Wednesdays? I lose track, and the big day was Friday way back…
This is a flashback: you need to know that first. Guy Delisle’s comics career has been mostly circling the lands of memoir – a series of longer, more serious books about his travels, created when he was a working animator and/or lived in interesting places of the world (Shenzhen , Pyongyang , Burma Chronicles, Jerusalem…
I may be spoiled. It’s been a while since I hit the end of a graphic novel (or bande dessinee, in this case), realized it was the kind of “Part One” that doesn’t have a real ending, and couldn’t get the next book immediately. But In Shadows, Book One , by Mallié and Hubert –…
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