Sometimes working titles survive everything the book-production process can throw at them. The new project comes in with a title everyone assumes will be replaced, eventually, by something better, but then the whole team gets used to it, every new option is shot down for various reasons, and the placeholder title seems OK by comparison….
Comics artists of a certain age always want to draw Loki in a helmet with big twisty ram’s horns. I know why, they know why – we all know why. But reminding readers of bombastic comics for kids, hacked out monthly and printed on the cheapest paper available, might not be the mental connection you…
One of the oddest things, for me, about the contemporary cartooning world is that everybody has to be an entrepreneur now. (I mean, yeah, I know, late-stage capitalism hits all of us and all that jazz, sure, but even more so for cartoonists.) It used to be that cartoonists who did lots of different things…
I’ve always been a fan of complication – especially if it’s complicated mostly in my own head. So a book about a Spanish couple moving to live in Japan for an extended period, originally published in France and translated into English for American publication by a mostly French company headquartered in Hollywood…well, that’s the kind…
Names are not unique: I need to remind myself of that every so often. Today I have a book of comics from a small Canadian publisher called Renegade Arts Entertainment, and, at first I thought, “Renegade? Surely it’s not the same one?” It’s not. The Renegade I was thinking of – Renegade Press, the mid-80s…
So it looks like I discovered Sarah Andersen’s comics in late 2021, and read all of her books within roughly a year: Adulthood Is a Myth , Fangs , Big Mushy Happy Lump , Herding Cats , Cryptid Club , and Oddball . That’s always fun – discovering a new creator and reading all the…
I don’t want to say “art of” books always come out as line extensions after a creator has died and can’t produce new work, but…it’s pretty darn common. This book, for example: The Art of Edena , part of the vague “Moebius Library” (which seems to be primarily, if not entirely, posthumous itself). It was…
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 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…
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…
SANTA MONICA, CA (September 10, 2024) – Fall into a new world when The Crow arrives on Premium Video, on Demand, and Premium Electronic Sell-Through on September 13 from Lionsgate. Based on the iconic graphic novel, The Crow tells the dark love story of Eric and Shelly, and the lengths one will go to for…
