Rose Jeff Smith & Charles Vess Graphix, 140 pages, $10.99 Earlier this year, Scholastic’s Graphix imprint completed releasing the nine volumes comprising Jeff Smith’s delightful [[[Bone]]. The full-color books are ideal entry points into graphic novels or even fantasy literature. Now, the prequel, [[[Rose]]], is finally joining the library in a softcover color edition. Rose…
Asterios Polyp David Mazzucchelli Pantheon, July 2009, $29.95 Comics are an essentially mongrel art, bred out of the scraps of two prior art-forms in the great kennel of popular culture. That’s no bad thing, despite what the mandarins might say – mongrels typically have the strengths of both parents, without the fussiness and decadent weakness…
George Sprott: 1894-1975 Seth Drawn & Quarterly, May 2009, $24.95 Comics very, very rarely tell stories about old, fat, boring men, which most people probably don’t think is a problem. But no art form can ever become mature if it ignores large swaths of the world, and it’s indisputable that our world is filled with…
…because when else will I get to run it? < p class=”text”>The Devil Ate My Blintzes, an illustrated poem, tells the story of Goldie and Gus, who live in Dogpatch-like bliss and sell “blintzes and wheel alignment” as well as “chicken soup and transmission fluid.” The trouble (and fun) starts when the Devil finds out…
Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou Bloomsbury, September 2009, $22.95 Despite the modern framing at the end of this book arguing about whether or not this was a tragedy or a happy ending by bringing computers into the whole thing to support the side of happy, which puts a…
Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays Edited by Brendan Burford Villard, May 2009, $16.95 For most of the past fifty years, American comics had been running through an ever-tightening spiral of acceptable topics – somewhat mitigated by occasional art-comics eruptions – as superheroes and (ever less and less) other areas thought acceptable for children dominated…
Richard Stark’s Parker, Book One: The Hunter Darwyn Cooke IDW, July 2009, $24.99 Richard Stark’s Parker novels come out of a particular period in literary history: the heyday of the disposable paperback for men. Paperbacks had appeared in their modern form just before WWII, and servicemen got used to carrying small paperbound books in whatever…
Likewise: The High School Comic Chronicles of Ariel Schrag By Ariel Schrag Touchstone, April 2009, $16 One of the nice things about reviewing for ComicMix is that people send you things that I would otherwise not consider reading or watching. Such is the case with [[[Likewise]]], an autobiographical graphic novel by Ariel Schrag. She began…
Famous Players: The Mysterious Death of William Desmond Taylor By Rick Geary NBM, August 2009, $15.95 No one does murder like Rick Geary. For more than a decade he’s been regularly creating slim books in this loose series, each depicting a separate, horribly violent crime of passion in his inimitable crisp and detailed style, each…
Stuffed! By Glenn Eichler & Nick Bertozzi First Second, September 2009, $17.99 Eichler writes for Stephen Colbert’s show, which is why [[[Stuffed]]]! has a prominent Colbert quote on the cover – and, perhaps, why it was published at all. It’s a graphic novel that wants to be satirical, particularly about the modern touchiness surrounding race,…
If you can’t license the characters, biograph the creator. Stephenie Meyer, the author of the Twilight book series, will be the focus of Bluewater Productions‘ latest Female Force comic book. Two versions of the biographic comic about Meyer will debut just before Summit Entertainment’s November 20, 2009 release of The Twilight Saga: New Moon. Written…
The Photographer By Didier Lefèvre, Emmanuel Guibert, and Frederic Lemercier First Second, May 2009, $29.95 Lefèvre was a French photojournalist – he died, unexpectedly and too young, in 2007 – and this book is an unusual combination of drawn comics and [[[fumetti]], telling the true story of part of his life. In 1986, Lefèvre took…
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