About a decade ago, writer Lewis Trondheim and artist Nicolas Keramidas made a bande dessinée for Éditions Glénat, the French arm of the global Disney octopus, about Mickey Mouse. It was called Mickey’s Craziest Adventures and pretended to be rediscovered pages from an obscure (probably American) 1960s comic, telling a long, convoluted and all-adventure story on…
I have to start, as usual, with my biggest criticism, and get it out of the way. I’m sorry to slam Axelle Lenoir and her publishing team so hard, but it has to be said. What If We Were… only has a three-period ellipsis in its title. This is wrong. When an ellipsis ends a…
First of all: this volume contains two things, which it does say pretty clearly: the title is The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell & The Fate of the Artist , after all. There’s one new book – Campbell dislikes the term “graphic novel,” so I’m going to see if I can consistently avoid it here…
So I kinda like Sarah Andersen’s cartoons, as discerning readers may have noticed [1]: she writes funny, she draws funny, and she has a quirky sensibility that means she tells goofy “I am an introvert” jokes that are familiar and relatable but not obvious. Just really good at the being-funny-in-public thing, with a distinct sensibility…
I have two theories about John Allison’s best stories, or maybe two versions of the same theory. One goes that his best works are organized around triumvirates – I should perhaps say triumfeminates – such as Bad Machinery and Giant Days , which allows the three main characters to bounce off each other in complicated ways….
If that cover image trips any warnings on whatever computing device you’re reading this on, I apologize – but it is the cover for this book. The Muse is an album-length graphic novel, written by Zidrou, drawn by Oriol, translated by Matt Madden, and published – only electronically; there’s no print version in English – by…
The thing to remember about young readers is that they’re young. Maybe not everything in the world is new to them (“Wow! Breakfast is oatmeal! I’ve never seen that before!”), but they’re seeing and experiencing new ideas and concepts and situations all the time. It can be hard for those of us who haven’t hit…
Today kicks off a mini-theme section of Book-A-Day; I read four 2009-2010 books from Fantagraphics over four days early in December, because I had them all digitally. They came in during the era when I was reviewing books seriously but getting many more things than I could fit into my Realms of Fantasy monthly column. The…
Even in a comics superhero continuity entirely controlled by one creative team and contained in one series of stories, there can be retcons and changes. And sometimes you don’t notice them unless you’re specifically looking for them. Take Strong Female Protagonist by writer Brennan Lee Mulligan and artist Molly Ostertag, originally a webcomic, which has…
I spend more time than is reasonable worrying if I’m doing things right. Even worse, often what I mean by “right” is “fitting the rules I made up myself, which I haven’t bothered to clearly codify.” Obviously, a healthy person would not spend time on anything like that, but I am a blogger, and so…
Hey, remember Minx? (Don’t worry, a lot of people don’t.) DC Comics launched that imprint in 2007 to great fanfare, with a raft of interesting creators (many from outside the comic-shop) world and a focus on fiction for teen girls that was unusual for comics of the modern era. It flopped in barely a year,…
Here’s a lesson I could stand to learn: if I pick up a book in a field I’ve been following reasonably closely for my entire adult life, and that book came out during my adult life, and I can’t remember hearing anything in particular about it, it’s very likely that’s because the book is not actually…
