So much goes into comedy , especially comedy in comics – there’s funny writing, and funny drawing, and the intersection of the two, plus personal taste and sometimes all of that obscured by the passage of time. Something can be done well, with lots of wordplay, well-thought-out drawings and solidly amusing premises, but still feel…
I did not intend this to turn into Sarah Andersen Week here at Antick Musings, but why not? She’s funny, and the two books I read nearly back-to-back are funny in very similar ways, which could potentially be interesting. Fangs is a small unjacketed hardcover, stylish and blood-red. I believe it was Andersen’s fourth solo…
In memory , the past is moments. We slot in memories to specific points in time: that was when I was living there, remember when Y was five years old and started doing Z?, that was the Christmas when A had that crazy hat. But time is more fluid than that. Anything we remember was…
Self-publishing can strip out a lot of the standard bullshit of publishing. If this book had been published by a Fantagraphics or Dark Horse, it would be called something like Prairie Moons and Night Drives, or maybe True Stories and Other Lies. But, since Rick Geary assembled it himself out of his archives and published…
Gag-a-day cartoons are a wonderful and mysterious art, a triumph of style and viewpoint, precise phrasing and engaging drawing, with a clear point of view and a world that can be encapsulated in four panels but expands with four new panels every day for as long as the cartoonist is inspired. Well, good gag-a-day cartoons…
Serialization, the fans of floppy comics are fond of telling us, means that stories actually get told, since their creators can get paid while they’re working. If a creator had to finish an entire story before publishing anything…well, that might take years, and clearly no one can live on nothing for years and so, ipso…
We try not to get political here at ComicMix, but this is just too important in the wake of current events to ignore. The Second Amendment is clear: the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed. Granted, when the Founding Fathers wrote that amendment, they understood an “arm” to be a musket,…
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….
I don’t think anyone’s hired Kyle Baker to write screenplays for romantic comedies yet. But, from the evidence of books like Why I Hate Saturn and I Die at Midnight and this book, I think he’d be really good at it: he has a knack for screwball complications and the kind of dialogue that only…
As I type these words, today is today. Usually, today is yesterday or a day before or so, and if any of our other columnists pulled this stunt I’d be bitching my brains off. But, to paraphrase stand-up philosopher par excellence Mel Brooks, “it’s good to be the king editor.” I do have an excuse,…
Sometimes it’s like Oni Press just puts out books for our amusement! This week we review Our Cats Are More Famous Than Us: A Johnny Wander Collection by Ananth Hirsh and Yuko Ota.
