When a creator you like turns to creating works for younger readers, you have two choices: follow him along, and check out the new stuff, trying to have an open mind, or to avoid the new stuff and grump about how creators should keep doing the things you discovered them for, grumble grumble. OR –…
This was Richard Sala’s first book; this edition is (at least for the moment) Richard Sala’s last book. Sala died in mid-2020, alone at home, of what turned out to be a heart attack. He didn’t die of COVID, but I have to believe he’s one of the many, many people who would have had…
Dick Giordano was a major Robert B. Parker fan, which is how I first learned of him and his creation, Spenser. In fact, I once spent a lengthy lunch hour in line at the Fifth Avenue Barnes & Noble to get the latest release autographed for Dick. From there, I began reading the books and…
Comics are about sex less often than most artforms. Call it a lingering prudishness, the hangover from long decades seen as a medium just for kids, or just the fact that drawn sex is inherently a bit more fleshy than the written kind. But it’s true: comics avoid sex a lot of the time, and…
I read The Incal at least thirty years ago, during the burst of Mœbius republications from Marvel. As I recall, I thought it was OK space opera, with an annoying main character and more mystical mumbo-jumbo than I preferred. (At the time, I was much more enthusiastic about the Blueberry stories, a long Western series…
If this were a TV show, it would be a pilot that didn’t get picked up: it obviously aimed to start a series, and, a decade later, it didn’t. There are a lot of plot points, themes, and ideas that aren’t completely explained or fleshed out here – but of course there would be, if…
I’ve been known to bemoan the fact that the caption was basically wiped out of mainstream US comics in an extinction event roughly congruent with the big ’90s crash. I’ll admit that captions may have made a comeback since, like tiny mammals after the Chicxulub impact, but I read mainstream comics only rarely these days,…
Avatar Legends: City of EchoesBy Judy L. Lin320 pages/Amulet Books/$21.99 I know this much about The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, so I approached this first novel in what is being billed as the Avatar: Legends series. Is the title intended to be about stories set in and around the Avatar series, or…
Books that are obvious metaphors can be tricky. Especially if you’re not quite sure exactly what they’re a metaphor for. I think Anna is Mia Oberländer’s first major graphic novel – it says it was created as part of her thesis in illustration at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences – so I don’t have…
I didn’t think Grant Snider made comics quickly enough to put out a book every year – he’s a working orthodontist, as I always find a way to fit in when I write about his work, since it’s such a highly-skilled, well-paid, and useful career and yet anti-glamorous and low profile at the same time…
Everyone has story elements that annoy them unreasonably. For me, it’s often small factual things that undermine core themes of a book – the ones that make me think, “wait, well if she can do X, then Y can’t be true.” So I spent a lot of time while reading Eric Drooker’s 2024 graphic novel…
Phenomena Book Three: The SecretBy Brian Michael Bendis and André Lima AraújoAbrams ComicArts/144 pages/$25.99 I have to hand it to Brian Michael Bendis. The writer is far from a one-trick pony, and no two series have the same feeling. Here, partnered again with André Lima Araújo, he has come up with a light family-oriented science…
