Did you know there are at least two comics about animals that talk? (Random animals, out in the world, and not talking to humans, but to each other.) I say “at least” because if there’s two, there’s probably more than that. The one I was vaguely aware of is called (unsurprisingly) They Can Talk, and…
By Dayton Ward A while back, I was asked by the good folks at ComicMix to submit myself to watching the “complete” Blue Thunder TV series in honor of its release on Blu-ray. Although I was and remain a fan of the original 1983 film on which the series is based, I’d never seen the…
My first thoughts are trivial, distracting: how long do werewolves live, anyway? I mean what we might call the Metric Standard Werewolf, beloved from folklore, and not any modern author’s bespoke version, for greatest applicability. Because The Werewolf at Dusk and Other Stories is a collection of three stories largely about being old, and I…
So Gilbert Hernandez makes his regular comics stories – I almost said “normal,” but that’s not the right word here – with continuing characters set in a real world. They get pretty rococo; Hernandez is fond of overcomplication and of turning his theme-amplifier knob up to eleven and then trying to twist it up even…
When you self-publish a comic on any kind of regular basis, you tend to pour all of your creative work into that one outlet. (I don’t think there’s anything similar in other art forms – non-comics ‘zines, maybe, but that feels like a variation of the same idea. Very few media have both the low…
Guy Delisle’s new book last year – his first graphic novel since 2021’s Factory Summers – was something of a change of pace. Delisle, to this point, had mostly had two strands of his career – the short books of funny strips like the four “Bad Dad ” collections and some early work , and…
If you knew nothing else, and heard that Raina Telgemeier and Scott McCloud had made a graphic novel together under the title The Cartoonists Club , what would you think? Most of us would say something flippant like “Oh, it must be Understanding Comics, but for pre-teens, and in Telgemeier’s art style!” And…that’s pretty much…
One of the standard kinds of nonfiction is the “here’s a trend; what does it mean?” book. It can be serious or tabloid-y; breezy or deep; based on research or vibes. But I don’t think it’s been presented in comics form much, if at all. Kristen Radtke, though, seems to be carving out that as…
First of all: I checked multiple times, because I keep expecting that title to have an exclamation point. But it does not, and that slightly disappoints me. That might be the only criticism I have of this book, so I’m putting it up front. Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Spidermania is the fifth and most…
I am no expert on Euro Disney comics. Fantagraphics has been reprinting what they say are the best of that large universe – and I have no reason to doubt them; publishing programs always try to get the best of whatever – for a decade or more, and I’ve dipped into that sequence here and…
I’m sure I’ve re-read this story since 1986. You can’t prove it from this blog, though. And my copy of the trade paperback is the original 1987 edition, with minimal credits and supplemental material, from the era when the Big Two were still figuring out the whole reprint-floppies-in-a-permanent-format thing. (I’m not sure how I can…
I try to treat books on the level I find them; it’s only fair. This one is the first of a decent-length series of Western comics by two French creators. It collects the first two, very closely linked books in the series, both originally published in 2015 and translated by Tom Imber for this 2026…
