As you might be able to tell from the year in the post title, I’ve gotten more than a little lackadaisical about keeping up with this annual series of the best in comics created by North Americans. (I reviewed 2006 at the beginning of 2007, 2007 later in 2007, 2008 in 2008, 2009 in 2009,…
The 1950s was an interesting era for Walt Disney as they moved further away from movies with humans as the protagonist to ones featuring anthropomorphic animals. Although work had begun a decade earlier, 1955’s Lady and the Tramp is one example and one of the more charming stories, if lacking in the wonder of earlier…
To be a sad sack, a character has to be sad. If she’s just as put-upon by life, but has a chipper attitude the whole time, she turns into something else. I’m not sure if we have a name for that something else, but maybe we can start calling her a Lucky Penny. Penny Brighton…
There’s not a whole lot to say about this book as a book, so it might be time for some Book-A-Day behind-the-scenes. You see, to keep the hopper fed — especially early in the year, which sets the tone and energy for the whole project — I’m making sure to read at least one book…
Reading a book at four-year intervals is probably not the best way to keep it in the front of one’s mind. But I read the first two volumes of Shoulder-A-Coffin Kuro (one and two) back in 2010, and then the third in 2014, so, since it’s 2018 now, I couldn’t continue any earlier than now,…
I believe I’ve had this book on the shelf for ten years, which means it’s one of the small number of things that survived my 2011 flood. (That destroyed my entire basement and somewhere around 4,000 books.) I’m not sure why or how this book survived, but I’m pretty sure I haven’t managed to read…
We all regret our twenties. Some of us regret how quickly we settled down and got boring, and some of us regret that we didn’t settle down and get boring, at all or quickly enough. I’m one of the former; I think Julia Wertz is one of the latter. Museum of Mistakes is the big…
This book has more panels introducing its characters than any comic I’ve ever seen in my life. I know it was originally published as twelve individual issues of the Jack Staff comic, but it’s much more common than that — so often that I started to think this had been serialized somewhere, no more than…
For those of you scoring at home, this is the major Brandon Graham comic that does not include a random hardcore sex scene thrown into the middle (The one that does is Multiple Warheads . Graham toiled in the sex-comics vineyards for several years, and one sex-comic idea blossomed or transformed into an idea that…
The notion of placing Batman in other times and places seems so obvious now, but when Brian Augustyn first hatched the notion with Mark Waid, it was radical. As Augustyn recounts on the 21 minute Caped Fear: The First Elseworld featurette, it was immediately embraced. So enticing was the concept that when artist Mike Mignola…
I am so glad middle school is far behind me. I even gladder my two sons are past those years as well, and that I don’t expect to have any other kids to shepherd through those years. And I don’t think it’s purely Schadenfreude when I read a story about middle-schoolers — but there might…
Jennifer Hayden is a middle-aged New Jerseyan, telling stories here about her growing kids and family life — so why did it take me so long to get to a 2011 book so close to my own life and experience? (I’m generally all over that stuff: don’t we all love to be validated by art…
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