Review by KC Carlson For some reason, the 1960s suddenly descended upon the Carlson household over the last few weeks. Johanna has been binge-watching DVDs of Doctor Who (the earliest Doctors, of course). And the recently released Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In: The Complete Series on DVD from Time Life unexpectedly plopped down on our front porch the other day — not too surprising, since we ordered it (but I, of course, had forgotten about it an hour after Johanna pressed […]

I don’t know why I didn’t know about this until now, but friend of the blog Michael Eury has a book coming out in April that explores the camp comics of fifty years ago. Hero-A-Go-Go: Campy Comic Books, Crimefighters, & Culture of the Swinging Sixties pretty much lays out its premise in its lengthy title. The book … celebrates the camp craze of the Swinging Sixties, when just about everyone –the teens of Riverdale, an ant and a squirrel, even […]

Want to indoctrinate your favorite child into superheroes? Get them one or both of these large children’s picture books aimed at ages 3 and up. For a focus on powerful women, you want The Big Book of Girl Power, emphasizing how “DC’s super heroines… have the courage to fight for peace and justice.” Each character (with three exceptions) gets a two-page spread with an image (many drawn by Scott Kolins) and a brief explanation of her origin and abilities. The […]

Now available is Black Widow: Red Vengeance, a YA novel by Margaret Stohl featuring the Marvel Comics superspy. It’s a sequel to the popular Black Widow: Forever Red from last year. In Red Vengeance, Natasha Romanoff and Ava Orlova (introduced in the previous book and created by Stohl), aka Black Widow and Red Widow, have teamed up to “stop a conspiracy involving stolen nuclear warheads, mind-altering chemical weapons, and ultimately, betrayal by old friends and enemies alike.” It’s a globe-trotting […]

Since parents are the ones who buy books for kids, this picture book gives them what they want: a way to get hero-loving little boys to go to bed. Written by Michael Dahl and drawn by Ethen Beavers, Bedtime for Batman compares what the Dark Knight does with what the kid has to do at nighttime. Batman has the Bat-signal, the boy has a bedtime on the clock. Batman cleans up the town, the boy has a bath. Batman puts […]

As we lead up to next month’s Marvel movie Captain America: Civil War, we’re going to see a lot of product tie-ins. One of the more interesting (and intellectual) is a new book, A Philosopher Reads Marvel Comics’ Civil War: Exploring the Moral Judgment of Captain America, Iron Man, and Spider-Man, by Professor Mark D. White, Chair of Philosophy at the College of Staten Island/CUNY. (It can also be ordered from BookDepository.com worldwide.) I’ve been given this exclusive excerpt by […]

Out later this spring is a specialized guide of value to those interested in what some consider a nostalgic craft. The Sequential Artists Workshop Guide to Creating Professional Comic Strips is by Tom Hart (Hutch Owen), who founded and runs the Florida art school whose name this appears under. He also co-created (with Marguerite Dabaie) the former syndicated strip Ali’s House (2008), about an Arab-American family. Although the background of this book is the traditional newspaper strip, in the introduction, […]

This month’s Diamond Previews catalog, used by comic shops and their customers to determine what to buy in the comic months, has the theme “How to Draw” to “pay tribute to the DIY spirit”. That means a number of publishers are reoffering books about making comics. Here are some I recommend you should be aware of, complete with this month’s ordering codes. The DC Comics Guides to Creating Comics — Writing (JAN16 1915), Pencilling (JAN16 1916), Inking (JAN16 1917), Coloring […]