Why I Hate Saturn is only the second graphic novel by Kyle Baker (Nat Turner, The Bakers: Babies And Kittens), but it’s one of his best. The unusual format — illustrations in black, white, and a light sepia tone, with dialogue or narration underneath the panels — suits the conversational-driven story. Anne is a jaded alcoholic urbanite, full of wisecracks about everything and everyone around her. She hates the beautiful people because she’s not one of them, the kind of […]

Will Eisner is one of the acknowledged geniuses of the comics field. While he didn’t actually invent the graphic novel (with 1978’s A Contract With God), he did make numerous strides in fighting for acceptance of the medium as an artform. One of his advances was his Sunday Spirit sections, seven-page stories included in weekly newspaper supplements. The Spirit Archives collect these tales in handsomely re-colored hardcovers. With 24 volumes out so far, giving them a try can be intimidating. […]

Of all the Golden Age Archives of early comics DC has made available — Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman — the best read is The Plastic Man Archives. Many of the others have more historical significance to the superhero genre, but Jack Cole’s stories of his stretchable accidental hero are so creative and odd that they’re great reads, even 60 years on. The first volume reprints the Plastic Man stories from Police Comics #1-20 (August 1941 – June 1943). […]

Danni and her mother have moved to a logging town in Oregon. Dad split, and she doesn’t like Mom’s new boyfriend, because she doesn’t like the person Mom becomes around him, more concerned with others than with herself. In Burnout, Danni’s grumpy and bitter, a very typical teen. She doesn’t like her surroundings, but she can’t do anything to change them, so her pain comes out as complaints. Then she develops a crush on Haskell, her morose soon-to-be-step-brother with secrets. […]

Incognegro weaves historical elements — lynchings, blacks passing for white, the Harlem Renaissance — into an entertaining, action-packed thriller that makes its points violently, so that they strike home. Zane Pinchback is a reporter for a black newspaper in the early 30s. He’s light-skinned enough to pass for white, so he ventures down south to report on the murders of black men that the white papers don’t bother covering. He’s tired of it, though, afraid of continuing to risk his […]

I look to comics to show me experiences I haven’t had and get me thinking about new perspectives, with bonus points for unusual, interesting settings. Cairo has all of the above. It’s written by G. Willow Wilson, a journalist who lived and worked in the area, which gives the fantastic events verisimilitude. It starts with a drug smuggler, but it quickly sprawls out through his connections and those he meets through chance (or more likely, destiny). His sister is friendly […]

Brian Azzarello and Cliff Chiang reinvent the superhero team book in Doctor 13: Architecture & Mortality. They use a set of forgotten characters to not only launch an imaginative adventure in which anything is possible, but they also comment coyly on the current trend of anti-history, of the tendency to ignore or attack bits that don’t slot perfectly into all-too-serious superhero continuity. Doctor 13, paranormal investigator and professional skeptic, finds himself thrown together with the following goofy characters: Captain Fear, […]

Darwyn Cooke (with the aid of J. Bone’s inks) is responsible for the most exciting re-imagining of a character this decade: Will Eisner’s Spirit. Book One is a handsome hardcover collecting the first six issues of the series plus the Batman/Spirit crossover written by Jeph Loeb. The book itself stands apart from the usual collection. The hardcover binding consists of images instead of plain color boards, and the dust jacket has the Spirit letters cut out to show the art […]