Review by KC Carlson Those of you who have been reading Fantagraphics’ exemplary Complete Peanuts series and think that the Sunday Peanuts strips included there (in black and white, and greatly reduced in size) are enough for you, well, you’re mistaken. If you’re any kind of Peanuts fan, and you get a glance at any page of the new Peanuts Every Sunday: 1952-1955 collection — printed in a huge 12.75” x 10” format, and with the original colors restored — […]

After putting out four volumes reprinting the historic Mickey Mouse newspaper strip, focusing on the black-and-white daily adventures of the spunky mouse, Fantagraphics begins collecting the color Sunday comics in Call of the Wild. (Note that back then, in the early 1930s, the Sunday comics ran different stories from the dailies, so the books can be separated in this fashion.) As is typical of their archive projects, there’s a good amount of historical information available here, from an introductory foreword […]

Review by KC Carlson Fantagraphics’ latest Carl Barks Disney Library volume stars Donald Duck and collects most of Barks’ Donald stories from 1948. For those keeping track, The Old Castle’s Secret is Volume 6 of the Library, which Fantagraphics is issuing in random order — so far, alternating with volumes starring Uncle Scrooge. Like the other Donald Duck volumes in the series, this collects three full-length Donald stories (usually from Dell’s Four Color series), 11 ten-page stories originally from the […]

I enjoy Linda Medley’s Castle Waiting, a modern take on a fairy tale world, a lot. In fact, the first edition of this second collection was my best graphic novel of 2010, when it was released. However, there were unanswered questions about that release, since it didn’t really have an ending and the author’s name wasn’t anywhere on the cover. Now that that book is out of print, Fantagraphics and Medley have released an updated “definitive edition” that’s gone from […]

Young Romance: The Best of Simon & Kirby’s Romance Comics by the masterful team of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby is a hoot to read, a real time capsule. Most of the stories reprinted here first appeared in Young Romance, the book that created the romance comic, during the period 1947 to 1959. Also included are a couple of Western love stories (a genre that had its own, multiple titles) and three from Young Love. All have a dynamism to […]

After greatly enjoying Ellen Forney’s Marbles, I thought I’d check out her earlier book, I Love Led Zeppelin, a varied collection of short pieces. A couple of these strips were familiar to me from Marbles, in fact, having been referenced or appearing in that book. Most of them, though, are much different. Not only are they shorter, a lot of them are non-fiction, focused outwards instead of to the artist’s interior. The first major section of the book contains 14 […]

Review by KC Carlson I’ve been somewhat lax in reviewing these, intending to talk about them earlier in the year. I’ve been incredibly selfish in wanting to find quality time in my impossible schedule to really do them justice. Most months, I’ve only had an hour here or 15 minutes there, and that’s just not enough time to take to really read these quality-packed volumes of classic Carl Barks duck stories. (I’m having similar problems with the massive wave of […]

The third in the series of Mickey Mouse strip collections continues providing exciting adventure stories in serialized form. In the first story in Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse: High Noon at Inferno Gulch, Mickey and Minnie pilot a plane to get food to a snowed-in mountain town, where they also discover a plot to steal the mine’s gold. The events are flat-out ridiculous at times — with a windmill rotor replacing the propeller and a plane launched from the top of […]