In Love and Capes, Thom Zahler does a perfect job combining romantic comedy with superheroics. Now, you can get a great big chunk of the adventures of Mark and Abby in the new collection Do You Want to Know a Secret?, reprinting the first six issues of the series. Mark is the Crusader, the best-known superhero in town. Abby is a detail-oriented bookstore owner who somehow has missed figuring out his secret identity. They’re deeply, believably in love, and he […]

Owly: Tiny Tales is the perfect starting point for someone interested in trying this series of charming fables. The volume collects Andy Runton’s various short stories featuring the characters, so it’s perfect for browsing or dipping into. Four of the tales — “Splashin’ Around”, “Breakin’ the Ice”, “Helping Hands”, and “In a Fix!” — were previously published as giveaway comics for Free Comic Book Day. Others appeared in convention programs or anthology collections or minicomics. Because of the various sources, […]

Tonoharu by Lars Martinson comes in a handsome hardcover, but the book doesn’t live up to the promise raised by its upscale presentation, because it ends before resolving key questions raised by its premise. Dan is an assistant English teacher in Japan, although he speaks very little of that country’s language. He’s miserable. He lives in a small town where the only other English-speakers are gossiped about as weirdos. He has too little to do and no inclination to find […]

Where to start talking about From Hell? Perhaps a hint is given in one of the quotes that open this almost 600-page tome. As Charles Fort said, “One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.” And that’s what writer Alan Moore seeks to create, a work that circles on itself, using a proposed solution for the mystery of the Jack the Ripper murders to portray, as Warren Ellis put it, “the birth of the 20th century”. Like so many Alan Moore books, […]

The fourth entry in the charming series about an owl and his woodland friends is another comforting tale about how being nice will save the day. A Time to Be Brave is told wordlessly, with the characters communicating in symbols, but they do read a fairy tale about a knight and a dragon whose text appears in the panels. Wormy, who serves the role of a small child (nice for reader identification purposes), is frightened by the story, so after […]

Liz Prince’s first full-length book, Will You Still Love Me If I Wet the Bed?, won the 2005 Outstanding Debut Ignatz Award. It was a pocket-size volume of observational strips mostly about her relationship. Her new book, Delayed Replays, is similar, with one big difference: the book is oriented horizontally, the better to reflect the direction of the comic strips. Prince’s style is sketchy, with construction lines visible. Reading this small book feels like looking through a sketchbook or journal. […]

Alex Robinson (Tricked, Box Office Poison) is best known for his mastery of handling a sprawling, connected, soap opera-style cast. In his new graphic novel, Too Cool to Be Forgotten, he changes gears to focus on a single protagonist. Andy Wicks is a middle-aged man who, when he undergoes hypnosis to stop smoking, finds himself back in high school in 1985. It’s a common fantasy, to wonder how things would go if you had the chance to do it all […]

The Surrogates is a strong debut by writer Robert Venditti, ably supported by artist Brett Weldele (Couscous Express). It reminds me of Fell in several ways: the cop investigating bizarre crimes, the grid-based layouts, the grimy, scratchy art. Venditti’s approaching his story as more traditional science fiction, though, taking an intriguing premise and playing out different implications within an action framework. Fifty years from now, most people interact through the use of surrogates, idealized robot forms that make virtual reality […]