Once Upon a Rind in Hollywood
I loved the concept of Once Upon a Rind in Hollywood: 50 Movie-Themed Cheese Platters and Snack Boards for Film Fanatics, and I loved it even more when I read it. (The photographs, which are glorious, are credited to Rachel Riederman, and I think she wrote the text as well, based on the about page, but the text is copyrighted to the publisher, Ulysses Press, although the recipes are credited to Riederman. Modern books are weird.) For each famous movie, […]
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Small Press Expo 2023
I find myself able to attend the Small Press Expo 2023 (Saturday only — but given how there were more people that wanted rooms than available in the hotel, that’s maybe easier to handle this year). It’s held September 9-10 in Bethesda, Maryland. I’m most interested in the debut books, as a convention is a terrific place to find material new to me. Some of the biggest name books in that category — but there are tons more — are: […]
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Lost Legion of Super-Heroes Art by Stuart Immonen
The below, I’ve been told, was intended to be one of the pinups for the oversized Legion of Super-Heroes #100 (which was cover-dated January 1998 and was one of the last issues of the series KC Carlson edited). It did not run, I think, because it was thought to be TOO close in style to Archie Comics characters. I was reminded of it when chatting with someone who referenced the “Archie Legion”, a name I don’t care for, but hey, […]
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Science Comics: The Periodic Table of Elements
The Science Comics line continues with The Periodic Table of Elements: Understanding the Building Blocks of Everything, an introduction to the basics of chemistry by Jon Chad. Mel is anxious about her upcoming chemistry test on the elements, because pressure makes her nervous. She dreams herself into the Land of the Elements, where the elements take on the forms of various blobby creatures. Her help is needed to defeat the Elemancer, who wants to destroy the world, and — what […]
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Washington’s Gay General
Two of the biggest trends in graphic novels over the past few years are graphic memoir (biographies and autobiographies in comic format) and non-fiction comics (particularly those about scientific topics or history). I love both, as I find them both educational and a terrific use of the combined textual/visual nature of comics. Nothing gives you a better way of sharing someone’s experience or understanding new material. I thought Washington’s Gay General, by Josh Trujillo and Levi Hastings, was going to […]
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Kiss Number 8
We not only live in changing times, but we live in quickly changing times. Kiss Number 8 came out in 2019, and as the story of a girl realizing she’s gay, complicated by the unspoken family history she discovers, it already feels a little like a period piece. (Not enough of one, though, given current events.) To be fair, the author’s interview in the back makes that point as well, based on how long the book took to write and […]
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The Fatal Folio
I was so impressed by The Fatal Folio, third in the Cambridge Bookshop mystery series by Elizabeth Penney, that I went back and read the first two. The series began with Chapter and Curse and continued with A Treacherous Tale. They’re great cozy mysteries, particularly for Anglophiles. Molly Kimball and her mother move from Vermont to Cambridge, England, after the death of her father and to help her aunt run a family bookshop, one of the oldest in the city. […]
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Pow Pow Press Titles Available Through Lunar Distribution
Pow Pow Press is a small publisher out of Canada with the goal “to make the work of Québec cartoonists available to an English-speaking audience in both Canada and the United States.” Along those lines, their graphic novels will be easily available in the US comic book direct market (comic shops) for the first time through Lunar Distribution this fall. I previously recommended The Pineapples of Wrath by Cathon several years ago, when I found it at TCAF. That’s one […]
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