Mike Madrid, author of The Supergirls, a history of comic book heroines, is now bringing us reprints of vintage stories featuring female heroes with Divas, Dames & Daredevils: Lost Heroines of Golden Age Comics. Madrid, in his introduction, defines “Lost” as “characters you may have heard of, but whose stories you never had the chance to read. Or they may be women who only made a few appearances and then disappeared.” Since the comics date from 1940-1947, the art style […]

You may have heard of Blue Is the Warmest Color earlier this summer. The French movie adaptation won the Cannes film festival Palme d’Or, followed by the author Julie Maroh denouncing the film. (The movie is due to be released in North America in October 2013 through Sundance Selects/IFC Films (USA) and Mongrel Media (Canada).) Now, the graphic novel is being translated into English, and it’s well worth reading. It’s the story of Clementine, a high schooler coming to terms […]

I value graphic novels that give me another experience, one I would never otherwise be able to sample or understand. That’s the strength of Look Straight Ahead, the story of Jeremy Knowles’ struggle with mental illness and treatment (collected from a webcomic I’ve previously mentioned). Jeremy’s life seems typical for a comic protagonist — he’s an artist, without many friends, picked on by the popular bullies, with a crush on his friend’s girlfriend whom he’s too shy to even say […]