The Plastic Man Archives

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). […]

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Life Sucks

Life Sucks when you’re a vampire without the exotic bearing, the classy clothes, and the family fortune. Dave only wanted a job as a convenience store night manager, but his boss, Radu, turned out to be a bloodsucker in more ways than one. Dave got turned into a thrall so Radu could order him around without paying him. Dave’s now a vampire, and it’s nothing but a drag. He used to be a vegetarian, but even now, he refuses to […]

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The K Chronicles: I Left My Arse in San Francisco

The newest K Chronicles compendium, as artist Keith Knight labels his strip collections, is now available. It’s completely self-published and only available through his website, but that means it comes signed and numbered. The first strip in the book gives an indication that this is a new, more mature Knight, as he announces that he’s turning 40 and suffering from pneumonia. There are a couple of guest strips (from Nina Paley and Steve Notley) before he’s off to visit his […]

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Flock of Angels Volume 3

The series by Shoko Hamada concludes in this volume. I haven’t read book two, so I’m not sure how Shea wound up living in the mountains with a mysterious black-winged girl. Her people can fully retract their wings, unlike him. So even where he might fit in, he doesn’t, although most are nice enough to him. Still, there are a bunch of weird things about their society, things Shea finds wrong and disturbing. However, they risk dying out, unless something […]

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Love for Dessert

Aurora’s Luv Luv line of explicit manga for women continues, and the quality is still disappointing. Like the other books, Love for Dessert contains a set of short stories by the same author, Hana Aoi. You can see the pasted-together nature of the stories — pick a quirk, bolt it onto a character, shove in requisite sex scene whether it fits or not — from the cover, where the tongue and the spoon seem like afterthoughts, edited into a generic […]

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Kodansha to Open U.S. Subsidiary; Manga Pricing to Change?

Currently, Del Rey Manga is mostly titles licensed from Japanese manga publisher Kodansha. Now, as Brigid reports, Kodansha plans to open their own American office. Many questions result. Del Rey isn’t concerned — their licenses are proceeding as planned. Chris Butcher reports that Tokyopop cancelled Beck, a Kodansha title, but that might also be due to lower sales or Tokyopop’s own problems. The most interesting aspect of this for me so far is the speculation on what this might mean […]

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Essential Books About Manga

I’m covering here reference works, not how-to books, of which there are more than enough. I’ve previously reviewed two how-to books: Manga Secrets is straight-forward and includes the basics, while Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga is satiric. You’ll learn from it, but you’ll learn more what NOT to do. And you’ll laugh while doing it. Anyway, on to the books about manga. Manga! Manga! Frederik L. Schodt provided the first and still one of the best English-language books covering […]

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Keith Knight on Complete K Chronicles

(This interview was originally published in PiQ #4, July 2008.) If he’s not the hardest working man in comics, Keith Knight’s definitely one of the top ten. He’s the creator of The K Chronicles, the Harvey and Glyph Award-winning weekly comic strip, as well as the weekly editorial cartoon (Th)ink. At the beginning of May, he launched a new syndicated daily called The Knight Life. That’s in addition to his regular work for MAD and ESPN magazines and, oh yeah, […]

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