I originally read these two creepy stories by Sandy Jarrell as a minicomic, but both are now available to read online. The first, Don’t Play, the Game’s Not Safe, is about a bunch of kids trying to scare each other with trance-like games. This story does a fabulous job of realistically capturing kids playing around with the unknown, imagining grisly fates for each other. The art, pacing, expressions, and shading are all great, and the writer knows just when to […]

Destined Love is a cool little meta-superhero comic set in the late 60s by Sandy Jarrell with Vance Sumner. It blends Astro City-like superhero daily life and real cultural history in the format of a nurse romance. It’s an ambitious project that could go wrong so many ways but doesn’t. Annie meets the superhero Bastion of Freedom while treating one of the people he’s recently saved, and they have dinner together. She’s curious about his relationship with one of his […]

This gorgeous painted graphic novel uses humanoid animals to create a crime story with all the atmosphere of a classic noir film, complicated by the more modern concerns of racism and hate crimes. Blacksad: Arctic Nation is written by Juan Diaz Canales and illustrated by Juanjo Guarnido. Blacksad is a panther private eye investigating the case of a missing child against a background of color-inspired harassment. A group of white-skinned and -furred animals make up a Nazi-like group that preaches […]