Ready for the spooky season? I found a lovely little treat called Scaredy Cat by Heather Franzen. You can read it on her website at that link, or she sells a minicomic version (a panel a page, and the whole thing just about fits in the palm of a large hand). It’s not exactly a Halloween story, but it has a pumpkin patch, bats, a black cat, and a cute kitten encountering them all.

Darryl Cunningham, the artist behind non-fiction graphic novels including How to Fake a Moon Landing, Graphic Science, and the most recent Billionaires: The Lives of the Rich and Powerful, has created a new free online comic. Voices from the NHS: A People’s History is based on stories from a research project capturing workers and patients in their own voices, about the UK National Health Service. It’s not exactly a celebratory work, as it acknowledges many of the issues with the […]

As I previously mentioned, Doctor Who: Missy is out in October. Titan Comics has released the following preview pages. It’s written by Jody Houser and illustrated by Roberta Ingranata with cover by Claudia Caranfa.

I’ve been a fan of Kris Dresen’s work for a long time now. It doesn’t look like anything else out there, and she was telling everyday stories about queer characters long before it was fashionable, or accepted, to do so. Now she’s put a whole graphic novel, She Said, online. It’s about the lifespan of a relationship, and it’s so very bittersweet, particularly if you don’t rush through it but give each panel space.

Here’s a brilliant free read: How to Study Comics & Graphic Novels: A Graphic Introduction to Comics Studies by Enrique del Rey Cabero, Michael Goodrum, and José Morlesín Mellado, available online at Issuu (found via Ben Towle). It’s put out by the Oxford Comics Network, part of TORCH, The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities. And it’s wonderful, a comic that’s chock-full of information on how to read comics. It covers terminology (comic or graphic novel?), specialized terms (panel, gutter, […]

Out January 26 is Patience & Esther: An Edwardian Romance, an adults-only graphic novel by S.W. Searle that’s absolutely adorable. I know, weird adjective for explicit erotica, but nevertheless… it’s the story of Patience, a servant girl finding love and herself in Edwardian England. Her partner, Esther, introduces her to pleasure and progressivism, as they encounter suffragettes and changing times.

Melanie Gillman has been talking about foraging, finding wild foods, on their Twitter recently. Now, they’ve assembled 18 pages of advice on one particular natural food source, acorns, into a pay-what-you-want PDF comic. Eating Acorns: A Foraging Guide is available via Gumroad. Even if you would never eat something you picked off the ground, it’s a fascinating source of information. In addition to a handful of recipes for acorn flour, Gillman has a wonderful, poetic section on why they forage […]