The Art of the Graphic Memoir: Tell Your Story, Change Your Life sets out to be instructional, but the part I found most fascinating was when author Tom Hart talked about the choices he made for his own book, Rosalie Lightning. (Hart has previously written The Sequential Artists Workshop Guide to Creating Professional Comic Strips; Rosalie Lightning is his story of the death of his not-yet-two-year-old daughter.) While there are exercises and lessons on creating graphic memoir in this book […]

Review by KC Carlson I’m a huge fan of this series. Published by TwoMorrows, the American Comic Book Chronicles is an extremely detailed year-by-year — and then a further month-by month — examination of pretty much everything of note that happened during that time, both inside the comic books and at the offices of the major publishers, as well as with many of their top freelance artists and writers. American Comic Book Chronicles: The 1990s, written by Jason Sacks and […]

The Complex Genesis of the Marvel Universe, in Its Creators’ Own Words Review by KC Carlson John Morrow has to be one of the most prominent (if not THE) Jack Kirby scholars on the planet. His Jack Kirby Collector magazine has been published regularly and faithfully since 1994. The earliest issues were published in limited quantities in B&W and are now almost impossible to find. (Good thing John later reprinted them as paperback collections.) These early issues were also fairly […]

The upcoming paperback release of Comic Shop: The Retail Mavericks Who Gave Us a New Geek Culture by Dan Gearino prompted me to finally read the hardcover I was sent a year and a half ago. Boy, that was a comprehensive trip through comic industry history! Gearino, a business journalist from Columbus, Ohio, puts local store The Laughing Ogre in the center of his history of how the direct market, the non-returnable distribution system for comic books, began and changed […]

Friend of the blog Bob Greenberger has been writing a series of hardcover books about DC comic characters under the umbrella title 100 Greatest Moments. The first book, reviewed by KC, was Justice League: 100 Greatest Moments: Highlights from the History of the World’s Greatest Superheroes. The second is DC Comics Super Heroines: 100 Greatest Moments. The publisher was kind enough to send me a copy, and while I’m thrilled about the idea of the content, seeing so many accomplished […]

Given that superheroes began as examples of those who could bring justice, it’s fun to see the Super Friends versions used for moral instruction. Super Heroes Say Please by Morris Katz is a 20-page board book for ages 0-3 about manners. Uncredited clip art shows classically illustrated heroes being polite and kind. They introduce themselves, shake hands, say please when they need help, take turns, share, and compliment each other. It was odd for me to notice just how many […]

This set of four hardcover storybooks makes up a new series in which the famous caped crimefighters use forensic investigation techniques to solve crimes. It’s a clever way to encourage scientific thinking and understanding the real-life background behind superhero adventures. The Batman & Robin Crime Scene Investigations series is written by Steve Korte, illustrated by Dario Brizuela, and published by Capstone Press. The subjects are well chosen: Fingerprints and footprints are classic mystery elements, while DNA keeps the heroes up-to-date […]

It’s been fascinating to see Mark Crilley’s how-to books move from genre, with the Mastering Manga trilogy, to a story about learning how to draw, to a set of illustrations with a wide variety of influences, to hyperrealistic art. His latest how-to book continues in the vein of that last one, although it could also be classed as almost fine art. The Two-Pencil Method: The Revolutionary Approach to Drawing It All is a series of instructions for using a regular […]