Now available is Black Widow: Red Vengeance, a YA novel by Margaret Stohl featuring the Marvel Comics superspy. It’s a sequel to the popular Black Widow: Forever Red from last year. In Red Vengeance, Natasha Romanoff and Ava Orlova (introduced in the previous book and created by Stohl), aka Black Widow and Red Widow, have teamed up to “stop a conspiracy involving stolen nuclear warheads, mind-altering chemical weapons, and ultimately, betrayal by old friends and enemies alike.” It’s a globe-trotting […]

Since parents are the ones who buy books for kids, this picture book gives them what they want: a way to get hero-loving little boys to go to bed. Written by Michael Dahl and drawn by Ethen Beavers, Bedtime for Batman compares what the Dark Knight does with what the kid has to do at nighttime. Batman has the Bat-signal, the boy has a bedtime on the clock. Batman cleans up the town, the boy has a bath. Batman puts […]

As we lead up to next month’s Marvel movie Captain America: Civil War, we’re going to see a lot of product tie-ins. One of the more interesting (and intellectual) is a new book, A Philosopher Reads Marvel Comics’ Civil War: Exploring the Moral Judgment of Captain America, Iron Man, and Spider-Man, by Professor Mark D. White, Chair of Philosophy at the College of Staten Island/CUNY. (It can also be ordered from BookDepository.com worldwide.) I’ve been given this exclusive excerpt by […]

Out later this spring is a specialized guide of value to those interested in what some consider a nostalgic craft. The Sequential Artists Workshop Guide to Creating Professional Comic Strips is by Tom Hart (Hutch Owen), who founded and runs the Florida art school whose name this appears under. He also co-created (with Marguerite Dabaie) the former syndicated strip Ali’s House (2008), about an Arab-American family. Although the background of this book is the traditional newspaper strip, in the introduction, […]

This month’s Diamond Previews catalog, used by comic shops and their customers to determine what to buy in the comic months, has the theme “How to Draw” to “pay tribute to the DIY spirit”. That means a number of publishers are reoffering books about making comics. Here are some I recommend you should be aware of, complete with this month’s ordering codes. The DC Comics Guides to Creating Comics — Writing (JAN16 1915), Pencilling (JAN16 1916), Inking (JAN16 1917), Coloring […]

Bart Beaty’s Twelve-Cent Archie resembles a grab bag of blog posts put under book covers. There are 100 capsule pieces, in no immediately obvious order, each lasting 2-4 pages and covering some aspect of Archie comics cover-dated from December 1961 through July 1969, when Archie publications sold for 12 cents. He’s read all the works the company put out in that time period, 17 different titles. In particular, he’s focusing on the work of artists Harry Lucey (Archie), Dan DeCarlo […]

I really like the guys behind TwoMorrows. They made a go of publishing historical magazines and books about comics at a time when few others were. However, their publications are aimed at a core, comic shop-based, male audience that is so clearly irrelevant to what I enjoy about the medium. Take, for instance, this latest volume, the 29th. (It’s labeled 30 because number 23 never came out.) As the series has progressed, the subjects have gone from well-known, acclaimed creators […]

Out next month is a fascinating novel by Martine Leavitt. Calvin is the story of a 17-year-old, born on the last day of the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip and coincidentally named to match, who’s convinced Bill Watterson can fix his life. Calvin has just been diagnosed with schizophrenia, and hearing the voice of an imaginary tiger is one of his symptoms. After his hospitalization, he finds a mission. “I just need Bill Watterson to make one more comic strip […]