Two of the biggest trends in graphic novels over the past few years are graphic memoir (biographies and autobiographies in comic format) and non-fiction comics (particularly those about scientific topics or history). I love both, as I find them both educational and a terrific use of the combined textual/visual nature of comics. Nothing gives you a better way of sharing someone’s experience or understanding new material. I thought Washington’s Gay General, by Josh Trujillo and Levi Hastings, was going to […]

A dozen years ago, Abrams published Jason Shiga’s Meanwhile, a choose your own path comic about a boy in a mad scientist’s lab. I’d seen Shiga’s comics in their self-published forms, but this was bringing it to bookstores and wider distribution. Now, released earlier this year, there’s finally another volume. Adventuregame Comics: Leviathan sets the reader up as an adventurer seeking a mysterious wizard to gain a wand to defeat a sea monster. You may satisfy your quest or wind […]

Instead of a new installment in the Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales series, this year we got a related book, one that encourages kids to make their own comics through a wide variety of art and storytelling activities introduced by the continuing characters of that series. Let’s Make History! Create Your Own Comics starts in with a challenge. Actually, two. First, the reader is encouraged to draw their own splash page, before an explanation page tells them “YOU will be drawing, […]

The eleventh in the Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales series — an impressive run!– covers the most modern period yet. Cold War Correspondent is the story of Marguerite Higgins, a reporter who found herself trapped in Korea when the Communists took Seoul in 1950. The cast of series narrators has expanded. Captured spy Nathan Hale, telling historical adventures to hold off his hanging, and the Hangman and the Provost (a stuffy British soldier) have been joined by Bill Richmond, the real-life […]

Flung Out of Space: Inspired by the Indecent Adventures of Patricia Highsmith is an impressively good comic. Which is funny, because much of the book shows us Ms. Highsmith writing comics and hating it. Yet this story of some of her life is easily one of the best graphic novels of the year. Highsmith was a lesbian but despised herself for it. She smokes but says she’s quitting. She writes comics but refuses to put her name on them, calling […]

Laura Lee Gulledge has never shied away from telling stories of young women artists struggling with difficult issues. In Will & Whit, it was grief and finding one’s community. In Page by Paige, it was loneliness in a new place. In The Dark Matter of Mona Starr, it’s depression. The result is a welcome addition to the growing list of graphic novels for young people suffering big challenges. Mona has never had many friends, and her best just moved away. […]

In October 2017, Brian Fies (Eisner Award-winning artist of Mom’s Cancer) lost his home (one of over 6,000 destroyed) to a California wildfire. A Fire Story captures the events and their aftermath. This is my favorite kind of graphic novel. It gives the reader an empathetic understanding of an experience that they hopefully will never have to live through themselves, and it does a terrific job conveying the feelings and choices that go along with it. The book shares, directly […]