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 […]

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 […]

I adored I Will Judge You by Your Bookshelf by Grant Snider. If you liked You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack or Book Love, you’ll love this. The cartoons are all about being a reader or a writer or both. Overall, the message is how books can and will change your life. I alternated among thinking “how wise”, “how inspiring”, and “how surprising”. Starting with this opening spread. I thought it was a manifesto for the book — which […]