It’s always a pleasure to see Evan Dorkin drawing, with his bold lines and claustrophobically crowded panels. Reading The Eltingville Club again — which I think first appeared in Instant Piano #1 in 1994, then continued intermittently in the Dork series — feels like very uncomfortable time travel. The satire of obsessed, immature, selfish fanboys is savage. It’s the kind of work that can only be done by someone who knows the type and the field extraordinarily well. When this […]

To tie into the new Buffy Season 10, the Angel and Faith series has also been relaunched with a similar title (although it makes less sense here, since there was never a season 9). I enjoyed the previous run of the series due in large part to how well writer Christos Gage and artist Rebekah Isaacs captured the characters authentically. Now they’ve been promoted to the main Buffy book, and we’re left here with Victor Gischler, whose writing I did […]

If you’ve been wanting to try the Buffy the Vampire Slayer comic, issue #1 of season 10 is a terrific place to start. Christos Gage captures the character’s voices authentically, and he manages to cram in lots of exposition (to remind readers of the new status quo) while still keeping the storytelling interesting. Of most interest to fans is that just about EVERYone shows up here. Buffy’s fighting vampires with Spike, Willow has her magic back, and Xander, Andrew, and […]

It’s when one comes across a work as subtle and detailed and well-crafted as Bad Houses that one realizes how rare it is to see a true novel in graphic novel form. In the small town of Failin, Oregon, Cat runs an estate sales business, responsible for disposing of the detritus of other people’s lives and homes, often after their death. Her son Lewis works with her, pricing objects for the dealers and collectors that snap up any leftover, eventually. […]

Based on the large amount of publicity, creating The Fifth Beatle: The Brian Epstein Story was a labor of love for author Vivek J. Tiwary. Unfortunately, while his affection for the subject shines through, he may have spent too much time in Epstein’s life, since it’s not always explained clearly to the casual reader. In short, this is one of those Beatles books where you already need to know the story of the Beatles and the details of the incidents […]

Bloodhound’s back! (His previous comic run was collected this summer as Brass Knuckle Psychology.) It took ten years, but I’m thrilled to see more adventures with (and hopefully more revelations) about the tough-guy supervillain fighter. Crowbar Medicine is a five-issue miniseries that opens with Travis Clevenger, the Bloodhound of the title (because he never lets go of things), trying to fit into an unusual environment for him, that of family. Dan Jolley does a terrific job reestablishing bits of his […]

I was a little concerned, when I read Resident Alien: The Suicide Blonde #0, that the feds searching for our protagonist, Dr. Harry Vanderspeigle, would take up more of this miniseries than I wanted. I liked the idea of finding out more about how the alien came to understand our culture and settle in a small town, but I didn’t look forward to another guys-in-suits-chasing-around story. I’m pleased to say that this issue is just what I wanted. We do […]

If you missed the first miniseries (now collected as Resident Alien: Welcome to Earth!), this zero issue is a terrific starting point and an easy way to sample the series, one of my new favorites. (I previously called it “a nice little mystery with some sharp small-town observations.”) Resident Alien: The Suicide Blonde #0 collects three short chapters that ran in Dark Horse Presents #18-20, but it’s so smoothly sectioned that I wouldn’t have known that just reading the story. […]