This beautiful hardcover is perfectly timed. As fall creeps over the country, there’s nothing better than relaxing with some lightly scary (but also funny), impressively illustrated stories about monsters. The strong sense of family, whether natural or assembled from close friends, is a comforting underlay, as is Jill Thompson’s tangible portrayal of the season. I was pleasantly surprised to see that, in addition to the original four storybooks — The Scary Godmother, The Revenge of Jimmy, The Mystery Date, The […]

I love animal comics, but I am too squeamish for horror, so I wasn’t sure how I’d react to the blend in Beasts of Burden: Animal Rites. I should have had more faith in the skills of writer Evan Dorkin and artist Jill Thompson to create stories worth reading. The Beasts of Burden are the neighborhood dogs (and a stray cat) of Burden Hill. They were introduced in “Stray”, which first appeared in the anthology The Dark Horse Book of […]

The Guild #3 concludes the miniseries as expected: Cyd winds up forming a Guild with the characters viewers already know. I didn’t expect as much that events in Cyd’s daily life would start becoming more outrageous, as though her reality was ramping up to meet the excitement of her gaming fantasy. Her boyfriend might be gay, and he’s definitely fooling around on her while guilt-tripping her into writing the new music style that’s helping out his band. She’s seeking advice […]

The Guild #2 continues showing us how Cyd (Felicia Day’s character) came to be part of the online role-playing game that means so much to her. It does this by emphasizing what a jerk her boyfriend is, in a structure that’s a classic example of the unreliable narrator. Cyd thinks she’s happy because she thinks she’s helping her boyfriend and his band. We, in contrast, easily see that she’s coming up with all the ideas while he’s doing nothing but […]

I heard good things about this comic, I bought it, and I liked it. That doesn’t really happen much anymore for me, in this world of pre-ordering and big-event fascination hypnosis and fractured online communities who already know what they’re buying and what they’ll think about it. Even though this comic is a media tie-in, it entertained me and made me eager for more. Writer Felicia Day is better known as an actress, part of Joss Whedon’s company. She’s the […]

Rick Geary is best-known these days for his true crime stories exploring historical murders, such as his recent The Lindbergh Child. In The Adventures of Blanche, he tackles similar past settings — three world cities during the early 1900s — but the action is definitely fictional. Geary’s traditional pen-and-ink style, with its thick lines and distinctive caricatures, does a wonderful job building a different world for the reader. As Blanche writes home to her parents, we see through her eyes […]

Bryan Talbot’s Alice in Sunderland isn’t read so much as succumbed to. It’s a happening more than a graphic novel. Talbot draws himself visiting the Empire in gorgeously detailed pen-and-ink, where he views himself on stage narrating a celebration of the 100th anniversary of the theatre, at which point the book explodes into a colorful collage of every kind of image and graphic. Bits of everything are woven into this phantasmagoria — quotations, the geography of the North East of […]

I hadn’t realized how much I’d missed these characters (previously seen in First Blood) until I picked up this new collection of their adventures, which I loved. Team leader (and psychic) Arisia was incapacitated at the end of the last book after having been attacked by a vampire, so her teammates need to get her medical attention. Meanwhile, demon piranha creatures from another dimension are attacking headquarters. The life-and-death circumstances necessitate the team splitting up, and their individual choices demonstrate […]