With the movie opening tomorrow (although the reviews are in already, and it’s not looking good), I figured now was a great time to get caught up on my reading of the classic reprint series The Spirit Archives. Volumes 23-25 are the three most recent. Volume 26, the last in the series, is due out next week. It features Eisner’s Spirit material from after 1952, when the original series ended, including work originally published by Harvey and Kitchen Sink. Volume […]

Token, last of the Minx line, is also the best. Alisa Kwitney writes a story about a fifteen-year-old Jewish girl in Miami in 1987. Shira’s best friends are her grandmother and her buddy, a former movie star. They feed her nostalgic dreams of glamour, which don’t help when her father gets seriously involved with his secretary. She feels like she’s losing his love, with no one’s support to replace it. Some of the elements are standard — mean blonde classmates, […]

I wasn’t looking for another series to read, but I tried the first issue of this new-style anthology, and I was hooked. House of Mystery: Room and Boredom collects the first five issues of the series. Cain and Abel, the DC horror comic hosts from the 70s who lived in the Houses of Mystery and Secrets, respectively, make a two-page cameo at the beginning, but after that, it’s all new. The House of Mystery is now a bar outside dimensions. […]

Blue Beetle: Road Trip is the second book in the series about the young superhero, and it’s where the stories really start clicking. Jaime Reyes has an alien scarab bonded to him, and it gives him the power to fly, to create armor, to fire blasts… and to get in over his head fighting intergalactic threats. Jaime’s got a background different from most teen superheroes: he lives in El Paso, and he’s Hispanic. The art (especially the colors by Guy […]

Back in the 90s, Kyle Baker’s The Cowboy Wally Show was one of the great lost graphic novels, a legitimate cult classic. People would pay hundreds of dollars for a copy due to its impressive reputation and rarity. (It was originally released by a book publisher in 1988 before being brought back into print in 1996, then picked up by Vertigo in 2003.) There are two lessons to be learned from this: 1. Today, when comics with a spine are […]

Why I Hate Saturn is only the second graphic novel by Kyle Baker (Nat Turner, The Bakers: Babies And Kittens), but it’s one of his best. The unusual format — illustrations in black, white, and a light sepia tone, with dialogue or narration underneath the panels — suits the conversational-driven story. Anne is a jaded alcoholic urbanite, full of wisecracks about everything and everyone around her. She hates the beautiful people because she’s not one of them, the kind of […]

Will Eisner is one of the acknowledged geniuses of the comics field. While he didn’t actually invent the graphic novel (with 1978’s A Contract With God), he did make numerous strides in fighting for acceptance of the medium as an artform. One of his advances was his Sunday Spirit sections, seven-page stories included in weekly newspaper supplements. The Spirit Archives collect these tales in handsomely re-colored hardcovers. With 24 volumes out so far, giving them a try can be intimidating. […]

Of all the Golden Age Archives of early comics DC has made available — Superman, Batman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman — the best read is The Plastic Man Archives. Many of the others have more historical significance to the superhero genre, but Jack Cole’s stories of his stretchable accidental hero are so creative and odd that they’re great reads, even 60 years on. The first volume reprints the Plastic Man stories from Police Comics #1-20 (August 1941 – June 1943). […]