Kate Beaton’s new collection of her Hark! A Vagrant comics is just as entertaining as the previous, titled simply Hark! A Vagrant. Reading Step Aside, Pops is the best kind of entertainment, the kind that makes you feel smarter. It’s always a pleasure to read such witty work with such detailed cartooning. Beaton uses so many historical and literary references (in clever and well-integrated ways) that you either know what she’s referring to — in which case, you feel pleased […]

Graphic memoir is the hot genre these days in publishing. Where fantasy stories can be hit or miss, true-life autobiographical comics have an immediate hook — this story actually happened to someone. In fact, if I’m honest, graphic memoirs are a bit of a drag on the market. Just because a story is true doesn’t always make it entertaining or well-told; structure is a huge challenge with autobiography. And one of the most common types of memoir is the coming-of-age […]

Out next month from Drawn & Quarterly is Petty Theft by Pascal Girard. I haven’t read his previous works they’ve translated and released here, although Reunion sounded interesting, if uncomfortable. That’s the comedy category this book falls into, that of recognition of human frailty. Here are some preview pages. In Petty Theft, Pascal’s on his own after a long-term relationship ended. He’s running as part of his new life healthy resolutions, but when he trips over a rock and injures […]

At first thought, the biography seems like an easy format to do as a comic. Just portray the family and background, select some key incidents, and you’re done. Except when you’re telling the story of Margaret Sanger, birth-control pioneer. Her life was so unique, fiery, and jam-packed with events that it’s hard to summarize it. Woman Rebel is a stunning read, an inspiring look back at a fight against ignorance and for women’s self-determination. Plus, author Peter Bagge made the […]

Reading the entire volume of You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack at one sitting is like ingesting a mind-altering substance. It contains such a coherent and yet completely strange worldview that it will reset your perceptions. Tom Gauld‘s cartoons, one per page, cover history, literature, and technology, in the same way Kate Beaton’s do. The best way to recommend this volume is to simply send you to read his cartoons. If you see one that tickles you, you’ll likely […]

I wasn’t going to bother reviewing Hark! A Vagrant, because really, how many people do you need to tell you that Kate Beaton’s comics are hilarious as well as informative? I am impressed, though, that something so distinctively unique has caught on so widely. If you’d told me that a collection of comic strips based on literature and history, drawn in a pen-and-ink style more reminiscent of mid-last-century editorial cartooning than other popular webcomics, would be one of the hottest […]

Only in comics could something this creative and unusual happen this brilliantly. Classical literature is mashed up with the lowest popular culture in Masterpiece Comics, and the result sheds a new light on both. R. Sikoryak has an amazing ability to mimic whatever art style is needed to make these stories work with familiar comic characters. Stories here include: Adam and Eve as Dagwood and Blondie. This kicks off a strip-oriented section which also includes Dante’s Inferno with Bazooka Joe, […]