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, […]

I enjoyed Guy Delisle’s Shenzhen, so I was eager to try his earlier Pyongyang, in which he journeys to North Korea. I’m glad I did, because I found it to be an ever better book than the other, largely because the country is so much stranger. As in Shenzhen, Delisle is working in North Korea for a couple of months as a supervising animation director. The opening scene, in which he’s taken to worship at a giant statue of President […]

Shenzhen: A Travelogue From China captures Guy Delisle’s culture shock in visiting a country so very different from his own. Shenzhen is in Southern China, near Hong Kong. He’s been sent to this commercial city in the late 90s to supervise an animation crew. For three months, he’s got to deal with inferior work, a lack of other foreigners, and the things that are common to all big cities: dirt, noise, smells. There aren’t many translators, and those that are […]

Get a Life properly introduces Mr. Jean to English-speaking audiences. Lengthy stories featuring the character, written and drawn by Philippe Dupuy and Charles Berberian (who both do each), have previously appeared in Drawn & Quarterly anthologies, but this book collects the earlier work where a younger man struggles with his life decisions. Jean is a novelist living in Paris. He’s gone to the museum because a friend is supposed to meet a woman there, but the friend ducks out on […]

Exit Wounds by Rutu Modan uses a Tintin-like “clear line” style to tell a modern story of the effects of terrorism and the search for a life of one’s own. In Tel Aviv, Koby drives a taxi cab. He’s been estranged from his father, so he’s not sure how to feel when a soldier tells him his father might be the unidentified victim of a cafeteria suicide bombing. The soldier, Numi, tries to talk Koby first into a DNA test […]

Dylan Horrocks’ Hicksville opens with a quote from Jack Kirby: “Comics will break your heart.” Horrocks goes on to prove that epigram true, although in an unexpected way. Journalist Leonard Batts is in search of information on Dick Burger, “the most influential comic book creator of [this] generation”, a man whose Captain Tomorrow graphic novel sold millions. Batts visits Burger’s New Zealand hometown, Hicksville, a place where everyone reads comics and discusses them as other people would the weather. The […]