Zot! changed my life. The 36-issue comic series by Scott McCloud ran from 1984 to 1991. It started as a manga-influenced light-hearted superhero series, but by the end, McCloud was telling powerful stories about everyday life as a teen. McCloud is better known today as the author of Understanding Comics, a non-fiction exploration of the format; its followup, Reinventing Comics, which examines technology; and a how-to book, Making Comics. But he originally started with this series, an homage to the […]

The new Magic Trixie book, Magic Trixie and the Dragon, is simply outstanding, the best yet! First off, there’s an awful lot going on. I’m okay with having a minimum of plot so long as there are plenty of amazing Jill Thompson pictures to look at, but that’s certainly not the case here. Trixie’s grandmother Mimi takes her to the circus/carnival, where she falls in love with the dragons and wants one. Of course, she can’t have one, even though […]

Jill Thompson’s Scary Godmother series never got the success I thought it deserved. Her new series, Magic Trixie, takes a different approach to a world of magic and fun. Instead of a niece who gets to wander into a fantasy world occasionally, Magic Trixie is a little girl with her own powers, a talking cat, and a wild shock of blazing orange hair. She’s also incredibly realistic, which makes her behavior believable to anyone who’s either seen a been a […]

Larry Gonick’s books are impressive: they’re wickedly funny, culturally insightful, and more educational than some college classes I’ve attended. His latest series, following up from the The Cartoon History of the Universe books… well, I’ll let the PR explain it: Cartoon History of the Modern World Part I covers the history of ancient Mexico, the Spanish conquests, the Portuguese empire in Asia and Brazil, national and religious upheavals in Europe and India, the colonial ventures of France, Britain, and the […]

43-year-old Miriam Engelberg decided to cope with a diagnosis of breast cancer by creating a comic journal. The back cover calls Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person “devastatingly humorous”, but much as I appreciate black humor and laughing in the face of trouble, I didn’t find the book funny at all. Her style is best described as naive or primitive; it’s flat, with no backgrounds and a heavy reliance on text, both dialogue and captions. Most of the art is […]