Warren Ellis’ latest triumph is Fell: Feral City, tight little tales of freaks in a creepy city called Snowtown. It’s a new-style detective comic, one featuring short, satisfyingly dense stories with a distinctive look courtesy of Ben Templesmith. The use of a strict nine-panel grid packs plenty of plot into a small space. It also gives the comic the feel of one of the procedural TV shows, one where the events matter more than the staging or set design. The […]

The question of “what is comics” is often debated in certain circles (especially those academically inclined). There’s no one definition that satisfies everyone, although most have in common something about combining text and images to tell a story. When asked to think about comics, most visualize panels on a page, rows of boxes containing pictures and word balloons. Kabuki knocks that definition on its ear. In Skin Deep, artist David Mack demonstrates a different kind of comics, beautifully artistic blends […]

Stagger Lee is a song. You may have heard it; it was a hit in the 50s for Lloyd Price, as well as having many other versions over the years. Even Price’s take has two variations, because he cleaned up the lyrics for American Bandstand (his original was too violent for Dick Clark). Stagger Lee is also an amazing book that looks at the story behind the song and the legend it describes. You don’t even need to know the […]

Hawaiian Dick: The Last Resort is a welcome followup to Byrd of Paradise, the story that introduced island private eye Danny Byrd and his police officer friend Mo Kalama. This time around, Byrd has been hired by Italian mobsters trying to open a resort hotel. They’ve been running into all kinds of glitches. They think it’s sabotage from their Irish competitors, but the locals say it’s sorcery, that the white men are getting what they deserve. And they might be […]

The six existing issues of the cosmic teen superhero series written by Robert Kirkman and drawn by E.J. Su have been reprinted in a manga-like black-and-white digest as Tech Jacket: Lost and Found. Zack is a normal kid who happens to see a crashing spaceship. One of the last survivors gives him a tech jacket, an aware mechanical vest that gives him the usual complement of powers through alien weapon technology. Instead of being freaked out or concerned, Zack (with […]

As Sacrifice begins (following first volume A Thousand Ships), Paris and Helen return to Troy. King Priam at first refuses to admit her, knowing her presence will bring his city under attack, but she is pregnant with his grandchild. Kassandra prophesies doom but isn’t believed, in an affecting portrayal of a tortured soul. The Achaeans begin the war, only in the wrong place. They’re so eager for something to happen that they mistakenly think they’ve reached Troy as soon as […]

Eric Shanower’s Age of Bronze retells the story of the Trojan War in a beautiful, realistic fashion. Although they speak of being a god’s son or daughter the way we’d speak of our parents’ hometown, the participants are treated as real people with identifiable motivations: lust, anger, greed, arrogance … all the classics. Eric Shanower well deserved the 2001 and 2003 Eisner Awards for Best Writer/Artist. A Thousand Ships opens with Paris as a cowherd, which grounds the series before […]

Think back… it’s 1998. After revolutionizing the medium with Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud hasn’t published comics for several years. Instead, he’s been talking about micropayments and digital work and how computers will open a brave new world for comics. The New Adventures of Abraham Lincoln was him putting his theories into practice, created entirely on computers, and oh, what a disappointment it was! The technology wasn’t yet ready for what he was attempting, and the result was very minimal cartoony […]