I’m pleasantly surprised that Elvira: Mistress of the Dark #1 is more than just a booby book. Yes, there’s a scantily clad woman having adventures, but there’s also snarky humor and an intriguing culture clash premise. Artist Dave Acosta shows lots of cleavage, of course, but that’s the premise of Elvira. There is also storytelling and emphasis on her expressions as a character, not just body-part framing (although you will see plenty of bustlines). As written by David Avallone, we […]

There are plenty of comics about comics, since artists tend to fall back on “write what you know”. Draw Stronger is a completely different kind of book about making comics, though. As it’s subtitled, it’s about “self-care for cartoonists and visual artists”. It actually isn’t a comic so much as an illustrated guide, with plenty of cute little doodles demonstrating the different aches illustrators may experience. Most are exaggerated, to be visually distinctive, and a recurring lightning bolt with a […]

Cautionary Fables and Fairy Tales is the umbrella title for a series of anthologies edited by Kel McDonald. (And isn’t that a great title? So fun to say!) Each volume — there have been three so far — is themed after a particular region, so together, they cover folklore from around the world. What I like about them is the high quality of the content. The stories are substantial, which means they have plenty of space to develop (even if, […]

One of the benefits of a digital-only publisher like Europe Comics (particularly one republishing works that already have a track record, but in English) is that they can experiment with a wider range of story types and subjects. Aude Picault’s Limited Edition has strong appeal to a market under-served by traditional American comics: the adult woman. It’s the story of Claire, an over-thirty French woman who wants to find the right guy and settle down to raise a family. Most […]

The best thing about Valentine, by Vanyda, is that it foregrounds the experience of a teenage girl as worth viewing. The worst thing about it is that absolutely nothing happens. There is no story here. Valentine is a teenager in school. She hangs with her friends and goes to a party where one of them gets sick. Her big accomplishment is walking by the house of the boy she crushes on. Just because something is realistic or true to life […]

I have just found a completely different type of comic, and it is just what I needed after wrapping up a busy week before a holiday. Ambient Comics by Nadine Redlich is a collection to induce meditation and quiet observation. Each page has six panels showing an object as time passes. For example, as shown here, the shadow of a stick moving through the day, or a banana aging. Some — such as the house on fire or the field […]

There’s a tendency, when working with a favorite property, to want to include all the well-known bits all at once. But in this case, the result is more like a checklist than a story. Many of the elements that fans know from the Sherlock Holmes stories by Arthur Conan Doyle — a name that nowhere appears on this comic, by the way, although the incorrect line “Sherlock Holmes TM & © 2018 Dynamite Characters, LLC.” is in the indicia — […]

As part of a graphic series on self-care and mind/body understanding, Steve Haines (a chiropractor who teaches Trauma Releasing Exercises) writes and Sophie Standing illustrates Anxiety Is Really Strange. (They have also done Trauma Is Really Strange and Pain Is Really Strange, while Forgiveness Is Really Strange is written by Masi Noor and Marina Cantacuzino.) It wasn’t what I expected. It’s a 32-page comic on heavy paper that reads like an illustrated essay, with related quotes as footnotes on almost […]