After a bad day, there’s nothing that picks me up like the romantic comedy of Thom Zahler’s Love and Capes. Issue #11 has the couple, Mark and Abby, preparing for their upcoming marriage. Abby’s having problems finding the right wedding dress. When she does find the perfect gown, there’s a catch … it’s connected to Mark’s ex-girlfriend, Amazonia. That’s a bit of a stretch, but it does allow us to see a lot more of the superheroine than her previous, […]

Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey pack issues of Comic Book Comics full of history and humor. Even when you’ve heard these stories before, you’ll find a new perspective or detail you weren’t previously aware of. And they don’t stick just with the obvious, well-known stories — this issue’s 40 pages covers The creation of Crime Does Not Pay, a notoriously horrific comic, and what happened to Charles Biro and Bob Wood, its founders. How Marvel Comics and Stan Lee […]

I had the pleasure of discovering the work of both Lucy Knisley (Radiator Days) and Erika Moen (DAR) this year. So imagine my glee when I discovered that the two had teamed up for this conversational comic collaboration. The two artists passed the pages back and forth between themselves over a period of about six months. Via the internet, they drew themselves talking to each other, but it’s the subjects they cover that make this fascinating. They talk about deciding […]

I realized that this webcomic series had put out a new collection purely by serendipity — I found myself wondering what had happened to it and visited the website just in time to see that the second book, Nothing Better 2: Into the Wild, was available. I was thrilled, since the first book was one of my top 10 of 2007. I’d missed reading about odd-couple college roommates Katt (art student and questioning atheist) and Jane (religious but seeking, uncertain […]

Review by Ed Sizemore Crumb doesn’t follow any organized religion; in fact, he might be an atheist. In the introduction to The Book of Genesis Illustrated by R. Crumb, he tells us that he doesn’t believe that the Bible is the Word of God, or even inspired by God. Yet he strove to produce the most straightforward, faithful-to-the-text, illustrated version of Genesis. And succeeded. Every word found in the Biblical text is included in Crumb’s version. Further, Crumb didn’t make […]

I like true science comics, like the works by Jay Hosler or written by Jim Ottaviani or the Manga Guides to various fields. When I saw The Stuff of Life: A graphic guide to genetics and DNA, I thought it would be another great book in the genre. Heck, it was both blurbed by Hosler and illustrated by Zander Cannon and Kevin Cannon, who previously worked with Ottaviani on two books, T-Minus: The Race to the Moon and Bone Sharps, […]

The Middleman TV series finale has finally arrived, in print form, and it’s a fitting goodbye to the beloved show. Everyone makes an appearance — Lacey, Wendy’s boyfriend Tyler, Noser, Manservant Neville, Roxy the former succubi, giant robots — and the events are suitably amazing, huge, and touching. What really got to me, though, beyond the insane ideas and creative action was the spot-on dialogue. I’d missed hearing the characters talk like this, whether jokes about the costumes or the […]

Lucy Knisley and her mother went to Paris for a month in 2007, and the result was French Milk, Lucy’s drawn travel journal. The two women were each facing their own turning points. Her mother was going to be 50, and Lucy was turning 22 and facing the questions of adulthood. Her preparations demonstrate her youthful view of what’s important: she barely learns the language, but she succeeds at taking up smoking, to better hang out in cafes. She’s struggling […]