Friends With Boys

I’m a big fan of Faith Erin Hicks’ work, so I knew I’d love her new graphic novel, but I had no idea how much. With Friends With Boys, Hicks has developed into a cartoonist you need to be reading. Drawing on her own home-schooling experiences, but not sinking into autobiography, Hicks tells the story of Maggie, the youngest of four siblings and the only girl in the family. They’d all previously been taught by their mother, but she has […]

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Catching Up With Toon Books: A Year’s Worth of Releases

I’ve been remiss in getting behind on the wonderful Toon Books comics for young and beginning readers. Before these most recent releases, I’ve covered all their previous books; you can find links here. Spring 2011 Silly Lilly in What Will I Be Today? by Agnes Rosenstiehl I didn’t care much for the previous Silly Lilly book, but this one is much more focused. Each four-page sequence, with two panels per page, shows Lilly engaged in some new activity, from cooking […]

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Possessions Volume 3: The Better House Trap

Green (book one), blue (book two), and now pink. But not a baby pink, more like Pepto-Bismol, suitable for treating the feelings Gurgazon the Unclean Pit Demon might raise in the weak-stomached. I was thrilled to see that the book opened with a sketch showing us how one of the other inhabitants of Ms. Llewellyn-Vane’s mansion for captured spirits and ghostly curiosities came to be part of the living museum. We haven’t seen enough of their histories for my taste, […]

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Sanctuary by Stephen Coughlin

Sanctuary is one of the digitally serialized comics coming out from SLG Publishing. Stephen Coughlin has created a story he calls a “Disney murder mystery” personalizing a group of animals kept in a park-like animal sanctuary. I found it funny, suspenseful, and well-cartooned. The animals are treated like people, with their own personalities and motivations, and while that’s unrealistic, it’s also entertaining. It reminded me of something like Madagascar … until the research scientists revealed their darker sides. That sets […]

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Andy Warner’s Online Comics: Man Who Built Beirut, Two Stories

Andy Warner is a student at the Center for Cartoon Studies who emailed me out of the blue to look at his comics, and I’m glad he did. He’s got a bunch online, but the newest are these: The Man Who Built Beirut is a non-fiction exploration of Middle Eastern politics through the story of the murder of Rafik Hariri, former prime minister of Lebanon and construction mega-mogul, and the demonstrations that followed. Warner lived in Beirut in 2005 and […]

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Hark! A Vagrant

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 […]

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Finder: Voice

The first new Finder story in five years — the previous was Five Crazy Women — takes an exponential step forward in the series. Carla Speed McNeil’s work is more astounding and self-assured than ever in this story of identity and gender. In an echo back to the original Finder: Sin-Eater, Finder: Voice revisits one of the cross-breed daughters from that story. Rachel resembles her mother, a Llaverac, one of a clan known for its androgynous beauties. As the story […]

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Page by Paige

The story of a young woman finding herself as an artist while adapting to life in the big city has been told before, but never so well or in so graphically interesting a fashion as in Page by Paige. Paige has moved with her parents to New York City from Charlottesville, Virginia, and she’s feeling lonely and unsure of herself. She misses her friends and a more natural setting and feels she can’t be truly herself in this new situation. […]

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