Independent Opinions, News, and Reviews of Graphic Novels, Manga, and Comic Books
Back in the 90s, Kyle Baker’s The Cowboy Wally Show was one of the great lost graphic novels, a legitimate cult classic. People would pay hundreds of dollars for a copy due to its impressive reputation and rarity. (It was originally released by a book publisher in 1988 before being brought back into print in 1996, then picked up by Vertigo in 2003.) There are two lessons to be learned from this: 1. Today, when comics with a spine are […]
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Released this week was The Martian Confederacy, a new sci-fi adventure graphic novel written by Jason McNamara (First Moon, Continuity) and drawn by Paige Braddock (Jane’s World). It’s set on Mars in the year 3535, but this isn’t a shiny happy future. It’s Mars as trailer park. Think of the grimy bar that shows up in Star Wars or Serenity, and then envision a planet like that, where even the air is controlled by a corporation. Boone’s a scrappy guy […]
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I haven’t read Dean Koontz’s Odd Thomas series of novels, but In Odd We Trust, an original graphic novel prequel co-written and illustrated by Queenie Chan (The Dreaming), makes me interested in seeing more. The young man strangely named Odd Thomas is a genius pancake maker who can also talk to ghosts. (Think a male Ghost Whisperer, only the ghosts he sees don’t speak.) He lives in a small California town, almost a character in itself, where he’s accepted as […]
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Why I Hate Saturn is only the second graphic novel by Kyle Baker (Nat Turner, The Bakers: Babies And Kittens), but it’s one of his best. The unusual format — illustrations in black, white, and a light sepia tone, with dialogue or narration underneath the panels — suits the conversational-driven story. Anne is a jaded alcoholic urbanite, full of wisecracks about everything and everyone around her. She hates the beautiful people because she’s not one of them, the kind of […]
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Will Eisner is one of the acknowledged geniuses of the comics field. While he didn’t actually invent the graphic novel (with 1978’s A Contract With God), he did make numerous strides in fighting for acceptance of the medium as an artform. One of his advances was his Sunday Spirit sections, seven-page stories included in weekly newspaper supplements. The Spirit Archives collect these tales in handsomely re-colored hardcovers. With 24 volumes out so far, giving them a try can be intimidating. […]
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Where to start talking about From Hell? Perhaps a hint is given in one of the quotes that open this almost 600-page tome. As Charles Fort said, “One measures a circle, beginning anywhere.” And that’s what writer Alan Moore seeks to create, a work that circles on itself, using a proposed solution for the mystery of the Jack the Ripper murders to portray, as Warren Ellis put it, “the birth of the 20th century”. Like so many Alan Moore books, […]
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Matthew Loux has created a modern classic of children’s adventure with Salt Water Taffy, “The Seaside Adventures of Jack and Benny”. Jack and Benny are brothers, and their parents have taken them to a small town in Maine for the summer. The videogame batteries are dead, there’s no television, but Chowder Bay has other things to draw attention, like “The Legend of Old Salty”, a giant lobster. Loux draws with a thick line that gives everyone incredibly sharp chins and […]
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The fourth entry in the charming series about an owl and his woodland friends is another comforting tale about how being nice will save the day. A Time to Be Brave is told wordlessly, with the characters communicating in symbols, but they do read a fairy tale about a knight and a dragon whose text appears in the panels. Wormy, who serves the role of a small child (nice for reader identification purposes), is frightened by the story, so after […]
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