Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth

The raison d’etre of Planetary has been using thinly-disguised versions of other people’s characters to explore genre literature. In Planetary/Batman: Night on Earth, Warren Ellis is able to use the real thing, which makes this entry the best of the series. As expected, there isn’t much of a story — the Planetary team, while chasing a superpowered freak, encounters various versions of Batman — but the gorgeous art by John Cassaday and the appreciation for superhero history as summed up […]

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The Baby-Sitters Club: Kristy’s Great Idea

The Baby-Sitters Club: Kristy’s Great Idea adapts the first book in the popular novel series by Ann M. Martin into comic form. Raina Telgemeier beautifully handles the conversion, creating a work that reads as though it had always been illustrated. It’s a great story for girls of all ages. Kristy has the idea of forming the club with two friends and a new acquaintance. Mary Anne is shy, with an overprotective single father. Claudia’s growing up a bit faster than […]

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Action Philosophers

Action Philosophers by Fred Van Lente and Ryan Dunlavey makes the history of philosophy fun. Profiles cover nine figures — Plato, Bodhidharma (inventor of both Zen Buddhism and Kung Fu), Nietzsche, Jefferson, Saint Augustine, Ayn Rand, Freud, Jung, and Joseph Campbell — using the vocabulary, both visual and verbal, of action-adventure comics. Exaggerations and modern language are used to make points in memorable fashion. Characters have plenty of attitude, making long-dead historical figures easier to relate to from the modern […]

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Tech Jacket: Lost and Found

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 […]

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Odds Off

Matt Madden’s love of playful formalism, explicitly on display in 99 Ways to Tell a Story, here takes the shape of fiction. Odds Off is a graphic novel about young adults making key relationship and life decisions. Under it all is the exploration of how communication works, or more often, doesn’t work. At a New Year’s party, Shirin wants to leave, but her boyfriend Morgan decides to stay. Shirin’s studying for the MCAT while working a cubicle job. She wants […]

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Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person

43-year-old Miriam Engelberg decided to cope with a diagnosis of breast cancer by creating a comic journal. The back cover calls Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person “devastatingly humorous”, but much as I appreciate black humor and laughing in the face of trouble, I didn’t find the book funny at all. Her style is best described as naive or primitive; it’s flat, with no backgrounds and a heavy reliance on text, both dialogue and captions. Most of the art is […]

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Pizzeria Kamikaze

Pizzeria Kamikaze postulates an unusual afterlife. Those who’ve killed themselves wind up in a world that looks and behaves just like this one, only with even less purpose and even more boring. The only difference is that some of the inhabitants bear scars, based on their method of death. Our narrator, Mordy, works at a pizza joint in this generic afterworld city. He goes to a bar to relax in the evenings, where he meets new friend Uzi. The two […]

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Orion: The Gates of Apokolips

I’ve never been that interested in the New Gods. Their original appearances were before my time, so my exposure to them is limited to reprint volumes and occasional appearances in The Legion of Super-Heroes. There wasn’t a lot about the characters I could relate to, but that changed with this collection, Orion: The Gates of Apokolips. Between the clarity of the god’s motivations, the epic plans and schemes, and the interaction with regular people, there’s more than enough to keep […]

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