Marvel Rising is intended to be a new franchise from Marvel that features lots of young female team members and characters of color. The tie-in comic books have started coming out (the cartoon doesn’t have a release date that I’ve seen), and they’re a mess. The stories are simple and straightforward, not outstanding but not bad, but the release plan is overly complicated. (I’m sympathetic to the new supervillain, Emulator, because she’s a gamer girl who’s hassled by over-muscled boys […]

Iron Circus Comics, C. Spike Trotman’s publisher, will be reprinting Cautionary Fables and Fairytales with new titles and covers “for the retail and library markets… with an eye to bringing those books to middle grade readers”. I briefly summarized the excellent anthology series edited by Kel McDonald and Kate Ashwin last month; they’re currently kickstarting their fourth volume, Oceania. Out this fall will be the Africa volume, renamed The Girl Who Married a Skull and Other African Stories. The Asia […]

As with Megan Rose Gedris’s Spectacle volume 1, volume 2 will be serialized digitally before the print version is published by Oni Press. Issue #6 will be available digitally on July 11, with a new issue every month until November. (That makes five, which was the same length as the first volume.) Or you can read the webcomic as a page a day. The first book came out in May, with its final issue out in February, so that suggests […]

After taking off 2017 to get settled at their new host convention, the New York Comic Con, now comes word that the Harvey Awards will be radically revamped for 2018. The Harvey Awards were started in 1988 and named after Harvey Kurtzman. Last year, if I counted correctly, there were 22 categories. Now, there are six, recognizing graphic novels (and one for media adaptations, sadly), and three creator awards, which are more career-based than focused on work in a particular […]

No, that’s not a typo. I enjoy looking back at my yearly summaries, so I’m filling in those I missed as I can. And 2015 was a good year, with plenty of diverse, entertaining, substantial reads. (Plus, with more time to look back, I can better know which works are longer-lasting, instead of the hot thing to talk about that year.) Awkward by Svetlana Chmakova — An outstandingly good graphic novel for and about kids, with surprising depth regarding motivations […]