Search Results for: science comics

Rumble Girls: Silky Warrior Tansie

In Rumble Girls: Silky Warrior Tansie, Lea Hernandez mixes a prep school soap opera with fighting girl manga and forward-looking science fiction to skewer popular culture and media manipulation. Raven Tansania Ransom is in training to be a rumble girl, the pilot of a hardskin, a robotic fighting suit. She’s reached that age where she’s starting to pay a different kind of attention to her coach, and she doesn’t even know yet that he’s also media phenomenon Crimson August, the […]

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Bones: The Superhero in the Alley

A body is found in an alley. It’s a badly decomposed skeleton that indicates a fall or push from a high building, and next to it is found a maggot-ridden graphic novel. (“It’s a comic book” explains one of the resident geeks on the investigative team.) I typically watch Bones anyway, because I enjoy the interplay between Emily Deschanel’s straightforward forensic anthropologist (nicknamed “Bones”) and David Boreanaz’s FBI agent. This one, though, had friends at work asking me the day […]

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Manga Starting Points

If you’re curious about where to start reading manga, here are links to some recommendations: Pluto: Urasawa x Tezuka (Viz) | An eight-book revamping of an Astro Boy storyline in which someone targets the world’s seven greatest robots for murder. The best translated manga available in the U.S. and a story with someone for everyone: excellent art, cinematic storytelling, deep themes, and affecting plot twists. Nana (Viz) | An incredibly involving tale of two young women named Nana, one a […]

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Salamander Dream

Hope Larson’s Salamander Dream is a dream of childhood told in lime green and black ink on cream-colored paper. The book begins with a map of woods and creek that looks like a crayon drawing, reminiscent of the sketch of the 100-Acre Wood that opened the Winnie the Pooh stories. Hailey lives at the edge of the woods, and that’s where she spends her summer, amongst the trees and the birds. She’s exploring the wonders of the world and her […]

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The Sandwalk Adventures

In this scientific fantasy, two mites living in the follicle of Charles Darwin’s eyebrow tell each other myths about the creation of the world, involving a motley collection of humorous gods. It’s sort of a cosmic game of telephone, taking events and making them bigger and different in the retelling over generations. For some unknown reason, Darwin is able to hear one of them, Mara, when she speaks. Their resulting conversations about how life came to be touch on myth, […]

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Clan Apis

Clan Apis is the biography of a honeybee. It’s educational, as you might guess, but it teaches more than biology facts. Each chapter of the story also illustrates a life lesson as well as being wonderfully entertaining. I never thought I could care so much about, or learn so much from, a bee. The story opens with a bee’s version of the creation of the universe, which turns out to be a tale an older bee, Dvorah, is telling Nyuki, […]

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Doctor Who: The Tides of Time

Doctor Who: The Tides of Time says it’s the “complete run of Fifth Doctor comic strips from the pages of Doctor Who Monthly“. I can’t argue with that, but I had a bunch more questions after reading it. Since it started as serialized, it’s a dense read. I finished the first seven-part, 50+ page story feeling as though I’d completed a typical graphic novel, and I had six more stories to go. (I didn’t like any of them quite as […]

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Planetes

Planetes by Makoto Yukimura is the story of garbage collectors in space, those responsible for picking up leftover junk floating around. Yuri is trying to get over the freak death of his wife years earlier. He’s quiet and distracted, putting up with the desolation of the work by losing himself inside his head. Hachimaki is still young, dreaming of making enough for his own ship one day, and not realizing how prying simple questions can be. Fee is their driver, […]

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