What Is Zuda Looking For?

I thought I’d stop by and check out this month’s Zuda entries, which made me wonder about how similar they were all becoming. I noticed that many of them were tagged either Super-Hero, Action/Adventure, or Horror. There were smart-alec animals, girls in their underwear, bloody fights, talky conspiracies, and always, too much time spent waiting for the viewer to load. The content reminded me of what I can already get elsewhere. Also typical: lots of setup, no real story. With […]

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The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For

With the popularity of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, many readers wanted to see more work by her. Her earlier series, Dykes to Watch Out For (DTWOF), is good reading, but hard to catch up on, with 11 books released over two decades, some of which are out of print. Thus, this omnibus edition. In addition to 330 of the previously published strips (out of 457, or about 3/4 of them), The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For contains an additional […]

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Tokyopop News: CSI Interns, Kindaichi, INVU, Company Plans, more

I was fortunate to be invited to a recent Tokyopop webcast where editor Lillian Diaz-Przybyl presented information on an upcoming work and took questions. CSI: Intern at Your Own Risk First, we saw a small preview of the CSI Interns book, due out in early September. Although Gil Grissom and Catherine Willows make an appearance in the introduction, it mostly focuses on a new group of younger interns. Apparently, CSI has a significant teenage audience, which should overlap with the […]

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A Distant Neighborhood Volume 1

The latest translated manga by Jiro Taniguchi follows a plot familiar to most science fiction fans. In A Distant Neighborhood, a middle-aged business man finds himself reliving his life as a teen, with the potential chance of doing things over, better. By mistake, Hiroshi Nakahara gets on the wrong train and finds himself in his home town on the anniversary of his mother’s death. After he visits her grave, he returns to town to discover that he’s become his 14-year-old […]

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Emma Volume 9

Like the previous volume, Emma volume 9 contains short stories set in the world and time period of the main story. But you don’t need to be familiar with all the rest of the series to enjoy this one; in fact, it might be a good sample if you’re curious and coming late to this great read. The first story surprised me by being so nature-focused. A young boy and his pet squirrel go on a family picnic in the […]

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Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe

In this penultimate volume of the indy favorite series, Scott Pilgrim continues the path he began in the previous book: becoming an adult and growing up. Along with that comes relationship struggles and the need to make decisions instead of coasting through life. As Scott Pilgrim vs. the Universe opens, Scott turns 24. He and his friends are getting bored with their perfect little lives — the parties are trying too hard, the band is “recording” instead of playing gigs, […]

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20th Century Boys Volume 3

This is a bit of a departure for the site. Usually, when it comes to manga series, we leave them up to one reviewer or the other instead of switching off. Although Ed’s previously reviewed the first two volumes, I wanted to get in on recommending this astoundingly good series by by Naoki Urasawa. 20th Century Boys volume 3 is where Kenji reaches his turning point. He now understands what’s going on — someone who knew about their childhood games […]

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Drawing Words & Writing Pictures

This textbook is arranged in 15 lessons that promise to teach the reader “the foundations of visual storytelling”. And you know, given the authors, I believe them. Matt Madden previously created the amazing 99 Ways to Tell a Story, as well as the graphic novel Odds Off. Jessica Abel‘s works include La Perdida and Life Sucks, and together, they have taught years’ worth of comic courses, gaining important practical experience in what works instructionally. (And because they’re artists, they can […]

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