Independent Opinions, News, and Reviews of Graphic Novels, Manga, and Comic Books
Since Hellboy 2: The Golden Army comes out on DVD next week, it’s time for me to watch the first movie, Hellboy, for the first time. Overall, I liked it, but I don’t have much to say about it. It’s very true to the comic book in its visuals, perhaps just as much as Sin City, although in a much more subtle way. Like the comic book, the point is what you see, not so much the story, which is […]
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Ochre Ellipse by Jonas Madden-Conner (technically, Ochre Ellipse #2) has won the 2008 Isotope Award for Excellence in Mini-Comics. Jonas discusses the work at his blog, along with showing samples. Here’s a review at the Daily Cross Hatch.
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I enjoyed Blue Beetle largely because of John Rogers’ writing. He’s not writing it any more. (Matthew Sturges (House of Mystery) has taken over.) Instead, Rogers has moved to television, with a new TNT series called Leverage. He’s executive-producing this “action-packed drama” along with Dean Devlin (Independence Day). Timothy Hutton stars as the leader of a team of thieves and con artists who steal from those who deserve it in order to help those not so well off. It’s got […]
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I recently reread the three volumes of Kat & Mouse, the Tokyopop series about two girls solving mysteries at a snooty New England private school. I’ll say up front, I think canceling it (and leaving major plots unsolved) was a very bad idea, since it’s a wonderful book to push to fans of things like Gossip Girl or similar stories of class-based plots among the school-age set. However, its odd format — not manga-sized, but half that length, for $6 […]
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I checked out this mystery because I adore the detailed thin line art of Jiro Taniguchi (The Walking Man). That’s on display, but the story is nothing to write home about. In a plot that could have been part of Murder, She Wrote, mountain climber Shiga heads to Tokyo to find the missing daughter of his dead best friend. There’s more to it than that, thematically — Shiga had an additional connection with the widowed mother, and the girl turned […]
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I wasn’t looking for another series to read, but I tried the first issue of this new-style anthology, and I was hooked. House of Mystery: Room and Boredom collects the first five issues of the series. Cain and Abel, the DC horror comic hosts from the 70s who lived in the Houses of Mystery and Secrets, respectively, make a two-page cameo at the beginning, but after that, it’s all new. The House of Mystery is now a bar outside dimensions. […]
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The first Luv Luv Press title, Voices of Love, was intriguing to me, just because it was very unusual in the U.S. to see manga romance stories for women with explicit sex included. (Although there had previously been the occasional explicit shojo story.) The next two, Real Love and Love for Dessert, were pretty bad, since they seemed to emphasize the sex at the expense of believable (or in some cases, any) characterization and storytelling craft. So how do the […]
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I’m surprised I’m still enjoying this manga as much as I am, because I would have expected that as it loses its shiny!newest! feel, I would be getting a little bored of it. But I’m not. I think that’s because the author, Kazune Kawahara, keeps the teen relationship realistic while plugging in lots of funny stuff and keeping the events moving. Plus, Haruna is just so enthusiastic a personality, she’s a blast to read about. As volume 6 opens, she’s […]
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