Cancer Vixen

There was a boomlet for a moment there in graphic novels about dealing with cancer. The primitively drawn Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person was in the traditional black-and-white autobiographical comic vein, while Mom’s Cancer, formerly a webcomic, won the first ever Digital Comic Eisner Award. That subject isn’t a surprising choice — it’s innately dramatic, something many people can relate to (if they haven’t had a scare themselves, a relative likely has), and a nicely meaty topic to make […]

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PR: What Not to Do: Marketing a Cancelled Title

NBM’s online publicist, David Seidman, sent out an email early this week promoting an online preview for “special friends” of the company to post. It was an excerpt from Angel Skin, a graphic novel by Christian Westerlund and Robert Nazeby Herzig. I was ready to put it up, only I noticed that the message didn’t include a release date. (I wanted to know whether to promote the book as something to preorder or something to look for shortly.) I checked […]

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Genshiken Volume 8

I had thought that this was the last volume in the series by Kio Shimoku, but there will be at least one more. However, this book did provide the focus on Ogiue I was looking for. The aspiring manga artist suffers severe guilt over her explicit yaoi because of an incident that happened five years ago. At the urging of her friends, she’d drawn yaoi featuring a student in their class. When he and others found out about it, he […]

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Inubaka: Crazy for Dogs Volume 2

I do love this series by Yukiya Sakuragi. I know it’s predictable and flawed — it’s almost a case study in the way it infantilizes its two-dimensional heroine — but it makes me so happy to read it. How can you not enjoy being reminded of how dogs make people happy? After getting hired at the pet shop in volume 1 to take care of the dogs, now Suguri has to learn to sell them in volume 2. Except for […]

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Kitchen Princess Volume 1

by Natsumi Ando; story by Miyuki Kobayashi; adaptation by Nunzio DeFilippis and Christina Weir An orphan girl is a great cook with an amazing sense of taste. As a young child, her life was saved by a boy who left behind only a silver spoon with the crest of a prestigious school. Now, she’s worked hard to get into the school to try to find him. I was expecting fun things from this series, because I love cooking. Sadly, I […]

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Stagger Lee

Stagger Lee is a song. You may have heard it; it was a hit in the 50s for Lloyd Price, as well as having many other versions over the years. Even Price’s take has two variations, because he cleaned up the lyrics for American Bandstand (his original was too violent for Dick Clark). Stagger Lee is also an amazing book that looks at the story behind the song and the legend it describes. You don’t even need to know the […]

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Genshiken Volume 4

It’s a time of change for the fanboys and -girls who make up the club dedicated to manga, anime, gaming, cosplay, and porn. Saki, the non-otaku who only hangs around because her boyfriend belongs, almost burned down the school by accident at the end of last volume, resulting in the club being put on suspension. To make it up to the members, she agrees to participate in a costume contest. There’s also the problem of them being locked out of […]

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Finder: Talisman

I’ve been putting off discussing this installment of Finder because of its power. All of Carla Speed McNeil’s graphic novels are astoundingly wonderful, but Talisman in particular hits on a very meaningful subject. Let me quote from its back cover: Talisman is about a book. The book that’s never there when you wake up, no matter how hard you try to take it with you. The book you steal when you’re too young to understand it’s not the only copy […]

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