Independent Opinions, News, and Reviews of Graphic Novels, Manga, and Comic Books
This modern comedy of gender roles by Hisaya Nakajo, subtitled For You in Full Blossom, is populated with androgynously cute teenagers sporting beautiful faces framed with sprays of bangs. Mizuki has returned to Japan to pursue her dreams, even if it means pretending to be a boy. She’d been living in America, but after seeing Izumi Sano compete in the high jump, she developed a crush on him. Now she’s attending the same boys’ school he does. Her outspoken, “foreign” […]
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Any fan who’s ever been to a convention will recognize the setting of Comic Party, complete with all the clichés. When Kazuki doesn’t get into his chosen art school, his friends Mizuki (a cute girl) and Taishi (a geek) take him to an anime, manga, and gaming convention in order to help him find a focus for his creativity. Inspired, Kazuki prepares to put together a comic and debut it at a show. Taishi directs him by showing him this […]
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My gracious, I do love Labyrinth. I just watched the DVD again, and I always forget how engrossing it is. David Bowie turns in a superb performance as the Goblin King, scary and exotic and attractive and magical all at once. The older I get, the more patience I have with Jennifer Connelly’s performance, too. Once I thought she was much too wooden, just something existing for the creatures to dance around, but she seems more subtle to me these […]
Read moreGoodbye, Randy. You’ll be missed. Randy was one of the few old-timers left from when we were both writing on Usenet ten years ago. I can sympathize with his feelings, especially when it comes to being motivated by guilt and writing for the right reasons: Truthfully, I’ve considered quitting before, and one of the factors that always kept me in was a sense of duty to the folks who sent me comp copies for review. I figured that I should […]
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From the Riot blog, posted by a retailer (link no longer available): every single Speakeasy title that I ordered over the past two months has been cancelled…. it’s obvious to me that the publisher is going the way of Dreamwave, CrossGen, and all the other “hey, let’s try something NEW and DIFFERENT” dodo publishers. Speakeasy tried to do too much too soon. Instead of building an audience for four or five titles over the course of a year and then […]
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Using animals to comment on the human condition is a tradition with a long history in comics. Andy Runton is the latest to use it to its full potential, creating this generation’s Winnie the Pooh in his stories of Owly and his worm friend. The first book, The Way Home & The Bittersweet Summer, contains two mostly wordless pieces. The first story shows how Owly rescues a worm from drowning during a rainstorm. After recovery, and although the two species […]
Read moreDavid Welsh has launched a great idea: a site for trading manga. I’ve already signed up, because I have a stack of manga I’m not interested in keeping and a list of what I’d like to try. The books are easy to swap this way because of their mostly uniform format, which mails easily for not much cost.
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The New York Times reports that the new comic strip Retail will launch tomorrow. His aim for the comic strip … is to do for the mall what Dilbert did for the office, revealing the dysfunctional world of bickering employees, spineless managers, and cruel shoppers that lurks behind the cheery sales slogans. It’s a good topic, with lots of possibilities, and one most people can relate to. Everyone’s been shopping, even if they haven’t had the life-changing opportunity of working […]
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