by Scott McCloud A very unusual book from McCloud, the writer/artist of the comic Zot! In fact, I'm amazed that McCloud doesn't have a more extensive bibliography, given the wealth of information and insight presented in this volume. Succinctly,...
Continue reading "Understanding Comics:
The Invisible Art" »
by Bill Watterson The announcement last November that Bill Watterson would be retiring his comic strip Calvin and Hobbes at the end of the year should not have surprised anyone--at least, anyone who has read the recently released The...
Continue reading "The Calvin and Hobbes Tenth Anniversary Book" »
by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean I picked this up for three dollars at a remainder fair in Denver while I was there for Anaconism, and read it on the plane coming home. It was a whim purchase, based...
Continue reading "Black Orchid" »
I don't buy individual comics anymore, but I do occasionally find collected trade paperbacks worthy. In the case of Cerebus, an independent comic self-published by the indomitable Dave Sim, the thing to buy are the 'phonebooks' so termed because of...
Continue reading "Two Cerebus Volumes by Sim" »
by John Ney Reiber Timothy Hunter is a 13-year-old boy with the possibility of becoming the world's greatest magician--as long as he can survive his first date. Well, that and his alcoholic, guilt-ridden father. Well, not really father, kind of...
Continue reading "Two volumes of The Books of Magic" »
by Alan Moore, et al. Unlike Moore's ground-breaking work on Watchmen and From Hell, Promethea is more traditional fare. However, because it is by Moore, this is still above the majority of comics/graphic novels being produced today. In some ways,...
Continue reading "Promethea Vol. 1" »
by Alan Moore, et al. The team of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon, who combined to hit a grand slam with the now seminal graphic novel, Watchman, regrouped shortly after that and produced this examination of Batman. It's shorter, but...
Continue reading "Batman: The Killing Joke" »
About fifteen years ago, a comic company called Eclipse tried an experiment with one of their popular independent titles, Airboy. They published it weekly. It was cheap (nearly a third to half the price of a normal comic at the...
Continue reading "15 years later, with feeling" »
I've never read Demon Beast Invasion. In fact, with a title like that, I'm not even likely to pick it up and look at it. I did a little googling on it and discovered that it's likely based on some...
Continue reading "Texas Prosecutor Invasion" »
by Matthew Pustz I'm using this book in my college writing course ("text+vision") this semester, and it is exactly what I wanted from a cultural overview of comic book fandom. Pustz does a great job of explaining how fandom came...
Continue reading "Comic Book Culture:
Fanboys and True Believers" »
by Frank Miller et al. Until recently, most of the hardcover reprint collections from both Marvel (the Marvel Masterworks series) and DC (the Archives) series have focused on either the "Golden Age" or the beginning of the "Silver Age" of...
Continue reading "The Complete Frank Miller Spider-Man" »
I think my brother is going to be in town this weekend, but it is imperative that I attend this year's Small Press Expo, not the least because I'm encouraging all of my students to go to it. Both Scott...
Continue reading "Small Press Expo" »
I had tried to set up a happy hour for the comixschl list, but I was either too vague in my directions and description, people missed the message on Thursday, people were busy, or--more realistically--people really didn't want to meet,...
Continue reading "Friday at Small Press Expo" »
I bought Bryan Talbot's Adventure of Luther Arkwright but didn't like it much, thinking it too muddled, a crossbreed of Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus with Michael Moorcock's adventures of Jerry Cornelius. But the librarians on the graphic novels list for...
Continue reading "Saturday at the Small Press Expo" »
An interesting discussion on the comix scholars mailing list revealed this interesting tidbit about a fellow named Ricciotto Canudo who defined the "seven arts." Then, in 1964 Claude Beylie said that comics were the ninth art because television was the...
Continue reading "Comics is the ninth art?" »
by Durwin S. Talon There's a presumption among people that if something looks easy or simple, that it must have been easy or simple to create. Most people look at a page of a comic book and think, "Anyone could...
Continue reading "Panel Discussions
Design in Sequential Art Storytelling" »
Today's Morning Edition on NPR had a segment on an annual Comic Book Fair in France. While I'm not surprised to hear that comics get more serious treatment in Europe than the do in America, what was surprising was the...
Continue reading "Comics in Europe" »
by Frank Miller (W,A) and Lynn Varley (C) Unlike a fair number of people, I enjoyed Frank Miller's return to the world of his groundbreaking Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. It's not the same work, it's not even the same...
Continue reading "Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again" »
The numbers that come out of Hollywood for how well a movie has done should never be taken without some examination. On the other hand, I'd probably trust box office figures much more than I'll ever trust the "bestseller" numbers...
Continue reading "Comic Book Movie Popularity" »
by Doug Moench and Paul Gulacy When I became a certified comics fan in the late 70s, there were two comics outside of the "mainstream" superhero fare that I loved. One was Howard the Duck, a satirical comic about politics...
Continue reading "Shang-Chi: Master of Kung Fu" »
Point: "Hero vs. Superhero" by Michael Ventura, in the Austin Chronicle (via Blog of a Bookslut) Counterpoint: "Powers and the Comic Book Human" by Timothy Burke, from his blog Easily Distracted Although I set them against each other, the two...
Continue reading "Point/Counterpoint: The Future of Comics" »
Seen today on my Amazon store: Next time my friend Phil Yeh, who's been self-publishing his books for over thirty years, comes by, I'll be sure to ask him how the hugely profitable self-publishing market is going these days. You'll...
Continue reading "Make Huge Profits by Publishing Your Own Comic" »
by Bill Willingham (w), Mark Buckingham and Steve Leialoha (a) Comics fans, as detailed in Mathew Pustz's Comic Book Culture, have an affinity for stories that refer to other stories or acquired knowledge. In this, they resemble any number of...
Continue reading "Fables: Animal Farm" »
It's the 10th anniversary for Vertigo, the comic imprint that finally brought some measured respectability for the field, so much that it's covered this week in the New York Times business section. Those new graphic novel areas in Borders and...
Continue reading "The New York Times represents the newspaper of damning praise" »
The Names of Magic by Dylan Horrocks (w) and Richard Case (a) When I was younger, I had fantasies of being a great wizard, of being able to conjure things from thin air with the power of words and gestures....
Continue reading "The Names of Magic" »
This is worthy of your time: Philip Pullman (author of the "His Dark Materials" trilogy) on the importance and relevance of Art Spiegelman's Maus....
Continue reading "Setting the Graphic Novel Canon" »
The artistic influences of Jason Lutes' "picture novel," Jar of Fools, are fairly easy to spot. The drawing style is European, with the clean lines of Herge of Tintin fame, while the storyline is contemporary Americana of such short story...
Continue reading "Jar of Fools" »
Jim Henley's continuing discussion on cover songs reminded me of another of my many interests in music because of something else that I share with Jim, a love for comics. I've long been keeping a list in my head of...
Continue reading "Songs about Guys and Gals in Tights" »
I just discovered (from Jim ) that I'm persona non grata to the mainstream of comics creators because I only buy trade editions (i.e., graphic novels), having foregone the monthly magazines in 1990. The decision at the time was easy,...
Continue reading "I Only Buy Trades" »
Jim Henley points us toward an interesting post over on the Comics Waiting Room called Comic Book Reader's Bill of Rights Version 1.0. In time honored blogging tradition, I intersperse my pithy comments on said bill below....
Continue reading "A Funny (Book) Bill of Rights" »
The comics blogosphere is being asked about recommendations for comics that concern political issues. All the usual suspects have been covered, so I'll try to suggest some things that might be considered that are a little farther afield:Superman Archives: Volume...
Continue reading "Political Comics" »
Jim Henley spent the weekend at the Small Press Expo in Bethesda. I went to this in 2002, back when I was teaching comics in my writing classes at American University, but haven't been in recent years. Sounds like it's...
Continue reading "Finding a New Model" »
by Mike Carey, et al. It takes some arrogance, worthy of the Prince of Lies himself, to claim, as this book does, that the book is based on characters created by Neil Gaiman, Sam Kieth, and Mike Dringenberg. I would...
Continue reading "Lucifer: Devil in the Gateway" »
by Robert Rodi (writer), Cliff Richards (penciler), Norm Rapmund (inker) Rogue is one of those X-Men characters that is well-loved by the fans, so it's not surprising that Marvel finally did a Rogue mini-series. What is surprising is how lackluster...
Continue reading "Rogue: Going Rogue" »
by James Robinson (writer), David S. Goyer (writer), Scott Benefiel (penciler), Stephen Sadowski (penciler), Derec Aucoin (penciler), Mark Propst (inker), Michael Bair (inker) There is a problem inherent with any piece of fiction that contains multiple protagonists, be it comics,...
Continue reading "JSA: Justice Be Done" »
by David Goyer (writer), Geoff Johns (writer), Stephen Sadowski (penciler), Buzz Marcos Martin (penciler), Michael Bair (penciler) Had I read the previous JSA volume, Justice Be Done, before buying this one, I probably would have passed it by. As it...
Continue reading "JSA: Darkness Falls" »
It's true that the graphic story medium remains a ghetto, even though successes in the last couple of decades such as Moore's Watchmen and Spiegelman's Maus did a lot to renovate it. The majority of American comics, and the...
Continue reading "The Best American Comics 2006" »
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