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Review: Trying Not To Notice by Will Dinski
Trying Not To Notice is one of the final books to come out of 2dcloud’s Spring Collection and my first encounter with cartoonist and illustrator Will Dinski in long form. I read An Honest Performance in 2015, which was noticeable for its strong line and a sense that marks on the page were more instinctual than placed. Now Dinski…
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Interview: Simon Hanselmann – “My greatest wish is that I could freeze time.”
I sat down with Simon Hanselmann at the Small Press Expo this year in North Bethesda, Maryland to talk about Bad Gateway, his latest graphic novel. Published by Fantagraphics earlier this year, Bad Gateway advances the plot of his Megg and Mogg comics past the events that appear in his first graphic novel Megahex. It’s…
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Review: A Fire Story by Brian Fies
California has been repeatedly battered by a series of wildfires in recent years, and Brian Fies, author of Mom’s Cancer, had his life upended by the 2017 Tubbs fire. In response, Fies wrote A Fire Story, initially a short piece posted online. This 19-page off the cuff reportage of the incident at the time of…
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Review: Hobo Mom by Charles Forsman & Max de Radigués
There’s a whole story to write about the publication of Hobo Mom, a recent release from Fantagraphics. Charles Forsman and Max de Radiguès are recently published authors from the press, and Forsman specifically has had some recent popular success with the adaptation of his comic The End of the Fucking World for a Netflix series.…
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Review: My Beijing: Four Stories of Everyday Wonder by Nie Jun
I spend a lot of time with my local library system, and I occasionally stumble upon books that escape notice by the indie and alt-comics press. There’s a thriving kids comics market, for example, centered around books like Diary of a Wimpy Kid and the work of Raina Telgemeier. I’ve read a lot of comics…
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Thoughts on the Formal Aspects of Small Comics feat. B.ü.Lb comix
Almost two years ago, B.ü.L.b comix, a European publisher based out of Geneva, sent me a little box full of tiny accordion style comics. The 2[w] series, as they’ve been titled, are all 3.5 x 4.5 cm comics in an 11-sheet accordion. I’ve been thinking a lot about those little accordions, which all fit neatly…
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Interview: Laila Milevski, on Enter, Holy Pilgrim
This week I’m featuring a recent release from Czap Books and Grindstone Press; Ley Lines #9, Enter, Holy Pilgrim. Yesterday we started with a review of the book; today I sit down to interview Laila Milevski, the creator, to talk about her inspiration and her thoughts about the creative process in working on a Ley…
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Review: Trashed by Derf Backderf One of 2015’s bigger graphic novel releases was Derf Backderf’s Trashed, an ode to the work of being a trash collector. This thick graphic novel tells the story of a college drop-out trying to figure out what to do with his life after leaving school, and ends up on the…
