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Review: The Worst by Molly Mendoza
Molly Mendoza is a real talent. Her illustration work has a divine sense of color and grandeur, and The Worst from Short Box falls comfortably in that same scope. One look at the striking cover of The Worst, a deep block of blood red with a superimposed panel of a shark right before it bites…
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Review: Skin to Skin by Jia Sung
The new Ley Lines books from Czap Books and Grindstone Press are starting to come out, and Jia Sung’s Skin to Skin is the first release of 2018. Jia Sung is a name I associate with Guernica Magazine – her illustrations for that website have always struck me as being simultaneously fragile and fierce. Drawing…
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Five Recommendations for TCAF 2018
Hi everyone! The Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) is this Mother’s Day weekend, and is one of the headlining comics shows of the spring season. I’m a little down on comics shows right now, but there are great comics debuting at the festival by some of my favorite cartoonists. But one of the joys of…
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Review: A Cat on the Chair by Heo Jiyoung
I occasionally have the opportunity to import comics from around the world. Generally I’ve had more success with cartoonists and shops based in Europe, but I recently got a few new books from South Korea, which is a first. One of the comics I was immediately drawn to was from the SSE Project. The…
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Review: Life Can (Not) Exist Here by Vreni Stollberger, Iasmin Omar Ata
Life Can (Not) Exist Here is a collaborative zine self-published in 2016 by Vreni Stollberger & Iasmin Omar Ata. The title is both a wink and nod towards the recent remakes of the Neon Genesis Evangelion film franchise, but the comic is a meditation on the transience and fragility of life. Life Can (Not) Exist…
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Review: Propagation and Seed Dispersal of Human/Plant Hybrids on 625B, by Lando
The title is a mouthful, but Propagation and Seed Dispersal of Human/Plant Hybrids on 625B is a reprint of UK-based cartoonist Lando’s 2014 comic of the same name, printed in Mould Map 3. Decadence Comics did a self-contained reprint of that story at the end of 2017, and I recently picked it up from a…
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Review: The Pervert, written by Michelle Perez, illustrated by Remy Boydell
I’m getting back into the swing of reviewing, and recently read an advance copy of The Pervert, a new graphic novel from Michelle Perez and Remy Boydell. The book will be released by Image in May, and the story features a trans woman living in Seattle doing sex work alongside other odd jobs. The comic…
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Review: Spirit Circle V 1-2 by Satoshi Mizukami
The writing here at Sequential State has been a bit sparse – apologies if you’ve been waiting for the latest update. I took a little time off over the last few weeks to decompress and get some reading in. I’ve been doing a lot of prose reading, and getting through some zines and library borrows…
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New Review of Anouck Durand’s Eternal Friendship on The Comics Journal
The title says it all – my first review for The Comics Journal was published this morning. The book is Anouck Durand’s Eternal Friendship. The book was originally published in France as Amitié Éternelle, and translated by Elizabeth Zuba for the small US-based publisher Siglio Press. In it, Durand uses official and personal photographs from Albanian state…
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Quick Picks #10 – mini kuš! #63-66
Quick Picks is an occasionally written series of microreviews of books I’ve read over the past two weeks. The latest batch of mini kuš comics came in the mail earlier this week, and as always it’s an interesting set. mini kuš #63 – Nausea by Abraham Díaz The first, most noticable quality of Díaz’s comic is how messy…
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Review: Before the Rain by Anne Pomel
One of the things I like about reading small press comics is the hunt. Despite there being distros across the US and a few good bookstores that have online storefronts, so much of what gets published in the small press community is isolated to a single website. That means if you’re trying to find new…
