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Review: Otherworldly Izakaya Nobu #1
IJapanese pop culture has been obsessed with a type of storytelling called isekai over the last few years, and it’s become a pervasive part of the manga landscape. The word isekai (異世界, lit. ‘different world’) has come to represent a wide swath of fiction with escape as their central theme. These are transportation or reincarnation…
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Review: Fluorescent Mud by Eli Howey
Comics is a medium ripe for the exploration of the intersection between lived experience and mental health conditions. Eli Howey starts down this well-worn path, but quickly steps onto fresh ground with Fluorescent Mud, a recent release from Chicago-based art comics publisher 2dcloud. Fluorescent Mud is 112 pages of watercolor and gouache comics that focuses…
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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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Review: Spy Seal: The Corten-Steel Phoenix by Rich Tommaso
I’ve been working and reworking a review of Rich Tommaso’s Spy Seal since the trade paperback came out in early 2018, and I still have trouble knowing what to make of its publication. The comic was the subject of a brief burst of commentary from places like Comics Beat and Bleeding Cool, who saw the poor…
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Review: Onibi: Diary of a Yokai Ghost Hunter by Atelier Sentō
One of the things that still plagues the “comics market” is the way creative work gets categorized. This is especially true if that work doesn’t neatly fit into any one category. This is even worse with translated work, and is a major issue for Onibi: Diary of a Yokai Ghost Hunter. Created by Cécile Brun and…
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Review: Her Bark & Her Bite by James Albon
I’m still working through some older books I’ve been meaning to review; hope you have enjoyed the last few days worth of reviews. I’ll take a moment of privilege today and direct you over to Your Chicken Enemy, a site run by my colleague and friend Daniel Elkin. Dan is running a week-long feature called…
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Review: Qoberious #1, by DRT
I’ve been holding on to Qoberious #1 since earlier this year, trying figure out what to make of it. The book came essentially out of nowhere fully formed, which defies my general expectations of comics-making. When a cartoonist publishes a graphic novel, especially when it’s a first graphic novel, there is often proceeding material, either…
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Review: By Monday I’ll Be Floating in the Hudson with the Other Garbage by Laura Lannes
Part of my goal for these next few weeks are to get back to some comics I read in 2017 and early 2018 but didn’t properly evaluate. For the next few weeks I will be trying to get in some writing I’ve been putting off over the last few months. October and November were hard…
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Review: Things Go Wrong #1 by Jason Bradshaw
Paper Rocket Minicomics puts out a few books each year, and generally runs a small-ask Kickstarter each year to get them printed. This year the books were a new Missy comic from Daryl Seitchik and a reprint of Jason Bradshaw’s Things Go Wrong #1, originally published as Bore #14, from his zine series. Bradshaw is…
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Review: Ran and the Gray World vol. 1 by Aki Irie
The first volume of Ran and the Gray World was one of the first Japanese language books I ever purchased. It’s a series that has long held my fascination; the whimsical setting piqued my interest, its use of magic so completely different from other manga in the fantasy genre. And importantly, the cover is beautiful,…
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Review: I Hate You, You Just Don’t Know It Yet by Nadine Redlich
Nadine Redlich has a playful style that I’ve seen popping up everywhere over the last 5-6 months. I loved her recent Google Doodle celebrating the birthday of Erich Ohser (aka E.O. Plauen), a famous German cartoonist (I reviewed a collection of his Father & Son comics here). Her illustrations in the New York Times and…
