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Review: Off Season, by James Sturm
James Sturm has had an interesting couple of years as a cartoonist. His latest book, Off Season, was serialized on Slate, starting in September of 2016 and running through the presidential election and its aftermath. While the final compiled version, out this year from D&Q, is cleaned up and expanded, it is a fascinating examination…
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Enemies of the State #004 – This Woman’s Work by Julie Delporte
Enemies of the State is a monthly virtual book club discussion on a recently published comic, featuring a rotating cast of comics critics. Episode #4 of Enemies of the State features commentary on Julie Delporte’s This Woman’s Work, published by Drawn & Quarterly in 2019. This Woman’s Work is Delporte’s third major publication in English,…
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Review: Coyote Doggirl by Lisa Hanawalt
Lisa Hanawalt has a lot of talent as a short story writer. Her first two books, My Dirty Dumb Eyes and Hot Dog Taste Test established her as a cartoonist with a knack for finding humor in everyday objections and expressions, and as a person whose work borders the fluorescent and the surreal. But I…
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Review: Red Winter by Anneli Furmark
Some books demand to be reviewed. This is certainly the case with Anneli Furmark’s period drama Red Winter, set in 1970s Sweden, where a secret affair between a young man named Ulrik and an older woman named Siv ricochets around a small northern community. Red Winter is Furmark’s first comic to be published in English,…
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Comics That Challenged Me in 2018: Part 1
It’s been tradition at Sequential State to run a series of microreview articles at the beginning of each calendar year. These articles are my “Comics That Challenged Me” lists, and they’re a function of how I think about the end of the year wrap ups that so many sites run during December as a way…
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Review: The Strange by Jérôme Ruillier
There are some books that demand attention – not because they are flashy, or because they are written by a well-known author, but because they describe perfectly the current moment in time. The Strange by Jérôme Ruillier is that kind of book. In The Strange, Ruillier documents the story of an unnamed undocumented immigrant and his journey to try…
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Sarcasm is Dead: Thoughts on Tom Gauld’s Recent Strip Comics
I reviewed Mooncop by Tom Gauld late last year, and I found that I enjoyed that comic quite a bit. Gauld has a new book out with Drawn & Quarterly, Baking with Kafka, and I recently read a short review of it at The Comics Journal. Annie Mok was pretty scathing in her review, but I found…
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Review: Poppies of Iraq by Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim
I’ve been having a hard time finding graphic memoirs that I truly love. I reviewed Tillie Walden’s Spinning earlier this week, which, while captivating, left me a little cold. I recently took the plunge on Brigitte Findakly and Lewis Trondheim’s Poppies of Iraq, which was published in English by Canadian publisher Drawn and Quarterly. The book…
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Comics That Challenged Me in 2016: Part 1 (of 6)
It’s been an annual tradition (for 3 years running) that I have not written a “Best Comics Of 20XX” list. I think that decision continues to be a good one for me. I generally dislike the idea that any one book can be the consensus pick of any given year when there is so much art being made.…
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Review: MOONCOP by Tom Gauld
I’m trying to get back into the swing of things while I still have some small measure of 2016 left to me to write. Nothing like starting out on the right foot for a new year. My annual feature, Comics That Challenged Me, will be starting next week and will run through the holidays. I’ve…
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Review: The Envelope Manufacturer by Chris Oliveros
Chris Oliveros is best known for founding Drawn & Quarterly and acting as its publisher for 25 years. In April of 2015, Oliveros stepped down as publisher, and in January 2016, his self-published comic The Envelope Manufacturer was released with distribution from D&Q. The Envelope Manufacturer is 102 pages of black and white comics about the anxieties and self-delusion of…
