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Review: Girl Town by Carolyn Nowak
It is about time that Carolyn Nowak has a collection of her work. Having won two Ignatz awards and plenty of critical acclaim (including from this critic), Nowak now has her first collection, titled Girl Town out from Top Shelf at the end of 2018. Girl Town is a collection of short stories, starting from…
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Review: Mechaboys by James Kochalka
James Kochalka is one of a handful of hyperproductive cartoonists working in small press comics. His recent output has rotated between Johnny Boo comics, which target a younger subset of readers, and comics like Superf*ckers Forever, which are more teen & adult oriented. Kochalka’s latest graphic novel Mechaboys is firmly in that later camp. Published in…
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Review: Bottled, by Chris Gooch
Top Shelf has taken on some younger cartoonists and is publishing a few debuts this fall. One of these debut artists is Chris Gooch, a Melbourne-based cartoonist, whose first graphic novel Bottled broke ground at SPX this year. Gooch has been a fairly active zine maker and anthologist up to this point, and he was…
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Comics that Challenged Me in 2016: Part 5
We’re nearing the end of the list – it’s only today and Friday and we’ll have finished up this year’s exercise in identifying the comics that challenged me as a reader and critic in 2016. I would love to hear your feedback on what has become an annual tradition here on Sequential State. Part 1 | Part 2 |…
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Review: The Fun Family by Benjamin Frisch Remixing the dusty, rattling corpses of newspaper comics has become something of a recent trend in indie publishing; Garfield Minus Garfield, the internet darling, is likely a progenitor of the latest wave of these comics that poke around with the classic modern newspaper funnies. These comics mine (and…