Sequential State – the comics criticism archive of Alex Hoffman

Tag: Top Shelf

  • Review: Girl Town by Carolyn Nowak

    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…

  • Review: Her Bark & Her Bite by James Albon

    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…

  • Review: Mechaboys by James Kochalka

    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…

  • Review: Bottled, by Chris Gooch

    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…

  • 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 |…

  • 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…