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Your Webcomic Isn’t a Good Book
I’ve been reading a lot of comics this month as I prepare for my “Comics That Challenged Me 2017” feature that will run at the end of December and the beginning of January. In an attempt to have a better rounded understanding of the publishing output of 2017, I’ve enlisted the help of the local…
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Review: Shiner by Nathan Cowdry
Some folks on Twitter and Instagram post #mailday pictures, and I depending on the person, I follow those with great interest. I’m always excited to find something new I hadn’t seen before, and Nathan Cowdry’s Shiner showed up in a pile a few months ago, on a cartoonist’s feed. I thought the cover was interesting…
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Review: NOW #1, edited by Eric Reynolds
This article was originally published at Your Chicken Enemy. I’ve been waiting for the release of NOW #1 since it was announced in May. At the closure of Eric Reynold’s last anthology project, MOME, I was still reading manga and whatever shitty graphic novels were thrown my way by well-meaning college buddies. I hadn’t figured…
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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: Children of the Whales V.1 by Abi Umeda
Today’s manga review is the upcoming Children of the Whales from Viz Media. Running in their Viz Signature line, this is Abi Umeda’s debut in English. The first volume will be released on November 21st – a digital advance reading copy was provided for this review. Images used in this review are © 2013 ABI…
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Review: Sukibito Diary by Chu Nap
I’m starting to dig deeper into the comics I got at SPX this year, and one in particular has been stuck in my craw. Carta Monir, a fellow critic and previous collaborator, recommended I pick up a copy of Sukibito Diary, a 120-page perfect-bound softcover book from Chu Nap. Nap is a Toronto-based cartoonist and…
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Review: Stages of Rot by Linnea Sterte
The SPX pile is slowly getting smaller, and I’m starting in on some of the bigger books from the show. One of those is Linnea Sterte’s Stages of Rot from PEOW Studio. The book is 152 pages in full color, with french flaps and spot gloss. Sterte works mostly in cool pastel colors, and…
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Review: Sound of Snow Falling by Maggie Umber
Maggie Umber is one of the unsung heroes of art comics. Her status as the assistant publisher at 2dcloud led to the expansion of an anthologies-based print collective to a significant force in alternative comics publishing. The micropress is a bustling, risk-taking enterprise that wouldn’t exist without Umber’s hard work. Over the course of…
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Review: I Hear the Sunspot by Yuki Fumino
One Peace Books occasionally sends me a review copy of new comics they have recently released, and one of their latest is I Hear The Sunspot, a comic about two young men, one with a hearing disability, and the other, a brash interloper who agrees to take notes for this classmate in college in exchange for…
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Review: I’m Not Here by GG
I’ve been following GG’s work since her minicomic Semi-Vivi appeared in the 2014 Comics Workbook Composition Competition, taking second place in that year. GG’s work has continued to bloom over the past few years, but I’m Not Here, a new 104-page graphic novel from Koyama Press, is her longest published work to date. In…
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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…
