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Review: First Year Healthy by Michael DeForge Plenty of folks have spilled ink on Michael DeForge’s latest print comic First Year Healthy. The book defies explanation, which is likely what makes it so fascinating. Its slight stature and bright imagery makes it seem more like a Little Golden Book than an alt-comic about mental illness,…
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Review: Baby Bjornstrand, by Renee French I’ve been slowly catching up with books published in 2014,and while I’m not in ‘the struggle is real’ kind of territory, it does mean it’s taken a while to get around to books I’ve been meaning to read for months, including the enigmatic Baby Bjornstrand from Renee French and…
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Interview: Katie Skelly on her new comic TONYA
Last week I got the chance to chat with Katie Skelly over email about her newest comic, TONYA. Released through the digital content delivery site Gumroad, this book immediately caught my attention because of its protagonist – the infamous Tonya Harding. Katie and I talked about the conflict between Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, isolation and…
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Review: The Sculptor, by Scott McCloud
One of the more highly-trumpeted comics to be published in 2015 is Scott McCloud’s The Sculptor with interviews and reviews in national media like NPR and on popular media sites like Boing Boing. McCloud is best known for his nonfiction comics about understanding and making comics, but The Sculptor is a work that apparently…
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Musings: Beauty by Hubert and Kerascoët It is hard to thoroughly discuss any work with any brevity. Often times a critic’s thoughts and ideas about a specific piece must be abandoned due to word counts. I admit I do this regularly – instead of bringing up all of the thoughts I have about a piece, I tend…
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Review: Fertility by Gosia Herba and Mikołaj Pasiński The Polish publishing house Centrala recently set up a wing of their publishing operation in London and has already put together a small slate of English-language books, including Fertility, a dark and evocative fairy tale about the nature of societal expectations and their consequences. Secret medicine, potions,…
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Looking Forward: Space Face Books Spring 2015 Publishing Slate
Happy Friday! It’s a new year, and that means publishers are starting to reveal Spring 2015 slates. There have been a lot of exciting announcements the past two weeks, one of which is 2D Cloud’s 2015 publishing expansion. Nestled in a post that includes two new employees for the micropress was a list of authors…
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Review: mini kuš! #24 – Swimming Pool by Anna Vaivare I’m back again with another mini kuš! this week. The kind folks at kuš! komiksi sent out a selection of their recent minis, and I’ve been thinking about how different each of these minis is compared to one another. While there aren’t necessarily unified themes…
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Review: SCREWJOB #1, edited by Paul Lyons Contributors: Box Brown, Pat Aulisio, Lale Westvind, Josh Bayer, Blake Sims, Brian Ralph, Paul Lyons, Mickey Zacchilli, Walker Mettling, James “GUNSHO” Quigley, Matt Leines A review copy was provided by the publisher. There was always a ban on “indecent” television in my parent’s home growing up. My brother…
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Review: Doctors by Dash Shaw One of the key tenets of bioethics is the maxim “Primum non nocere” or “First, do no harm.” The guiding principle of nonmaleficence reminds doctors, nurses, and other healthcare workers that any intervention they pursue may cause more harm than good. This principle seems to have been completely abandoned by…
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Review: In Clothes Called Fat (with emphasis on comparison to Kyoko Okazaki’s Pink)
I wanted to take some time to discuss Moyoco Anno’s new comic In Clothes Called Fat late last year, and I’m finally getting around to it now. Recently, Katie Skelly wrote a thoughtful review of In Clothes Called Fat and compared it to Kyoko Okazaki’s Helter Skelter, a seminal josei manga of the 1990s. After having…
