A Walk Through Hell isn’t a hard sell for the right kind of reader. The largest hurdle it may need to clear is that a lot of readers still haven’t heard of Aftershock Comics, a relatively new publisher founded just three years ago but that’s already recruited talents like Warren Ellis, Marguerite Bennett, Amanda…
Gentrification is a machine made of many moving parts. There are the developers that come to low-income neighborhoods and force out the established residents by building new properties they can no longer afford; the politicians who paint members of a community as undesirable and dehumanize them so the rest of the…
The great joy of reading Soft X-Ray/Mindhunters (Koyama Press) is in not really knowing what’s going on. Characters appear, and you can follow them easily, but what exactly they’re doing and what its significance is cannot easily be discerned. This is in large part due to how the author, A. Degen, structures his book.…
Sean Murphy’s alternate take on the Batman mythos draws to a close this week with Batman: White Knight #8 (DC Comics). It’s hard to imagine how the story could have fit into the previous seven issues, because this final one delivers a significant amount of narrative. White Knight has been selling well enough for DC,…
The Italian cartoonist Gipi is still an unfamiliar name for most American readers. His work first became available in English when First Second imported his Notes For A War Story in 2007, and the couple of works that followed announced Gipi as one of the next great Italian cartoonists in a decade beset with European…
The name of Studio Ghibli co-founder, Hayao Miyazaki, is constantly brought up by comic creators when they need a shorthand for describing a specific blend of spectacle and emotion in their work, but the comparison is appropriate in the case of the new Image Comics series, Isola. Co-written by Brenden Fletcher and…
In Blackbird Days (Fantagraphics Books) the Italian master Manuele Fior plays with form and style in a series of experimental shorts, some of which appear like brief notes on a scene, while others are more elaborated and developed narratives. It’s difficult to pick a favorite, but the collection’s final story, “Gare…
Action Comics #1 changed comic books forever when it debuted 80 years ago, introducing a new character whose wild popularity created the genre that became synonymous with the medium. Superheroes have since jumped off the page and become bonafide pop culture juggernauts, and Superman laid the groundwork, starting with…
Comics are no stranger to continuing a story where another medium left off. Dozens of movies and TV shows have been continued and expanded in comic form, long after they were no longer on screen and between various iterations and installations. But The Prisoner #1 (Titan Comics) feels like a different creature in a…
There’s no shortage of taciturn men who weaponize their trauma in comics, just like there’s no shortage of mercenaries. These characters are often reduced to their tropes, turning characters that have the potential for emotional heft and vulnerability into walls of clenched jaws and scowling.
With the Avengers at the core of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the franchise has gotten a big push in comics over the past decade, spawning multiple titles that expanded the team’s presence in the Marvel Comics line-up. This gradually diluted the brand with too many books taking on the Avengers name and pulling the…
Delve into fan-created content for almost any media and one of the first things you’ll notice is the popularity of the coffee shop AU, short for alternate universe. So many pieces of fan fiction and fan art revolve around setting characters from TV shows, movies, books, comics, and podcasts in a romanticized version…
If God is all-powerful, why did He create a world where people suffer? It’s one of the most commonly asked questions by challengers of Christianity, and Jeff Loveness and Jakub Rebelka tackle it head-on in Judas (Boom! Studios), a four-issue miniseries exploring the relationship between Jesus Christ and his…
The first story in Yellow Negroes And Other Imaginary Creatures (New York Review Comics) is titled “Love,” and in a few brief pages establishes the modus operandi of the collection’s author, Yvan Alagbé. What begins as an assortment of seemingly inchoate lines slowly, over one image and then the next, reveals itself…
The history of the universe is very long and complicated, but it is done no favors when represented as the steady, linear, progressive force of Enlightenment. That is meant as both critique and compliment to authors Daniel Locke and David Blandy, whose new collaboration, Out Of Nothing (Nobrow), gestures in both…
Music is a notoriously difficult artform to depict on the comic-book page, but French cartoonist Blutch gives a master class in musical visualization with Total Jazz (Fantagraphics), a collection of comic strips originally published in Jazzman magazine. The majority have no dialogue, but they are far from silent.…
Any conversation had about Dodge City #1 (BOOM!) has to start with how cute it is. And not in a cloying, saccharine way that makes it hard to appreciate. Dodge City is cute in a way that fans of manga like Princess Jellyfish or comics like Squirrel Girl will appreciate: it’s smart and motivated, driven by distinct…
It takes a certain amount of confidence to open a comic with not one but two double-page spreads in a row, and Deathbed #1 (Vertigo) does exactly that. After a brief four-panel page introducing Antonio Luna as a just-born infant, Riley Rossmo delivers two pages of swamps and monsters that would be at home in any…
As far as Roman Muradov comics go, Resident Lover (Kuš!) is fairly straightforward. Only 28 pages long, the comic relates the story of a narrator and their lover, ex-lover, and ex-lover’s lover (whose ex-lover is possibly a skilled bocce player, or so the narrator has heard). On a trip to the Colombian province Valle…
Cartoonist Pénélope Bagieu is developing quite the reputation as a graphic biographer. After telling the story of Mama Cass in last year’s rich, graceful California Dreamin’, she returns to nonfiction with an expansive collection of biographical shorts: Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked The World (First Second). Bagieu…
