Comic Book Resources

Everyone's A Critic: A round-up of comic book reviews and thinkpieces

• David Welsh asks the people who know what sort of scary manga they'd recommend for Halloween reading. As expected, his panel comes up with a lot of good picks.

• Meanwhile, Ten-Cent Plague author David Hajdu reviews Robert Crumb's adaptation of Genesis for the New York Times:

Crumb's The Book of Genesis

For all its narrative potency and raw beauty, Crumb’s “Book of Genesis” is missing something that just does not interest its illustrator: a sense of the sacred. What Genesis demonstrates in dramatic terms are beliefs in an orderly universe and the godlike nature of man. Crumb, a fearless anarchist and proud cynic, clearly believes in other things, and to hold those beliefs — they are kinds of beliefs, too — is his prerogative. Crumb, brilliantly, shows us the man in God, but not the God in man.

Over at Comics Comics, Dan Nadel calls BS on Hajdu's review: "One wonders why an author would persist in writing about a subject he clearly disdains and isn't interested in actually learning about, but I guess that's between Hajdu and his own idea of the sacred."

Go read the whole takedown; it's fun.

• Once again, Brian Chippendale brings the awesome. This time, he talks about Master of Kung-Fu.

• Over at the Savage Critics, David Uzumeri doesn't care much for the latest issue of Brave & Bold:
"This comic is like being lectured to by your grandfather. This comic is like a video they put on in history class during a substitute session."

• Von Marlowe really like Marvel Adventures Amazing Spider-Man #55: "I will be buying the next issue, and the next after that, and the next after that."

• Paul Gravett, who is always worth reading, talks about Willy Linthout's The Year of the Elephant.

• Jeff VanderMeer calls Richard Sala's Cat Burglar Black: "a charming and stylish escapade."

• Matthias Wivel reviews Asterios Polyp: "The originality of its vision, then, lies not in its portrayal of human emotion but rather in the art of its construction, and in what it leaves to our imagination."

• Down the Tubes declares The Misadventures of Jane: "another top quality book from Titan that is sure to appeal to aficionados of newspaper strips, glamour art and wartime memorabilia."

• Both Matthew Brady and Michael Buntag give Naoki Urasawa some love.

• Finally, Derik Badman reviews the first Oishinbo volume and then tries out one of the recipes, which I've been dying for someone to do.