Comic Book Resources

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

Pim & Francie In Golden Days

• The Comics Comics crew are having another cage match, although this time they're calling it a round table, about Al Columbia's Pim & Francie book.

• Curt Purcell continues his examination of the Blackest Night event, this time looking at some of the tie-in books.

• Ng Suat Tong examines the pleasures of owning original art and how that can change our appreciation for a particular cartoonist.

• Also at HU, Noah Berlatsky looks at the psychosexual underpinnings of the superhero genre, and how it's shifted over time.

• NPR's Glen Weldon talks about why Neil Gaiman's Sandman series matters: "[It] remains one of the most literate, imaginative and intricately plotted accomplishments in long-form comics storytelling out there."

• Sandy Bilus recommends Town of Evening Calm, Country of Cherry Blossoms: "The book never feels preachy, but it certainly forces the reader to focus on this issue and raises his or her level of understanding about what the people of Hiroshima have endured."

• Joe McCulloch compares/contrasts the new Astro Boy movie with the original Tezuka manga.

• Johanna Draper Carlson reviews the first volume of The Lizard Prince: "This manga, a romance in a magical fantasy setting, has enough humor to make it an enjoyable read for the young and young-thinking."

• Tangognat on Vol. 5 of 2oth Century Boys: "Everytime I pick this series up I’m reminded again how great it is."

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

Footnotes in Gaza

• Tom Spurgeon once again beats everyone to the punch with a review of Joe Sacco's new book, Footnotes in Gaza: The first good news to report ... is that the cartoonist is in top form throughout." He also has good things to say about Prison Pit.

• Christopher Allen offers 60 ways of looking at Watchmen.

• Critics critique critics -- Robert Boyd reviews Bart Beaty's Unpopular Culture: "This is a thought-provoking book, and I recommend it to anyone who is interested in comics-as-art."

• David Welsh gets schooled in college manga.

• Rob Clough calls MK Reed's new book, Cross Country "the most complex, ambitious and visually interesting of her comics."

• Perhaps if I link to Sean Collins' review of Refresh, Refresh, he'll forgive me for accidentally (I swear) stealing the title of his review feature.

• Nina Stone enjoyed the first issue of Cinderella: From Fabletown With Love: "All the pieces of the story just started to fit together perfectly."

• Grant Goggans declares The Art of Osamu Tezuka "very highly recommended."

• Finally, Kristy Valenti looks at a 1999 graphic novel drawn by Mia Wolff and written by acclaimed sci-fi author Samuel Delany.

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.

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

Exit Wounds

• Eddie Campbell has been offering one great critique after another lately, first on
Asterios Polyp and David Mazzuchelli's ability to convey a sense of place, and then on Rutu Modan's Exit Wounds ("The impressive thing about Exit Wounds is that there is a keen organizing intelligence at work at every single level of it, from top to bottom."

• Jeet Heer ruminates on the concept of the "proto-graphic novel," i.e. graphic novels that were published before the term became ubiquitous.

• It's a few days old, but this review of R. Crumb's Genesis adaptation by Bill Kartalopoulos is still well worth your time.

• I don't always link to Tucker Stone's "Comics of the Weak" round-up, but this one's worth noting, as he mimics the prose of "controversial French writer Michel Houllebecq," which leads to bits like this one on Batman:

Gotham City has but two types of people-those who wreak violence, and those who have violence wreaked upon them. The first type are all men, for the most part, although the occasional lesbian is permitted participation, as long as she has previously received approval from whomever currently holds the title of most cruel. (Said participation is usually considered an important story point, further cementing the little respect or interest that these stories have for women--there are few other places in fiction where "the bitch can stay" is considered interesting or dynamic.

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

• We'll start off by linking to Scott McCloud's recent article on how creators would be wise to pay more attention to criticism, even horribly, dismissively negative criticism of their work:

Scott McCloud

For myself, I always consider reviews useful—even the hatchet jobs. It makes my heart sink a little when I hear other artists dismiss all reviews as irrelevant to their process. A common claim is that reviews tell us “only about the reviewer” and tell us “nothing about the work,” but I disagree. Yes, reviewers have biases. Yes, they miss the point sometimes. But there’s always some kind of information embedded in any reaction to any creative effort.

I tend to agree with Mark-Oliver Frisch's comment that most criticism is intended for the reader, not the artist, but still, that's a really healthy attitude to have.

• Matthew Brady on Masayuki Ishikawa's Moyasimon, volume 1: "Not only is it actually quirkily charming, the torrents of educational facts actually turn out to be pretty informative." He's also got a nice review of Ken Dahl's Monsters.

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

Nancy

• Let's start off with Jeet Heer's short piece on the cult of Nancy. It really is all about Nancy, isn't it?

• Also at Comics Comics: Dash Shaw re-examines a panel he was on at TCAF on alternative and mainstream comics.

• The Hooded Utlilitarian blog, which never met a critical roundtable it didn't like, is doing a series of posts on French comics. I like the name of the series.

• I would be remiss if I didn't point to our new fellow Robot 6er Sean Collins' review of Kazimir Strzepek's ongoing fantasy series, The Mourning Star.

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

Sandman

Let's try to run through some of the more notable links of the past several days. My apologies if this is old news to you or I missed something.

• Kicking things off, I should note that the gang at the Hooded Utilitarian are offering an in-depth analysis of Neil Gaiman's Sandman series. In order: Noah Berlatsky, Ng Suat Tong,  Tom Crippen and Von Marlowe.

• Ken Parille looks at the work of his fellow blogmate Tim Hensley, specifically his Wally Gropius series: "I can’t think of another cartoonist who approaches space -- and what we might call 'spatial color' -- in such a rigorously strange way."

• Abhay Khosla talks about comics by way of crime novels:

So: a year from now, if we’re unlucky and Vertigo Crime no longer exists, and some so-and-so is screeching that “None of youse fools on the internet people could have done better because we are geniuses who thought of EVERYTHING” … I would suggest that maybe one thing they could have done differently is launched their crime line with crime fiction…? Just a silly thought.

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

• Ng Suat Tong time again! This time he's over at the Comics Reporter, talking about how mainstream (i.e. DC and Marvel) comics tend to mostly be writer-driven these days, and how few of these big-name writers fail to utilize the medium well, using Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli's Born Again saga as a comparison point.

From Miller and Mazzucchelli's 'Born Again

If Bendis and Maleev's take on Daredevil falters at times in its disregard for the formal properties of comics, it is also guilty of rolling out age old tropes for the "revival" of superhero titles. One is left with the impression that mainstream comics writing has not only stagnated but in all likelihood regressed in the last decade becoming competent yet mediocre.

Lots more good stuff at the link.

• Abhay Khosla declares the "3 Jacks" story from Daredevil #500 "pretty much the best Marvel comic of the year so far, right?"

• Jog looks at Jacques Tardi's West Coast Blues and compares/contrasts its noirist tendencies to Darwyn Cooke's recent Parker adaptation: "Both books contain framing images of Our Man on the road, a socio-economic subtext, and a dénouement that nod toward the inscrutability of these hard men and their achievements. You'd swear this was a response to Cooke's book, if you didn't know it was an English translation of a French album from 2005."

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

Crumb's The Book of Genesis

Trying to play catch-up on some of the more notable reviews this week. My apologies if I missed anything.

• Bookforum has what I believe is the first review of Robert Crumb's Genesis book, penned by Jeet Heer no less. The magazine also has a review of Asterios Polyp by Dan Nadel and a look at "oddball manga" by Jog.

• Wowzers, the mighty Ng Suat Tong is blogging over at the Hooded Utilitarian! His first post (which looks to be part of an ongoing series0 is spent looking at the critics' various responses to Dash Shaw's Bottomless Belly Button.

• David Welsh is still crazy about Astral Project.

• Rob Clough looks at two new books from Sparkplug — Neptune and Sausage Hand.

• Guest blogger Sean Collins reviews the fourth issue of Flash: Rebirth. So, for that matter, does the Speed Force blog.

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Everyone's A Critic: A roundup of comic book reviews and thinkpieces

Hellboy: Seed of Destruction

• Pop Matters has an interesting essay comparing Mike Mignola's Hellboy series with the similarly themed Italian comic Dylan Dog.

As characters, they could be satanic siblings, or infernal in-laws: Hellboy, the Hades-born offspring of a witch and a demon; and Dylan Dog, in love with an undead woman who was likely his mother, and battling his nemesis, the devil, who could be his father. Despite their fantastic and often horrific circumstances, at heart each character is a working-class hero, just trying to get the job done.

• Sean Collins grapples with All-Star Batman and Robin: "The thing really is (to quote Grant Morrison's Mad Hatter) very much cleverer than its rep as a goddamn-Batman meme generator would indicate."

• Curt Purcell continues his ongoing look at the Blackest Night series and superhero decadence in general.

• Matthew Brady enjoyed Lamar Abrams' Remake: "It's pretty ridiculous stuff, but always funny."

• Greg McElhatton declares Neil Kleid's The Big Kahn "easily Kleid’s best work to date as a writer."

• Brian Hibbs was shocked — shocked I tell you — to discover that Archie #600 was a fun read: "I mean, I'm certainly a "Betty Man", and that makes a lot more sense to me than Veronica, but Mike Uslan's script here is remarkably crisp, as well as filled with real drama and pathos."

• Katherine Dacey on Ooku: The Inner Chamber: "For all its dramatic and socio-political ambitions, volume one isn’t nearly as daring or weird or pointed as it might have been. If anything, it reminds me of a BBC miniseries: it’s tasteful, meticulously researched, and a little too high-minded to be truly compelling."

• Kinukitty reads the yaoi manga Black Sun and says "I can't even think about this title without kind of flapping my hands and sputtering a bit."

• Rob Clough reads and reviews more minicomics, something we all should do more of.

• The Daily Cross Hatch on Johnny Ryan's Prison Pit: "True enjoyment of this volumes ultimately seems to fall on a willingness to embrace the complementary sensibilities of 'aw, fucking gross' and 'oh, fucking sweet,' ”

• KC Carlson reviews Looking for Calvin and Hobbes by Nevin Martel, a book I was completely unaware of until now.

• Finally, Tim O'Neil has some thoughts on what makes The Thing so awesome.

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

• Andrew Rilstone's 60-page zine on Watchmen, Who Sent the Sentinels, has been garnering quite a bit of attention, mainly because of passages like this:

Who Sent the Sentinels

I've never stopped being surprised that something as geeky as Watchmen is so popular with people who are not geeks. How can a book which so full of superhero in-jokes be so much admired by people who have never read a superhero story -- by people who purport to dislike superhero stories -- by people who sometimes end up denying that Watchmen has got superheroes in it... Maybe Watchmen manages to generate its ironic double-vision internally: the text itself tells you both what superheroes are meant to be like, and what these superheroes are actually like, and it would do so even if there had never been another superhero comic in the world... Or maybe the people who were so enthusiastic about Watchmen were unaware of the idea of superheros, and read the story simply as a story - with an un-ironic single vision.

In which case they'd be reading a different comic to me and it wouldn't be surprising if they assessed it differently.

I've barely had a chance to do more than scrape the surface of this thing but I like what I've perused so far.

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

The Hunter

• Dan Nadel offers a devastating -- and as far as I can tell, the only -- negative review of Darywn Cooke's The Hunter (which, by the way, has gone back for a second printing already). Lemme quote a bit here:

Even if I'm wrong and Cooke's reading is utterly faithful, this adaptation doesn't work very well as a comic book. Cooke's character design is strangely generic, his storytelling is often unclear, and his drawing, while polished and stylish, is dull. Parker looks like a generic sort of Bruce Wayne, with a face and body language that betrays not a hint of an inner-life. Panel-to-panel and particularly page-to-page Cooke has a difficult time clearly conveying where a scene is occurring and what, precisely, the action and emotions are that he's trying to draw.

He goes on to use John Stanley as a point of comparison, which befuddles some folks in the comments section.

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

Asterios Polyp

• The great and all-powerful Ng Suat Tong provides one of the most comprehensive and detailed critiques of Asterios Polyp I've seen online yet. Seriously, Tong's one of the finest critics comics have ever had. The fact that he's writing again, even if it's just a one-time thing, is cause for joy.

• Frank Santoro reviews issues #1-4 of Richard Sala's Ignatz series, Delphine: "The story surrounded me and carried me away to a very real world. It's a cartooned, exaggerated world, but a real world nonetheless."

• Johanna Draper Carlson reads a whole lotta vampire manga.

• Graeme McMillan offers 25 thoughts on Wednesday Comics. He also admits to liking X-Men Forever. That's very brave of you Graeme.

• Similar to our Collect This Now feature is David Welsh's License Request Day, where he picks manga that haven't been translated yet, but should. This week he recommends something called Paros No Ken.

• It's been up for a few days now, but I have to point an arrow towards Katherine Dac's review of Children of the Sea, which is one of the best takes on the book yet.

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

Asterios Polyp

• Man, everyone and their Uncle Bob is reviewing David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp these days aren't they? This week alone we've seen Brian Hibbs, Rob Clough, Douglas Wolk and the LA Times' David Ulin.

Not wanting to be left out of the fun, I'll probably have my own review of the book up this Friday.

• The Groovy Age of Horror's Curt Purcell has been spending a lot of time talking about Blackest Night, and, given that he's not a regular fan, he has some interesting things to say about the crossover event. Rather than link to all the separate posts, I'll just say start here and work your way back.

Oh, and while you're at it, read his new review of Gilbert Hernandez's Speak of the Devil.

• Johnny Bacardi likes Blackest Night quite a bit too.

• Speaking of the Hernandez brothers, are you confused about where to dive into their expansive magnum opus, Love and Rockets? The Onion's AV Club is here to help. Continue Reading »

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

Asterios Polyp

• Another day, another stellar review for David Mazzucchelli's Asterios Polyp. This time it's Dan Kois for New York magazine, who calls the book "a great graphic novel" and "a masterpiece."

• Got some time to kill? Then you might want to check out this lengthy series of posts critiquing the entire 28-volume run of the seminal samurai manga Lone Wolf and Cub. (found via Spurgeon)

• Frank Santoro dubs Mat Brinkman's Multiforce "terrifyingly good and an indispensable record of possibly the most important serialized comics of the post-Ware era."

• Jog declares Daisuke Igarashi's Children of the Sea "a fairly lovely production."

• Johanna Draper Carlson calls Posey Simmonds's Gemma Bovery "engrossing, even watching people make stupid wrong decisions, it’s a page-turner."

• Brian Heater thinks Fred Chao's Johnny Hiro is "a rollicking love letter to boundary-less pop-culture, which, by the end, has embraced everything from Night Court to Brand Nubian."

• Sandy Bilus uses Hellboy Vol. 6 Strange Places to look at how colorist Dave Stewart uses specific palettes to strong effect.

• Rob Clough reads Everyone Is Stupid Except for Me and wonders if Peter Bagge isn't a modern-day Mencken.