Comic Book Resources

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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Robot Reviews: The Nobody

The Nobody

The Nobody
by Jeff Lemire
Vertigo, $19.99.

Note: Spoilers lurk after the jump.

Let's get the niceties out of the way first. Jeff Lemire has a unique, idiosyncratic art style that is instantly recognizable and stands out clear and strong against the "Vertigo style" that has dominated a lot of that line's books in recent years. What's more, I like how he chooses to set his stories in rural, northern Canadian towns, an area that, let's face it, is rather underexposed in most comics these days.

All that having been said?

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