Category: Comics
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It’s another “wow” issue, though a more gradual one. This issue pairs with the previous one, still telling the story of Chua, creator Craig Thompson’s ginseng pulling peer growing up. Only while Thompson was going to high school, Chua had to drop out to help with the family business. Thompson’s presumably illustrating an interview with…
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It’s an almost all-exposition issue, with Carolyn revealing a bit about her backstory—and apparently enough about the state of the world to her new companion, protagonist Mike (told you his name wasn’t exciting enough for the suspense)—but then Mike doing an exposition dump, Carolyn interrupting him because it sounds too much like an exposition dump,…
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Karmen has a lot of fantastic art. Guillem March is doing combination realistic and supernatural—a young woman has just committed suicide and her death guide (the title character) comes along to start her reorientation to the next world. There’s something very ethereal about the art, even when it’s gloomy. But the writing—which is translated—is quite…
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We do get to find out the protagonist’s name—the male protagonist—at the end of the issue but I shan’t spoil it for now. It’s in the top five of most common names but still. This issue beings with a resolution to the outstanding members of the Rebel Alliance and therefore traitors from last issue, who…
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Post Americana takes place in a post-apocalyptic world, in what used to be the United States, some generations after the bombs went off. The comic opens with the terrifying sight of a buff Reagan-type President giving a speech as two rebels try to escape in a stolen jet amid explosions. It’s a lot of action,…
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Ultramega is an “Ultraman” riff, with creator James Harren bringing in a bunch of non-standard elements to give a very different feel. Starting with the kaiju being a lot more Lovecraftian, with tentacles and sharp-toothed mouths and sharp-toothed mouths on the end of tentacles. And the Ultramega—the Earth’s defenders who look like Ultraman and get…
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The first thing I noticed in Orphan and the Five Beasts was the empty space. Creator James Stokoe is still all about the detail, but now he lets dust in the air just be dust in the air. Stokoe’s detail isn’t static; it takes a while for Orphan to get to some action (I was…
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There are some things only comics can do. There are some things only comics memoirs can do. This issue of Ginseng Roots mixes the two into something even more singular and rare; it’s a truly exceptional reading experience, far and away the best issue of the series so far; it’s going to be very hard…
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It’s such a dark issue. How is it such a dark issue. I mean, it’s clear why it’s a dark issue—creator Craig Thompson juxtaposes the seed process of ginseng with he and his siblings going into high school, getting baptized, and suffering serious abuse, so there’s simultaneous this literal expansive life thing for the seed…
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Maybe half the issue is the fascinating world history of the ginseng trade—it was actually an American export to China hundreds of years ago too—while the other half is a more colloquial info dump on how pesticides affect ginseng crops. At one point I remembered something I’d learned about ginseng growing from the previous issues…
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It’s been almost a year since I last read a Ginseng Root and I’ve been lallygagging on getting back into reading because I was worried I’d be lost without a reread. But this issue’s a nice concise look at creator Craig Thompson and his brother’s experience picking rocks for comic book money. So, while ginseng…
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Fatale is a quite unfortunately unfinished work from Jean-Patrick Manchette and Tardi, based on Manchette’s novel. They got twenty-one pages done of sixty; the pages seem to end around at the start of the second act and it’s a real bummer because it’s a phenomenal start. There’s a sublime, mysterious beginning, then maybe a little…
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I’m not sure how much more you get out of West Coast Blues if you know all the music references—I know all the movie references and it doesn’t really add anything except being able to contextualize the story as a noir piece, which isn’t particularly necessary. Like, it comes across real easy, even if you…
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Griffu has all the trappings of hard-boiled detective fiction–a reluctant “hero,” in this case the titular Griffu, whose not a private investigator but a “legal advisor” (read, apparently, debt collector), a femme fatale (or three), and an intricate plot line involving corruption and class—only set in seventies Paris. And, of course, there’s the omnipresent narration.…
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I was waiting for Bronze Age to get to the Batman Family reprints, assuming since DC moved Batgirl from backups to an anthology—and even a feature or two—the stories must be better. Surely Elliot S. Maggin and Bob Rozakis had to be better at writing her comics than Frank Robbins. Silly me. Most of the…
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I’ve been aware of the “Barbara (Batgirl) Gordon becomes a congressperson” storyline in the seventies since Who’s Who in the DC Universe #2 in 1985—I even have an anecdote about buying the issue at age seven—but I’ve never read the arc before or even read about its details. And now I’ve read it. And it’s…
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After a cliffhanger resolve with Gil Kane pencils (Vince Colletta inks, which shockingly is an improvement over previous Kane inkers on the Batgirl backups), Don Heck takes over the pencils with Dick Giordano on inks. Can Dick Giordano inks save Don Heck pencils? It’s not terrible. Even after Giordano leaves and the Batgirl strips are…
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Maybe I shouldn’t have complained so much about Gardner Fox. After approximately a year off (or just appearing as a guest star in Batman or Detective and not getting an Omnibus reprint), Batgirl’s started getting backups in Detective. Gil Kane came back to do the pencils, but with Murphy Anderson on the inks and—outside the…
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The strangest thing about the first five stories in Omnibus Volume 1 isn’t how writer Gardner Fox uses Barbara Gordon’s position at the Gotham Public Library to explain how she somehow targets criminals. She violates professional privacy standards—if not laws (it was the late sixties, who knows)—to figure out where the bad guys are going…
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According to Internet lore, Marvel once tried to get George Clooney interested in doing a Nick Fury movie with Garth Ennis’s original Fury MAX miniseries. Clooney pushed it away disgusted. Makes you wonder if anyone tried giving Morgan Freeman a copy of Valley Forge, Valley Forge, or if maybe Ennis and artist Goran Parlov were…
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I’m going to go out on a limb and say having Howie Chaykin do an issue of art—the fiftieth Punisher MAX, so for the collectors’ who got anniversary issues–having Howie fill-in was a mistake. Maybe if the rest of it weren’t regular artist Goran Parlov, like if it’d been all guest artists. But Howie ends…
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Books of Magic Original series and recent “Moveable Type” trade paperback Back in 1991, DC decided to let one of their successful new writers, Neil Gaiman, fresh from his success with The Sandman, an opportunity to play in the sandbox with a bevy of their silver age B list characters, weaving them into the origin…
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Mr. Boop is about being married to Betty Boop. The protagonist is Boop creator Alec Robbins, who is presumably not actually married to Betty Boop in real life because otherwise it’d be a series of photos not comics. Robbins, the comic protagonist, is very happy to be married to Betty Boop, who’s the hottest woman…
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A Rage in Arkham is the first Hitman collection, but it’s not all the first Hitman stories. There’s his first appearance, during the Bloodlines crossover—which I can’t forget to address, in a Garth Ennis and John McCrea Demon annual, then a Contagion tie-in with Hitman and Batman, then the first three issues of the ongoing,…
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Let’s see how long it takes me to describe Teknophage. Our reality is just one of an infinite (I think) number of realities, a multiverse woven together through the will of one single creature—the Teknophage, or Mister Henry Phage. He’s a giant dinosaur. On his planet, through mutation, he became hyper-intelligent and then discovered how…
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Pulp is good. I would’ve liked it a lot more with a different ending, instead of the same ending writer Ed Brubaker has used at least once before—but it’s such a distinctive, painfully obvious a reveal it sticks with me a decade after I first read it in Criminal. Though maybe he’s just trying to…
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I jumped shift halfway through the original Nailbiter series, so I think I missed the part about the serial killer antihero (the Nailbiter) having a daughter with the hero of the series. It’s been so long I can’t remember if the first series felt like a pitch for McFarlane Toys, but Nailbiter Returns feels it.…
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Okay, this issue is even better than last issue and not just because creator Craig Thompson has Black Jesus, White Yahweh, and a Chinese Holy Spirit, which is an amazing panel. Lots of amazing illustrative panels this issue, in fact, because the main plot isn’t about Thompson working on his comic or anything with his…
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Confession time—I never read Blankets, creator Craig Thompson’s first big work. And it now turns out Ginseng Roots is a somewhat direct sequel. This issue opens with Thompson going back to Wisconsin—he’d been living in Portland, OR (of course), which makes the questionable L.A. cartography last issue more permissible—and meeting up with his younger brother,…
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Creator Craig Thompson has a hell of a hook for the first issue of Ginseng Roots—he gets to be interesting. Thompson grew up in Wisconsin in the seventies and eighties when the state was the number one grower of ginseng in the world. According to Thompson; I’m not going to check it because you’ve got…
The Stop Button 