By Penina Gal
36 pages, color
Self-published
One of the things I like about going to the Small Press Expo is that I often end up with mini-comics (self-published, hand-assembled comics) that I’d have never found anywhere else. A comic that almost immediately jumped out at me was Penina Gal’s The Fire Messenger; for people who assume that mini-comics are all assembled on creaky copy machines with cheap paper and reeking of old toner, this full-color book would certainly be a bit of a surprise.
Written and penciled by Phil Foglio
Inked by Julie Sczesny
80 pages, color
Published by Airship Entertainment
Now don’t get me wrong, I love Phil and Kaja Foglio’s Girl Genius; there’s no other way to describe how I feel about a comic where I not only read the online updates three times a week, but then buy the special hardcover collections as well. But there are times when what really makes me the happiest about Girl Genius is not so much that it exists, but rather that that it seems to be financing the reprinting of Phil Foglio’s earlier comics. And having somehow missed out on the second Buck Godot, Zap Gun for Hire book in the past, trust me when I say that I was particularly excited about finally getting to read it. As it turns out, it really was worth the wait.
Continue reading “Buck Godot, Zap Gun for Hire Vol. 2: PSmIth”
Edited by Kazu Kibuishi
368 pages, color
Published by Villard Books
With each new volume of the Flight anthology, it’s a reason to celebrate. If I had to try and sum up the basic thrust of each book, it’s stories that instill a sense of wonder and excitement in the reader. Almost every single story does that in any volume of Flight, which is why I think it’s one of those books that I simply cannot get enough of.
Original story by Rod Serling
Adapted by Mark Kneece
Art by Rebekah Isaacs
72 pages, color
Published by Walker Books
I’ll admit that my initial reaction upon seeing upcoming adaptations of The Twilight Zone episodes into comics was, "Why?" Surely we had enough good comics out there that we didn’t need to jump back into the 1960s to find ideas? The more I thought about it, though, the more I realized it wasn’t such a bad idea after all. By aiming these books at younger readers, it’s an audience who has certainly never encountered the source material. And if they keep picking stories like The After Hours to turn into comics? Well, I hate to admit it, but it’s the kind of story that I think a lot of writers today wish they could write.
By Liz Baillie
128 pages, black and white
Published by Microcosm Publishing
One of the things I like about mini-comics is that, by their self-published (and often low-tech) nature, it lets creators jump right into creating comics on an open stage. This may sound a little strange, but by providing a print option for people to be creative, it often means that they’ll keep creating and refining their craft. I can’t think of a better example for this than Liz Baillie’s first collection of her mini-comic My Brain Hurts, compiling the first five issues of the mini-comic by the same name. Because while I liked the very first chapter of this book, the leap in skill between it and the fifth? It’s almost hard to believe it’s the same person.
By Batton Lash
32 pages, black and white
Published by Exhibit A Press
If you’ve ever read Batton Lash’s Supernatural Law before, you’ll know that over the years Lash has parodied a wide variety of subjects; horror movies, comic books, and the real world are all places that Lash has alluded to with his characters that are inevitably represented by Alanna Wolff and Jeff Byrd in the courtroom. You can imagine my surprise, then, when the new Supernatural Law showed up with the Toxic Avenger. Not a parody, not a thinly disguised version, but the real thing. And you know what? It made me wish that Lash could do this more often.
By Andrea Blasich, Nash Dunnigan, David Gordon, Michael Knapp, Sang Jun Lee, Kyle MacNaughton, Peter Nguyen, Vincent Nguyen, Jake Parker, Benoit le Pennec, Willie Real, Jason Sadler, Daisuke Tsutsumi, and Lizette Vega
240 pages, color
Published by Villard Books
One of the many great things that the Flight anthologies have done, it seems, is bring the modern comic anthology back to life. Every time you turn around, there seems to be a new anthology hitting shelves. One of the more recent works is Out of Picture, an anthology series from the artists of Blue Sky Studios. Out of Picture 2, the second volume of work in the series, is a beautiful, oversized volume that has one of the best production values of a comics anthology I’ve seen in a while. But do the stories themselves match up to the attention lavished into the book?
By Terry Moore
24 pages, black and white
Published by Abstract Studio
When I think Terry Moore, it’s hard to not instantly think Strangers in Paradise. Sure, it’s not the only comic he’s worked on—for DC Comics he wrote six issues of Birds of Prey, and he’s about to start writing Runaways for Marvel—but the bulk of his career was writing and drawing over 100 issues of Strangers in Paradise. Now that it’s come to a close, though, his new baby is a comic called Echo. It has been so long since he’s had something from which I could jump on at the ground floor, well, I figured this was a moment I couldn’t pass up.
By Mike Dawson
304 pages, black and white
Published by Bloomsbury
I’m always a little envious of people who grew up with a singular, favorite band. It gives you a frame of reference that you get to build memories off of; what you were doing in your life when each album and was released. That’s what I was expecting from Mike Dawson’s Freddie & Me, and while that was certainly part of his autobiographical book, what I also found was in many ways the more interesting aspect of the book.
Continue reading “Freddie & Me: A Coming-of-Age (Bohemian) Rhapsody”
By Kate T. Williamson
144 pages, color
Published by Princeton Architectural Press
One of the biggest potential stumbling blocks for an autobiographical work is the fact that most of us don’t necessarily live the most exciting of lives. I’ve often heard the genre referred to as "naval-gazing works" and it’s hard to deny that I haven’t read my share of those over the years. With all that in mind, though, I think what really grabbed me about Kate T. Williamson’s At a Crossroads: Between a Rock and My Parents’ Place was that she lives an absolutely ordinary (and in other hands, even dull) life, but the way she tells it made me enthralled from start to finish.
Continue reading “At a Crossroads: Between a Rock and My Parents’ Place”
