Category: Other Publishers

By Brian Ralph
48 pages, black and white
Published by Bodega Distribution

When is a gimmick not a gimmick? That’s a question I quickly found myself contemplating as I read Brian Ralph’s series Daybreak. Taking a rarely used storytelling device of setting the story in the second person (and thus making the reader part of the story), it’s easy to write off the decision as an attention-grabbing stunt, or just an attempt to be different. The more I read of Daybreak, though, the more convinced I am that Ralph’s using it as part of a plan to tell a very different story of survival. And when you look at it that way, it works remarkably well.

Continue reading “Daybreak Vol. 1-2”

Written by Sara Ryan
Art by Dylan Meconis
16 pages, black and white
Published by Coldwater Press

One of the best things about the internet when it comics to comics, I think, is that it opens up the possibilities on comics that you can read. In the past, you often only got copies of small self-published comics and mini-comics through conventions, or occasionally by ordering a copy online. Now, it’s not at all uncommon to see those publications also put online so more people can read them—and in the case of Sara Ryan and Dylan Meconis’s Click, I for one am thrilled that I didn’t miss out on this comic.

Continue reading “Click”

By Mark Crilley
176 pages, black and white
Published by HarperTeen

Some might say that Mark Crilley’s been poised for success for over a decade now. His break-out comic series Akiko always showed those rare qualities in English-language comics that ultimately made Japanese imports so popular: a female protagonist, adventure, and a certain level of a delicate sensibility. His new series for HarperTeen, Miki Falls, takes that one step further—and while it may not have been his explicit goal, I can’t help but think that this book is probably the closest I’ve seen in a domestic release that fits seamlessly into the Japanese comic book culture while still maintaining the creator’s own unique voice.

Continue reading “Miki Falls Vol. 1: Spring”

By Kim Deitch
136 pages, black and white
Published by Pantheon Books

I’m not entirely sure why I hadn’t read anything by Kim Deitch up until now. Maybe it was a bad first impression, glancing at his scratchy, slightly blocky art and not giving it a chance. Maybe it was just a lack of finding a book that seemed to instantly appeal. Whatever the reason, it wasn’t until Alias the Cat showed up that I sat down and gave Deitch’s comics the respect they deserved. Collecting Deitch’s The Stuff of Dreams mini-series, it’s a remarkably clever piece of metafiction that blurs the lines of reality and make-believe in a way that works far better than any description could even begin to try and tackle.

Continue reading “Alias the Cat”

By Abby Denson
144 pages, black and white
Published by Manic D Press

Not everything is for everyone. Sometimes you try something out and find it to be horrible, running away almost instantly. Sometimes you’re just indifferent to it, not able to muster up more of an opinion than, “It was all right.” And sometimes, you can’t figure out why you’re not connecting with a book until it all falls into place and you realize that you aren’t its target audience as you originally believed. It’s really meant for someone entirely different, and once you see that, you can appreciate just how much they’ll be into it. And that, for me, is exactly how I felt with Abby Denson’s Tough Love: High School Confidential.

Continue reading “Tough Love: High School Confidential”

By Rachel Nabors
48 pages, black and white
Published by MangaPunk

Self-publishing is a leap of faith; instead of another company taking a chance on your creation, you’re putting your own money where your mouth is. Doing so with a manga-influenced modern fairy tale that can double as an educational story on crows? Now that’s one heck of a leap indeed.

Continue reading “Crow Princess”

Written by Phil and Kaja Foglio
Art by Phil Foglio
112 pages, color
Published by Airship Entertainment

When Phil and Kaja Foglio announced that they were shifting the publication of their comic Girl Genius from single issues to web-serialization halfway through what was book four, I’m sure there were many that thought they’d never succeed and that the promised book collections would never appear. With the fifth volume now hitting stores and the comic still going strong online, I think most naysayers have learned their lesson.

Continue reading “Girl Genius Vol. 5: Agatha Heterodyne and the Clockwork Princess”

By Miriam Engelberg
144 pages, black and white
Published by HarperCollins

One of the hazards of writing comic reviews is that you can end up with a stack of books that are waiting to be read, and never getting around to them. Interesting book after interesting book gets thrown onto the pile, all with the best intentions because they all look genuinely interesting. And slowly but surely, the amount of paper gathered together continues to grow. Conversely, every once in a while you find a book that you figure will go into the stack, but you open it up to a random page and suddenly it’s two hours later and you’ve read the entire book. That, to me, is exactly what happened with Miriam Engelberg’s Cancer Made Me A Shallower Person.

Continue reading “Cancer Made Me A Shallower Person”