Category: Other Publishers

Written by Martin I. Green
Art by Bill Sienkiewicz
128 pages, color
Published by Penguin USA

This is going to be heresy to a lot of people, but I’ve never been a fan of Jimi Hendrix. Oh, I respect that he was an influential musician and how for a lot of people he turned music upside down… but it just never did anything for me. When a copy of Voodoo Child: The Illustrated Legend of Jimi Hendrix fell into my hands, though, I found myself wondering if perhaps this could show me just what I was missing.

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Written by Craig McKenney
Art by Gervasio with Estudio Haus
48 pages, black and white
Published by Headless Shakespeare Press

It’s a little surprising that there aren’t more comic books about stage magicians. I find them fascinating, using illusion to transport people to other worlds where the impossible can happen. Aside from Jason Hall and Matt Kindt’s Mephisto and the Empty Box and Jason Lutes’s Jar of Fools, though, there’s been a real lack of stories in recent times in this particular genre. You can imagine how eager I was, then, to read Craig McKenney and Gervasio’s new comic book The Magic If.

Continue reading “Magic If”

By Christopher Varian
112 pages, black and white
Published by Etompro

The evening of Christmas Day, I came home to discover the apartment above mine had burst a pipe—and left unattended, water was now pouring into my living room through the light fixtures and vents in the ceiling. One of the strongest streams of water was splattering directly on a padded envelope that I’d dropped on the floor the day before, in a hurry to meet my family for dinner. I figured that, like many other possessions, whatever was in that envelope was ruined. It wasn’t until the next day that I opened it up to see what was inside and discovered that against all odds, the book was still intact. Taking it as a sign, I promised that sooner or later it would get reviewed… and while it’s a little over two months later, I’m finally getting to that promise.

Continue reading “Dr. Tim Book One”

Edited by Tom Pomplun
144 pages, black and white
Published by Eureka Productions

Growing up, two of my favorite books to read over and over again were Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. It wasn’t until I got older that I really started to discover that Twain was also a writer of numerous short stories, linked together by a display of wit and cunning. I remember wishing at the time that someone had marketed his short stories to younger readers. I may be older now, but I’m no less delighted to see that Graphic Classics: Mark Twain seems to be doing just that.

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Edited by Tony Goins, Tim Fischer, and Dara Naraghi
40 pages, black and white
Published by Ferret Press

Sometimes all it takes is one story in an anthology to catch my attention. That was the case with Ferret Press’s Panel: Architecture, a comic with stories all around the theme of architecture. When I saw it had one of my favorite unsung creators, well, I certainly had to take a look at the whole book. It just goes to show, all you really need is that one hook to bring the reader on board.

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Written by Lisa Wheeler
Art by Mark Siegel
40 pages, color
Published by Atheneum

I’m noticing more and more of a fine line between children’s books and comics these days. Some, like Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly’s Little Lit, don’t surprise me at all, considering the editors’s work within the comics world. But then you turn around and see a book like Seadogs: An Epic Ocean Operetta by non-comics creators Lisa Wheeler and Mark Siegel and the only real difference between it and a comic is, quite frankly, how the publisher chose to market it.

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By Scott McCloud
two-color
Published at scottmccloud.com

Growing, I always tried to find patterns in numbers. Telephone numbers, addresses, the numbers on the odometer of my parents’s car… you name it, I’d be staring at the numbers carefully, flipping them around in my head to find their secret code. Is this normal? Not terribly, no. But I feel positively mundane when compared to the protagonist of Scott McCloud’s webcomic The Right Number.

Continue reading “Right Number Parts One and Two”

Edited by Patrick Godfrey and Jesse Bauch
168 pages, black and white
Published by Oddgod Press

It’s rare to find an anthology in which you like every single story. To have your tastes match up exactly with the editor’s is pretty difficult, after all, making you really just hope to enjoy the majority. When I opened up Big Dumb Fun I wasn’t at all sure who half of the names connected were, but I figured that if a majority of them turned out to be good, well, I was definitely ahead.

Continue reading “Big Dumb Fun”