Category: Other Publishers

Written by Brittney Sabo and Anna Bratton
Art by Brittney Sabo
96 pages, black and white
Self-Published

I get a little excited every time I find myself looking at a new comic funded by the Xeric Grant. For those unfamiliar with the Xeric Grant, it’s a fund set up by Peter Laird that chooses comic book projects and gives them money to actually publish their comic. It’s an extremely competitive field, and the end result is a lot of worthy, interesting comics that we might have otherwise never seen. Brittney Sabo and Anna Bratton’s book Francis Sharp in the Grip of the Uncanny!: Chapter 1 is part of the latest batch of Xeric-powered books to appear, and it’s such a fun book that I’m thankful yet again that Laird set the grant up.

Continue reading “Francis Sharp in the Grip of the Uncanny!: Chapter 1”

By Charles Burns
56 pages, color
Published by Pantheon Books

Charles Burns is a comic creator whose art is easy to recognize, but hard to categorize save that it appears to exist to try and make the reader uncomfortable. From my first experience with Burns’s work as a live-action adaptation of his story "Dog Boy" on Liquid Television, to his collections of short stories from Fantagraphics, and his most recent magnum opus Black Hole (which took years in the making but was utterly worth the wait), each piece has inspired a strange combination of wanting to see more and feeling the need to turn away from the view. With Burns’s new book, X’ed Out, he’s carefully stepped away from the "mutation as venereal disease" metaphor of Black Hole into a strange narrative that shifts back and forth between dream and reality.

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By Aron Nels Steinke
40 pages, color
Published by Blue Apple Books

Around this time last year I got to read Aron Nels Steinke’s excellent graphic novel Neptune, an all-ages adventure involving a mysterious dog and a massive flood. I was pretty excited, needless to say, to receive a copy in the mail of his new children’s graphic novel The Super Crazy Cat Dance, part of Blue Apple Books’s new "Balloon Toons" line of comics for younger readers. Just like the Toon Books line, this is the kind of comic for kids that you’ll want to start buying your own children, nieces, nephews, and friends.

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Written by Ananth Panagariya
Art by Yuko Ota
128 pages, black and white
Self-published

One of my favorite webcomics at the moment is Johnny Wander by Ananth Panagariya and Yuko Ota. It’s a simple enough strip, short one-pagers based on recent events in the life of Panagariya, Ota, and their housemates. When they announced their first print collection of Johnny Wander, though, I jumped at the chance to buy it. By boiling their comic down to singular moments in their life, Johnny Wander is consistently funny and sweet.

Continue reading “Johnny Wander Vol. 1: Don’t Burn the House Down”

By Julia Wertz
192 pages, black and white
Published by Three Rivers Press

Most autobiographical comics are boring. This usually has little to do with the actual lives of the people creating the comics, and more to do with that there’s no particular hook to make their own story interesting. Joe Matt is a prime example of someone who can create comics about an intensely boring (and slightly creepy) life and still make them enthralling, even while other cartoonists could go on a trip to Brazil and somehow make a boring comic. (Although let’s face it, the majority of boring autobiographical comics involve them wishing they were Joe Matt, not going to Brazil.) With all of that in mind, I wish to assure you that Julia Wertz’s Drinking at the Movies is the good kind of autobiographical comic, and it’s been a while since I laughed this much at a comic.

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By Julia Gfrörer
40 pages, black and white
Published by Sparkplug Comic Books

I’m cutting right to the chase here: Julia Gfrörer’s Flesh and Bone is a creepy, disturbing, comic. I mean that in a good way; Gfrörer mixes love, death, occult, and betrayal into a fascinating story that takes a simple starting point and then moves it down a dark and twisty road. If I had to try and compare Flesh and Bone to an existing comic, it would probably be Hellboy, but a story in which Hellboy himself never comes to save the day.

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By Ben Costa
192 pages, color
Published by Iron Crotch University Press

I like when surprises appear in my mailbox, and Pang: The Wandering Shaolin Monk Vol. 1: Refuge of the Heart certainly applies to that category. A collection of Ben Costa’s webcomic, Pang is something I’d never heard of before, but the cover reminded me of artists like Darwyn Cooke and Bruce Timm and coupled with Shaolin monks? Well, add in that this is a beautiful, slick hardcover and I was pushing it towards the top of the to-be-read pile.

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Written by Peyo and Yvan Delporte
Art by Peyo
56 pages, color
Published by Papercutz

I have a confession to make: I was never a big Smurfs fan. It’s not that I disliked them, but rather that I never got swept up in Smurfmania when they made their big splash in the United States. So I watched the occasional episode of their show, and I remember flipping through some of the earlier printings of the Smurfs comic albums at my local bookstore. But I’d certainly never sat down and read one of the books until now, so with Papercutz’s low-priced reissues it seemed a good a chance as any. And you know what? Forget the insipid "la la la la la la" theme song from the animated show, this was a lot of fun.

Continue reading “Smurfs Vol. 1: The Purple Smurfs”