Night Air
Work aimed towards the highly desired demographic of “All Ages” usually follows the same marketing-friendly formulas and resorts to the same winking irony. In popular culture, Pixar is most likely to blame, but comics have jumped on board, full steam … Continue reading
Don’t Come in Here
Patrick Kyle’s Don’t Come in Here follows a human (or human-like) character’s stay in a vast apartment unit: a five-year stretch of uneasiness. The place is home to a seemingly infinite number of rooms and hallways (yet only one wall … Continue reading
Mox Nox
What makes the work of gross-out absurdist Joan Cornella so effective is his use of the lingering, unsettling image within a fairly rigid, predictable page layout. Sure, his depiction of often grisly violence and/or weird sex acts is funny on … Continue reading
Blackbird
What would happen if our government banned self-publishing? I mean, it’s easy to imagine a world where the government attempts to restrict or censor internet content—in part because we currently live in that world—but printed works? Come on now. So … Continue reading
Peplum
Trying to survive the after-effects of an encounter with sublime beauty is the madness that permeates Blutch’s Peplum. The question of how to negotiate desire in the face of the thing which destroys all other desires; how to live after … Continue reading
Sick
Sick, the belated follow up to Gabby Schulz’s Ignatz Award-winning graphic novel Monsters, is an uncompromising, autobiographical look at the horrors of being severely ill, impoverished and uninsured, in modern day America. Continue reading
Gorgeous
If, as J.G. Ballard wrote in 1973, the car crash is a fertilizing rather than destructive event, the central car crash in Cathy G. Johnson’s Gorgeous yields fertile, if shaky, ground for an up-and-coming artist. The heart of Gorgeous’s story … Continue reading
An Olympic Dream
Biography, memoir, and autobiography are possibly the trendiest genres of book-format comics; one cannot even list the titles that have been published since the recent boom in the early 2000s. Some say that there are too many graphic biographies and … Continue reading
