I told The Comics Journal that my top dozen of 2018 were: The Prince and the Dressmaker, Jen Wang (First Second). The Dragon Slayer, Jaime Hernandez (TOON Books). On a Sunbeam, Tillie Walden (First Second). Flocks, L. Nichols (Secret Acres). From Lone Mountain, John Porcellino (Drawn and Quarterly). Love & Rockets #4-6, Los Bros Hernandez (Fantagraphics). Frontier #17, […]
Gary Groth, ed., Sparring With Gil Kane: Debating The History and Aesthetics of Comics (Fantagraphics, 2018). $22.99, pb. Sparring with Gil Kane is a book of conversations, but its title suggests a contest or bout, as if intellectual disputation were a knuckle-bruising donnybrook or prizefight—or perhaps the equivalent of a few rounds among friendly but formidable partners. […]
Ander Nilsen, Tongues #1 (No Miracles Press, 2017). $15. An eagle wings over a mountain and across a dry, flat, stretching plain, then alights on a scene of human catastrophe: armored cars overturned, the ground cratered as if from a bombing, and a sprawled, broken-looking man’s corpse lying nearby. The eagle frees a frantic skittering monkey […]
Dan Gearino, Comic Shop: The Retail Mavericks Who Gave Us a New Geek Culture (Swallow Press/Ohio University Press, 2017). 264 pp, $26.95. Dan Gearino’s Comic Shop is a book I wish I could have written. Here’s why: In my comics studies classes, I often teach the history and structure of the comic book market. Sometimes […]
Eleanor Davis, Why Art? (Fantagraphics, 2018). $14.95, pb. Why Art?, like Davis’s glorious 2014 collection How to Be Happy, flirts with another genre in its title—this time not self-help books but popular guides to art appreciation (perhaps simply another kind of self-improvement). Its opening pages speak in a voice of assured matter-of-factness even when saying stupid or terribly […]
Ezra Claytan Daniels & Ben Passmore, BTTM FDRS (http://www.ezracdaniels.com/#/bttmfdrs/) BTTM FDRS is the longest piece of sustained storytelling that I bought at last December’s CALA (Comics Arts LA) festival. Creepy and charming, it mashes up oozy, sick horror and dark, politically barbed comedy. The story satirizes racism, structural and environmental, via a blighted Chicago neighborhood and an imposing, […]
