The word of the arc is synergy, both in power sets and community. New Mutants has a broad cast of characters it follows: members of the titular New Mutants team, the younger generations of mutants who have been around for years but never allowed to age, and actual new-new mutants, like Cosmar (both newly powered…
Archie Comics Pubwatch: March 2021
Welcome to the Archie Comics Pubwatch for the month of March! I’m Lisa, reporting from a corner booth at Pop’s Chock ‘lit Shoppe, and here’s this month’s news! In this month’s Archie Comics Pubwatch, Riverdale gets renewed, variant covers are discussed, and some new info about Archie’s digital plans comes forth!
REVIEW: Hellions #10’s Attack of the Chucky Doll
Hellions is one of those great comics where it’s easy to see talented creators levelling up in real time, and gosh, it’s fascinating.
REVIEW: Shadow Life Is a Heartwarming Look at Life Before Death
My father is in his last days. We know it. He knows it. But gosh is he stubborn about how those last days are going to go. He’s still of sound mind, though his body is failing him, but he’s got enough get up and go left in him to demand that we allow him…
REVIEW: Mirrorland by Carole Johnston
Think of a funfair mirror hall: things appear magnified, often distorted, real, yet otherworldly. We see ourselves reflected, but it’s not us. It’s more than that; a distortion of the truth. And sometimes, things can appear so evident when the truth has been so twisted and memories so repressed, and we don’t want to confront…
INTERVIEW: Wendy Chin-Tanner on Embodied: An Intersectional Feminist Comics Poetry Anthology
Poetry is Wendy Chin-Tanner’s first love. In her own poetic work, she calls on the influences of poets such as Audre Lorde, Ai, Sylvia Plath, Vera Pavlova, and Lorine Niedecker. For A Wave New World’s Chin-Tanner, poets are a kind of literary world superhero, because, she says, “they’re always trying to do the impossible —…
REVIEW: Demon Days: X-Men #1 Gives Us Samurai X-Men and Monstrous Marvels
Demon Days: X-Men #1 is a tale for the ages. In ancient Japan, the Oni are fighting back against humans for expanding into their territories and taking away the Oni’s food sources. Can humans and Oni, who once coexisted peacefully, find balance again?
Spacewarp, Shift and The 77: Reviving British Anthology Comics
The phrase “British comics” has, over recent decades, seen a quite drastic shift in meaning. For a long time, British comics were affordable entertainment that youngsters picked up at the newsagent with their pocket money, and which covered a variety of genres from knockabout comedy to swooning romance, sporting exploits to high-flying sci-fi. Today, however,…
Bug Boys: Outside and Beyond Brings more Sweet Stories about Growing Up
Sometimes, especially when the world is terrible, you just need something sweet. Bug Boys has always been a comic that brings such sweetness. Protagonists Rhino-B and Stag-B often spend their stories worrying about what it means to grow up and become an adult, but they meet adult mentors who teach them gentle lessons, and guide…
REVIEW: You Can’t Live Forever in The Eighth Immortal #1
Seven immortals live among us, enduring their own humanity as best they can through the ages. For everyone else, time may heal all wounds, but when one has nothing but time to relive history and trauma, there is no such healing. And there is never allowed to be an eighth immortal, or else…
REVIEW: Catalogue Baby: A Memoir of Infertility
This heart-wrenching comics-narrative illustrating one woman’s epic journey towards motherhood is, at turns, also funny and cute. Drawings have a way of taking the sweat out of tragedy, turning it into something more palatable, though still powerful. I drank in Catalogue Baby in a single gulp.
INTERVIEW: Greg Hunter on Seekers of Aweto and Everything Lerner Books Has in Store for 2021
In 2018, Lerner Books published the first English-language translation of artist and writer, Nie Jun’s, called My Beijing, a collection of slice-of-life stories with a sprinkling of magical realism, translated from its original Chinese. This week, Lerner brings us a whole new adventure from Jun that introduces English-language readers to the fantastical world of the…