Morte Kevin Joseph, D.A. Bishop Source Point Press November 2017 For some readers, the idea of a silent comic is one of very little value: where is the marriage of words and images to create a liminal work of art, halfway between the visual and the literary? If a comic is images-only, doesn’t that take…
Paradiso is a Post-Apocalyptic Breath of Fresh Air
Paradiso Aditya Bidikar (letterer), Dearbhla Kelly (colorist), Devmalya Pramanik (writer), Alex Sollazzo (colorist), Ram V (writer) Image Comics December 6, 2017 Inspired by a road trip, writer Ram V and his architect friend Rajiv Bhakat set off to see historic cities across India. The result is Paradiso, a comic unlike any other. Set in a…
Faith and the Future Force Soared and Satisfied
Faith and the Future ForceIssues #1-4 Ulises Arreola (Colorist), Diego Bernard with Juan Castro (Artists), Jody Houser (Writer), Barry Kitson (Artist), Cary Nord with Brian Thies (Artists), Stephen Segovia (Artist), Dave Sharpe (Letterer) Published by Valiant July 2017 – October 2017 I’m tired of universe-wide hero team-up books. It feels like there’s a new threat to the very fabric…
Oni Watch: Home For the Holidays
The holiday season is well underway, and let me tell you, it really feels like we’ve been dragging our feet to 2018. Now, my family is as conservative as they come. (“Even though they’re Latinx, Azha, really?” Yes, really.) And I wouldn’t have made it through the eight-hour Thanksgiving Family Extravaganza without digging into a…
Shakespeare on the Page: A Better Way
I was recently rereading Manga Shakespeare: Twelfth Night, and found myself surprised all over again by how much I like it, and how well it works. The Manga Shakespeare series, published by Amulet/Abrams in the US & Canada or SelfMadeHero in the UK, uses a “manga” drawing style (but the western left to right reading…
10 Reasons Dark Horse Needs to Finish Releasing 3×3 Eyes
For those of us that came of age during the early anime period of the 1990s, 3×3 Eyes is a name many will recognize on the old fansub VHSes passed around among friends and local anime clubs. Based on the manga of the same name, the anime consisted of seven episodes of an OVA that…
The Best Thing I Didn’t Know About Valerian & Laureline
It’s that they love each other. Valérian and Laureline is a french-language comic, originally published over six decades (the late 1960s through the first ten years of the 21st century), and in English currently by Cinebook. They put out single-volume books as well as bonanza compendiums; I’ve only, so far, read three of the former….
Let Her Grow: The Importance of Poison Ivy’s Heroic Journey
“To discuss Poison Ivy is to discuss environmentalism. To discuss patriarchy. To discuss collective archetypes, and evolving narratives. To discuss Golden Age femmes fatale and black widows. To discuss thrill killers and team ups. To discuss redemption, and defiance, and friendship. To discuss narrative polemics, women in the sciences, the rush of urbanisation, and the…
Comics Has An Abuse Problem: Taneka Stotts Opens Up About Her Assault At SDCC
Comics has long been an industry rife with abuse, exploitation, and seriously problematic behavior from creators and publishers alike. But despite the apparently inevitable, many of us strive to make the space better, to excommunicate those who harm others, and to create authentic work that speaks to our lived experience whilst navigating the often racist,…
The Metabarons: A Rape Comic
Content warning: you don’t want to know any of this. A rapist’s comic, about rape, is discussed and pictured herein. If you visit the Wikipedia page of Alejandro Jodorowsky, you will be able to see that he has claimed himself a rapist. Here’s a section of the quotation with this claim, from a promotional interview…
7 Horrible Superhero Gifts for Your Arch Nemesis
As the holiday season creeps closer, we’re inundated with shining, glittering things trying to tempt us away from our money. But for every incredible fun gift idea we see, there are at least 100 awful things that no one would (or sometimes should!) ever want. So I collected together seven of the worst possible comic…
CB Cebulski’s Asian Mask: Why the Anger?
UPDATE: The Dark Horse statement below has been updated to the correct version. In 2004 a white man named CB Cebulski pretended to be a Japanese one named Akira Yoshida. “Yoshida” wrote comics for Marvel while Cebulski worked as an Editor at Marvel. Cebulski was recently instated as Editor in Chief at Marvel, and with…
