(or you are that roommate) The transition of a webcomic to print is always exciting for me; it often showcases how a cartoonist’s skills have improved over time, be they narrative, visual, or both. Even for veritable pros in comics, the tangible progression of a collected series shows off how artists experiment with new techniques,…
REVIEW: Wika Empowers Its Visuals But Not Its Worldbuilding
As the last survivor in a line of a once-powerful fairy kingdom, Wika had to live her life toughening things out in the streets. While dodging suspicious characters, she tries to keep her identity a secret in a world where fairies are scrutinized and persecuted. But thanks to magical tattoos that visibly change on her…
REVIEW: Anastasia: Part Two Calls for a Cut On all Hollywood Misogynists
The concluding volume of Europe Comics’, Anastasia, a story of a young starlet who has successfully climbed the glass mountain called Hollywood, only to find that it’s pretty hollow at the top, packs in a lot of emotion and a lot of truth about the horrors of the movie business, aided by stunning art to…
My Sex-Positive, Feminist Graphic Novel, Tracy Queen, is Being Shadow Banned
You may have heard whispers about shadow banning—that thing social media platform do where they block or partly block users and/or their content in a sneaky way so that, as Wikipedia puts it, “it will not be readily apparent to the user that they have been banned.” The practice seems to have started as a…
Love Addict: How I Learned to Love the Problematic Narrative
Love Addict: Confessions of a Serial Dater Koren Shadmi (Writer and Artist) IDW 31 January, 2018 With almost fifty million people using dating apps, it’s no wonder that there’s a comic written about them. Koren Shadmi’s Love Addict doesn’t just cover quirky disasters and mishaps that come with online dating, though; by showing the personal…
Hipster Manga: Angel Heart
Although it’s only half the name of the series, “heart” is literally at the center of the long-running manga Angel Heart by Tsukasa Hojo. (Literally-literally, not figuratively-literally.) It’s both a story of a transplanted heart and the code name of a young assassin aptly named Glass Heart. After a particularly gut-wrenching kill, Glass Heart decides…