One thing I love about Jade Street Protection Services is how much it emphasizes that all girls are magic. Some have more sparkles than others, and some move about the world differently, but they’re all championed as magical. And while the essence of this story is very rooted in the history of mahō shōjo manga…
REVIEW: Revolutionary Girl Utena: After the Revolution: … Is Less Than Revolutionary
Revolutionary Girl Utena is a shojo classic that I only recently read. Because of my recent exposure, news of an addition to the series, After the Revolution, released in 2020 in English excited me. Overall, I see threads in the series that a younger me would have loved. Unfortunately, neither the original Utena series nor…
I Don’t Need Adornments: On Phantom Thief Jeanne’s Maron Kusakabe
Content Warning: This piece contains discussion of rape. Recently, I changed the wallpaper on my phone to Phantom Thief Jeanne, the titular heroine of Arina Tanemura’s ’90s manga series Phantom Thief Jeanne. It was beautiful, but I soon wanted to change it to Maron Kusakabe, Phantom Thief Jeanne’s civilian identity. This was due to the fact…
A Little Magical Girl Ultra Violence: A Review of Magical Beatdown Vol. 1 & 2
Magical Beatdown Volume 1 & 2 Jenn Woodall (Art & Words) Silver Sprocket With a longsword, a baseball bat studded in nails, and her trustworthy bloodthirsty motorbike, Jenn Woodall’s eye-patched magical vigilante combats harassment from scumbags with style all while paying homage to classic magical girl manga with her zines published by Silver Sprocket, Magical Beatdown…
Sex, Cyborgs, and ’70s Style in Cutie Honey: The Classic Collection
Cutie Honey: The Classic Collection Go Nagai (writer/artist), Zak Davisson (translator), Bambi Eloriaga-Amago and Roland Amago (lettering/retouch) Seven Seas Entertainment August 28, 2018 Cutie Honey: The Classic Collection is a chunky hardcover that reprints Go Nagai’s influential 1970s manga series in its entirety. Cutie Honey was one of the taproots of the magical girl genre,…
Review: Magical Princess Sky
Magical Princess Sky Allie Malott Self-published 2018 When you have a genre like magical girls that’s gone on long enough to be slammed full of tropes, you can approach making a new work in a number of ways. You can play it straight without any innovation and become cliche. You can poke fun at it…
Short & Sweet: TCAF 2016 Edition
Angel and I had a blast at this year’s Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF); a free festival for the public where they can check out cool indie comics, creators and panels. I wrote about my experience of the festival which you can read here. We grabbed a ton of comics but couldn’t review our entire haul due to…
Carve Your Name in the Rockface: Arielle Soutar’s Art of Lettering
When I spoke to Zach Clemente about his Mountain cycle comics, he had plenty to say about his steady collaborator, Arielle Soutar. Clemente and Soutar have collaborated with a different cartoonist on each book, but she has provided the typography and logo work for all ClementeWorks scripts. And they’ve known each other since school! I wanted to…
Build Your Own Mountain: A Conversation with a DIY Comics Writer-Publisher
Review copies are nice, but review copies that you’d be excited to buy are better. Zachary Clemente sent me two comics that he self-published, with Arielle Soutar on lettering, and Kelsi Ricks (Remnants) and Ricardo Lopez Ortiz (Immolation) putting image to page. I wanted to know more about the connections between these two books, and, lucky…
BAM! POW! Comics Are Still For Kids!! Tamsin & The Deep
Imagine a comic for children. Imagine it’s about a girl braving horrors and humiliation. Imagine she saves her brother from a family curse, and imagine the mermaid in the story is the the kind that doesn’t let you go home. Sounds good, right? It’s called Tamsin and the Deep.
Magical Girls Who Are Jerks: Interview with Kel McDonald of Misfits of Avalon
Last year, we received a preview for a comic by Kel McDonald (Dark Horse Presents, Angel & Faith, Adventure Time) about a group of magical girls “who are jerks” called Misfits of Avalon. Having grown up on a good dose of Sailor Moon (and loving the fun play on The Mists of Avalon), I couldn’t help, but…
Incredible Indie Tuesday: Kickstart All the Comics
Hi everyone! My name is KM, and I’m takin’ over this ship. You’ll still get your weekly dose of indie comics goodness, you just might see a bit more about webcomics and self-published comics because I spend too much time on the internet. But enough about that. Let’s talk comics! This month has seen a…