Manga and Comic Reviews
Above-the-Board Recommendation: Decorum HC It’s not like you need to twist my arm to get me to buy anything written by Jonathan Hickman. Especially when he’s working with a great artist like Mike Huddleston. They could be doing a comic about their respective grocery lists and I’d still buy the trade paperback. In hardcover. “Decorum,” […]
Above-the-Board Recommendation: Batman by John Ridley HC It was supposed to be a lot bigger than one volume. It still might be. The plan was to have Bruce Wayne retire and for Tim Fox, son of Lucius, to take over the mantle of the Dark Knight. It was going to be the most high-profile in […]
Above-the-Board Recommendation: Grandville Integral HC Unfortunately this isn’t a new installment in Bryan Talbot’s excellent series of graphic novels set in a late 19th Century steampunk world where humans are second-class citizens compared to the anthropomorphic animal individuals who run the show. “Integral” is just a fancy way of saying that this is an omnibus […]
Above-the-Board Recommendation: Way of X #1 Right now, there’s room for a lot of “X-Men” stories. We’re getting a modern-day pirate story with lots of conflicting agendas in “Marauders.” Character-driven detective action in “X-Factor.” Dark comedy and action in “Hellions.” And whatever Head of X Jonathan Hickman feels like writing about in a given month […]
If you’ll recall (from last week, when I finally remembered to post my review), the first volume of this series didn’t make the best impression on me. Much of it felt like self-parody as mangaka Shuzo Oshimi tried to cultivate an air of sinister intent in a way that felt more ham-fisted than suspenseful. It […]
“X of Swords” isn’t quite the next volume in Jonathan Hickman’s run. This volume collects the five “Giant-Size X-Men” one-shots which were released over the course of last year. Aside from their slightly expanded page count, these issues wouldn’t have felt out of place in the pages of the writer’s “X-Men.” This is because these […]
I already talked about half of this volume with Rob, and the other half when talking about the tie-in issues to “Empyre.” Still, as Hickman and crew are onto something special with their “X-Men” relaunch, I felt that this volume deserved to be written up here and assessed as a whole. Even if it does […]
It’s the one title on my “Best of 2020” list that I haven’t written or talked about yet, so it’s time to give it its due. Honestly, letting “Superman’s Pal: Jimmy Olsen” sit on my review pile for so long was downright disrespectful on my part. It isn’t just that the adventurous photographer for the […]
True Story: When I was looking over what I’d written and recorded for 2020, I noticed that I’d posted my review of “Gigant” twice in April. That was embarrassing enough, but I couldn’t figure out what I had passed over in order for that to have happened. Well, I finally solved that mystery. Expect reviews […]
Not only does this graphic novella have an attention-getting title, but said title is also very appropriate for the tone and style writer Alex De Campi and artist Erica Henderson are trying to evoke. After a very brief prologue in Vienna, 1889, the story jumps to Los Angeles, 1974, where Quincy Harker is making a […]