In November, I finally joined the cult of the smartphone. I’m not the type of guy who’s usually on the bleeding edge of technology, nor am I one to become an early adopter of anything (other than comics, of course), but when Verizon’s release of the Droid X coincided with my contract expiration, I decided to take the plunge.
The Israeli cartoonist Rami Efal was recently nominated for the Ignatz Award for “Promising New Talent” for his self-published graphic novel, Never Forget, Never Forgive, which was originally serialized as a webcomic on Activatecomix.com. The book is a historical fiction set in feudal Japan and chronicles the “Great Onin War for the throne of Kyoto,” a struggle between the Okumura and Miyamoto tribes, two embittered clans locked in combat for decades. Within this context, Efal explores the impact of war and its lingering after-effects on one family.
There are better ways to spend a rainy afternoon than flipping through a box of old Heavy Metal magazines, but that’s exactly what I was doing when I happened upon “Is There No Justice in the Universe?” a forgotten five-page story by Brian Allen McCall in the August 1983 issue. Buried near the middle of the magazine, between a middle chapter of Tamburini and Liberatore’s Ranxerox and a one-page strip by Peter Kuper, it’s not surprising that this story was condemned to obscurity.
James Sturm is a cartoonist’s cartoonist, a passionate supporter of the medium and one of its great ambassadors. His comics, like all great artists, have sharpened and focused over the course of his career, and following his trilogy of graphic novels, recently collected as a single, stunning volume simply titled James Sturm’s America, it was only logical that Sturm would turn next to Europe.
The Lost Dossiers is not a sequel, per se, but more like the graphic novel equivalent of the bonus disc in a DVD box set. It’s hardly essential; however, for fans of the original, there’s more than enough “bonus features” to make it worth the price.
Rather than a straightforward biography,
Kleist’s artistic goal is to capture the emotional experience of Johnny Cash’s music in a visual medium…
Adapted by Harvey Pekar, Edited by Paul Buhle; The New Press; 224 pp.; $22.95; B&W; Softcover; ISBN: 9781595583215
Studs Terkel is widely regarded as the greatest oral historian in American literature. Although he would later win the Pulitzer Prize (in…
Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays Edited by Brendan Burford; Villard Books; 154 pp.; $16.95; B&W; Softcover; ISBN: 9780345505293
The fourth volume of Brendan Burford’s anthology of “nonfiction picto-essays” is the longest and most impressive to date (as well as…
Rick Geary; Hill & Wang; 102 pp, $16.95; B&W, Hardcover; ISBN: 9780809095087
“Actually, I was assigned Trotsky. I wouldn’t have chosen him. My first choice would have been Rasputin. I suggested him to the publisher, but he said, ‘Let’s…
Mijeong; Byun Byung-Jun; NBM; 240 pp, $19.95; B&W & Color, softcover; ISBN: 9781561635542
“If Bret Easton Ellis was a Korean cartoonist – and about twenty years younger – he might have produced a short-story collection like Mijeong.” – Andrew Wheeler…
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