How does it feel to be an expert in a dying field?
Just to the right of the last set of bookshelves we discussed is a stack of books that I probably would have put on one of its shelves, if only there was room to do so. So instead, they are just kind of piled up alongside it, waiting for a day when I might actually get enough shelves to accommodate all my books and go about organizing the in a less haphazard fashion. Given the size of the stack,…
Regardless of the quality of this summer's new Masters of the Universe movie, it definitely ushered in a flood of related merchandise. And given that the film is based on a toy line, one suspects that doing so was likely always a part of the point of producing the film in the first place. While I have long since grown out of the demographic to play with or collect the toys, I did find this one…
G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero #34 (1985) Art by Rod Whigham and Andy Mushynsky • This is a very strong issue, and a good candidate for any "best of" G.I. Joe collection, at least among the issues I've read so far. It's a done-in-one story, with no real connection to the various ongoing storylines...in fact, were it not credited to the regular creative team, I would suspect it might have been a…
This week's bookshelf is an awful lot like last week's, in that it is a) mostly small press and b) a real mess, with no real logic as to what is on it. One thing that seems apparent is that I seem to have stuck a whole bunch of very thin books on this shelf, books that are more "prestige format" (that is, regular comics with spines) than trade paperbacks, collections or graphic novels. The sorts…
BOUGHT: Now That We Draw Vol. 5 (Seven Seas Entertainment) The previous volume ended with a pretty big cliffhanger, with high schooler and aspiring manga artist Uehara Yuu overhearing the other two points of the series' emerging love triangle discussing him in the hot spring next to the one he was soaking in. His cute childhood friend turned sensei (and successful manga artist) Love-chan asks his…
• There's been a lot of talk about superhero fatigue, and that Marvel Cinematic Universe having become less and less of a selling point in and of itself (and I agree the cross-movie mega-story has been completely unmoored and ponderous compared to the early days; the producers never bothered to replace the original hook of building The Avengers team and then building towards the Thanos conflict…
G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero #31 (1985) Art by Rod Whigham and Andy Mushynsky • Say, did you know that David Mazzucchelli inked this cover...? He did! • This issue sees the introduction of Spirit, who is referred to repeatedly as "Spirit Iron-Knife" ("Spirit" is his codename, while "Charlie Iron-Knife" is his real name). Spirit is technically the team's second Native American member, following…
This week's bookshelf is a real hodgepodge, with, as far as I can now discern, no real orgainizing principle. These books seem to be almost all small press and/or self-published (with a few prominent exceptions), and to be of such a size that they fit better on this shelf than they might have on other shelves. A few seem to be pretty out-of-place though, like the couple of manga volumes. The…
Ever since I finished reading the last volume of Haikyu!! , I've been casting about for a replacement series of sorts. In part, I've been curious about how typical Haruichi Furudate's volleyball manga might be of sports manga. Like, is it a truly exceptional example of the genre, one that transcends interest in volleyball or sports in general? Do any other series offer such strong and compelling…
"Hmm, is the world ready for a dreamy Orion....?" That was my first thought when I saw the cover of Orion, the new original graphic novel from Ngozi Ukazu, the cartoonist responsible for Check, Please! , Flip (reviewed in this column ) and, most relevantly, Barda , the last of which is something of a prequel to this work, as its events kick off those here. Of course, when Jack Kirby created Orion,…
This week's bookshelf is a manga shelf, and it's dominated by two creators, one of whom is among the most influential Japanese artists to ever put pen to paper. That is, of course, the late Akira Toriyama. On the far left we have four volumes of his Dragon Ball , volumes 13-16. Why does my collection start with the 13th volume...? Good question! If I had to guess without a more thorough…
It's time once again to revisit Larry Hama and company's original 1982-1994 Marvel Comics series, G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero (via Image Comics' 2024 G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero Compendium Vol. 1 ). Today we we'll be looking at issues #28-30 . (Only 20 more issues to go...! In this volume. And then 105 more issues after that until the end of the series.) As per usual, I am pulling the covers…
Homer's epic poem The Odyssey is one of the oldest surviving works of literature and a cornerstone of world literature and Western culture, directly inspiring such modern works as James Joyce's 1922 novel Ulysses , 1995's episode five of Wishbone , The Coen Brothers's 2000 film O, Brother Where Art Though? and the Animal Man passages of DC's 2006 weekly comic book series 52 . Now comes perhaps…
This week's bookshelf is my original First Second shelf, and, indeed, most of the books here are from the publisher. On the furthest left are the bigger format books, like Aaron Renier's The Unsinkable Walker Bean , a couple of George O'Connor's Olympian books, a couple of Lewis Trondheim and Fabrice Parme's Tiny Tyrant books and, turned sideways to better fit the shelf but thus hiding their…
When I first decided that I would review my way through the original 1982-1994 G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero comic book series from Marvel—via Image Comics' giant G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero Compendium s—I figured I would tackle six issues per post. That seemed like a decent-sized chunk of comics, right? After doing four of them though, I came to realize that maybe that is just too many comic…
I've probably been looking for Jim Lawson's 1993, two-issue mini-series Dino Island in back issue bins for at least 25 years now...unsuccessfully. Lawson is, as you probably know, an alum of Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's Mirage Studios, having drawn many issues of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles series (including the "City At War" arc) and its sister series Tales of The Teenage Mutant…
This week's bookshelf is another small one (in fact, so small that hte picture of it looks pretty wonky here) and is also part of the repurposed entertainment center that last week's shelf was. You'll probably notice that it is also not all comics. There are three stacks of books there: One stack that's not-comics, one stack that consists of a not-comic book and a not-comic book about a comics…
There's definitely something to be said for simplicity of concept, just as there's something exciting about an artist following their interests and passions, creating a comic book not necessarily because they have something important to say, but just because they want to draw the things they like. Both seem true of Maid to Skate , a new manga from one-name artist Suzushiro, which Viz Media…
BOUGHT: Nancy For All Seasons (Fantagraphics Books) So look, I spent some time off-and-on over the course of the last few weeks wondering if there was anything that I personally have to say about Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy , history's most perfect daily gag comic strip, that hasn't been said better dozens of times before by more insightful critics with more impressive resumes. Now that my…
This week's bookshelf is a small one, and thus a relatively simple one. Here we move to a new wall, and start a new shelving unit, this one being one I found in my mom's house and turned into a place to hold books; I'm pretty sure it was another old entertainment center (The top two shelves have glass doors that close over them, and there's a huge, spacious shelf below, which I assume was meant to…
I was very sorry to hear that Books Galore in Erie, Pennsylvania is closing. I went to college at Gannon University in downtown Erie, and Books Galore was my comics shop during those years...and the year or so after I graduated but before I moved to Columbus. So, between 1995 and 2000, I used to visit pretty much as often as I could. Books Galore seemed to be a big, old brick house repurposed into…
Ryoichiro Kezuka's Record Journey is a rather literary manga, a collection of interrelated short stories that all revolve around records and music in one way or another. Kezuka dwells on the importance of music, particularly on how it can form and evoke memories and connect people to one another, but he makes his points with necessarily abstracted examples. The particular records, the most…
• It is certainly a choice for James Gunn and other DC Studios decision-makers to follow last year's joyful, inspirational, all-around fun Superman with this movie, in which the traumatized star attempts to self-medicate by badly abusing alcohol in a dark, grimy part of the galaxy, fighting a band of little girl-hunting sex slavers in order to save the life of her dog, the lovable scamp Krypto…
This week's bookshelf is my Marvel shelf...or, at least, it was my original Marvel shelf, when I started reading Marvel in 2000, although I have since come to fill a few other shelves with various Marvel books, like those Essential volumes discussed last week , and the digests from a few weeks back . It's not just Marvel though, and there are some books stuck on this particular shelf either…
When this book was first announced, I wasn't interested. I'm not a fan of the character, I wasn't familiar with the creators, I didn't recognize the other characters on the cover, the apparent sci-fi setting (Kandor? Outer space?) didn't appeal to me, and the apparent Adventures in Babysitting homage wasn't doing much for me. Then I read a blog post about it— this one, to be precise —and learned…
We've seen these for Batman, Superman and the Justice League before (I posted about the latter here ), and now, in this so-called "Summer of Supergirl", Superman's cousin from Krypton has got her own over-priced, magazine format collection of four comics stories available outside of comic shops, just in time for her new movie. I heard about the magazine online, and so when I found myself in a…