Some comics have both the good fortune and burden of being wholly unfamiliar in form and tone to readers. Bad Gateway is definitely one of those, a book specifically and clearly rooted in the comic-book storytelling tradition but which differs wildly from the average superhero tale or graphic memoir. The book focuses…

The symbolism is clear in travel memoirs: Journey as metaphor for the way a life unfolds. The growing number of graphic novel additions to this sub-genre have revitalized it in the past few years. Books like Lucy Knisley’s Displacement and Eleanor Davis’s You & A Bike & A Road are wonderful examples of the way that a…

Unlikable, even downright terrible protagonists aren’t inherently a bad thing, but they do require very careful treatment. Combine an unsympathetic, bad-acting protagonist with an attempt at satire, or an even more ambitious genre meta-commentary, and things get complicated and treacherous very quickly. Unfortunately, …

Test opens on a young person in the cab of an 18-wheeler, sparking anxiety in the reader about vulnerable hitchhikers and the threat long-haul truckers can pose. But expectations are thwarted as Aleph, Test’s protagonist and the fragile-looking young person in question, is released from the cab without incident and…

At first glance, This Was Our Pact looks like it treads the same ground as The Goonies and Stand By Me, telling a coming-of-age adventure about a gaggle of kids testing the bounds of their parents’ control. But only at first. Writer and artist Ryan Andrews imbues this kind of story with a sense of wonder and a plot…

Imaginary Fiends is in many ways a model Vertigo book. It’s weird and it taps into nearly universal fears to tell a story that could be set in any time and any place. The question of where imaginary friends come from and what happens to them when children outgrow them is something that’s been explored in multiple…

Heroes In Crisis #9 hits shelves this week, ending the series with more of a whimper than a bang—a whimper that lacks even some sort of closure. The book has included many of the foundations of an excellent Tom King story: nine panel pages, repetition of both words and imagery, and characters struggling with a sense…

Evan Dahm has shown time and again he’s a master of deliberate, emotional adventures. He has been posting webcomics for well over a decade, each of them a different journey through detailed and imaginative worlds. Rice Boy began in 2006 and was published just last year by Iron Circus Comics, while Vattu just passed…

Four years ago, when Descender hit comic book store shelves, it was met with excitement based mostly on the creative team. Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen weren’t exactly unknown names at the time, but hard science fiction stories can be a tough sell in comics. Descender is part of a larger swell of imaginative,…

Adaptations can be a difficult to wrangle under the best of circumstances, attempting to reframe and reshape a complete work so that it can fit into another medium. Adapting a much-beloved and acclaimed story adds another layer of complexity, and adapting something that’s already been adapted is even more difficult.…

In pop culture terms, 80 years is a long time. On the internet, pop culture moments can last for just days before they’re already over, gone in the constant stream of new content and distractions. But Batman has endured for 80 years, and last week Detective Comics #1000 (DC) marked the celebration of that anniversary.…

A Fire Story (Abrams ComicArts) is a perfect storm of a book, an individual graphic memoir that tells the larger story of a community, a comic that is the result of both long years of work and a viral internet sensation, a literal perfect storm of weather and human behavior that resulted in one of the most devastating…

Graphic memoirs by female creators are becoming a genre unto themselves, separate from the rest of the medium by sheer quantity and popularity. From Raina Telgemeier’s Smile, Sisters, and the forthcoming Guts to Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Are You My Mother? to Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do, many critically…

C. Spike Trotman should already be a familiar name to fans of independent comics. Trotman runs what has become the Midwest’s largest comics publisher, Iron Circus Comics. After years of wildly successful Kickstarter campaigns she became part of the Creators For Creators grant, and she managed to sign a distribution…

Biographies are a difficult genre to tackle gracefully, and graphic biographies especially so. Unlike fiction and even autobiographies, biographies require a deeply intimate understanding of the subject but also a rigorously sourced and researched understanding of history. David F. Walker has shown in works like Shaft …

Netflix had a surprise success with The End Of The Fucking World, the adaptation of Charles Forsman’s graphic novel of the same name made in partnership with U.K.’s Channel 4. Late in 2018 came the announcement that Netflix will adapt another Forsman graphic novel, 2017’s I Am Not Okay With This (Fantagraphics). It …

The gulf between manga and Western comics seems to shrink in fits and starts as some genres and titles become popular with American readers. There’s a particular gap between slice-of-life manga and American readers (though young women especially have been steady consumers of these stories). Manga provides for readers…

Berlin (Drawn & Quarterly) is an imposing book. It’s nearly two inches thick and the size of a hefty textbook, the kind that takes effort to read. The title aptly indicates exactly what the book is about: though there are more than a dozen characters that flow through the story, Berlin itself is the star of the show,…