Reviews

Sidekicks by Dan Santat

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Sidekicks by Dan Santat is pretty cool. It's a story about animal sidekicks to superheroes, specifically the four pets of Captain Amazing, Metro City's aging superhero.  Each of the four pets has their own story: Fluffy the Hamster is trying to become a hero, Metal Mutt wants to spend more time with Captain Amazing, Manny the cat needs to reconcile with Captain Amazing and Shifty the Chameleon… I guess he wants to belong too.  I think Fluffy is probably the core of the book but just barely — Santat does spread the story around Captain Amazing and the sidekicks.

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Astronaut Academy: Zero Gravity by Dave Roman

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Astronaut Academy: Zero Gravity by Dave Roman

Astronaut Academy: Zero Gravity by Dave Roman is a collection of Roman's webcomic Astronaut Elementary.  It's a wonderfully produced book with a great cover featuring Roman's art set off by a metallic silver cover.  The book doesn't change the structure of the webcomic — a series of short stories, each told from the perspective of different characters at Astronaut Academy.  The stories build together to form an overarching plot for the book yet still retain their own element of closure.

Roman has a cheerfully cartoonish style of art with just a touch of manga influence.  Just the character designs in this book alone are fun but Roman crafts a number of interesting personalities to round out the cast — from the former space hero turned student Hakata Soy to introspective space walker Doug Hiro to new teacher Senor Panda (still not extinct!).  

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Show & Tell : A Collection of Comics About Teaching & Learning

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Show & Tell : A Collection of Comics About Teaching & Learning

Show & Tell : A Collection of Comics About Teaching & Learning is a collection of comics by teachers and students.  It was produced in conjunction with the first New England Comics Arts in the Classroom conference just this past March.  It's published by Ninth Arts Press.  It features some familiar names from webcomics including Alexander Danner, David Malki!, Box Brown, Jason Viola, and Kevin Moore.  It also features work from a lot of teachers and even some students.

There are twenty short stories set in and around the classroom, most a small slice-of-life, although some are simply poking fun at educational topics.  It's a great theme and really neat to see a book explore these topics.  The comics themselves are a mixed bag — some very solid work intermixed with some that felt out of sorts to me.  Overall though it's a good package of comics clocking in at 96 pages long.

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Bone: Quest for the Spark by Tom Sniegoski (Illustrations by Jeff Smith)

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I guess I've reviewed my share of Bone books now. After releasing just about every bit of Bone comics material by the end of last year, Scholastic is now publishing a text novel series written by Tom Sniegoski with illustration from creator Jeff Smith. Sniegoski wrote some of the comics in last year's collection, Bone: Tall Tales so he's not a newcomer to this world. Still it's a leap from collaborating with the creator of a comic on a comic to taking on writing Bone: Quest for the Spark – a text novel (the first in a planned trilogy) based in the Bone universe.

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Mini Mini-review: Latvia Represent!

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I had a crush on a Latvian-American girl in college. She preferred the stoner surfer guy down the hall. That's the extent of my knowledge of the Baltic country. Earlier this year I received four mini-comics from Latvian publisher kuš! komiksi.  Kuš!" (pronounced kush!) puts out the only comics magazine in the Baltics. The aim of "kuš!" is to popularize comics in a country where they claim comics are practically non-existant. That's a worthy goal indeed.

O Latvia!

The four mini-comics I received include The Story of Gardens, Weeding, Being, and Bearslayer Returns.

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Hold On… It’s The Return of Zombre

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Zombre!!!

Ansis Purins' Zombre #2 The Magic Forest dropped out of nowhere on me last week.  I wasn't familiar with Purins' work beforehand and therefore missed Zombre #1.  Purins won a Xeric grant earlier this year for this project so it's great to see the finished comic out in the wild.  It's a really well done production clocking in at 48 pages and you can get it at his website.

Purins' pitch for the comic is “It’s Harry Potter meets Yogi Bear meets Night Of The Living Dead!”  I don't know about that, but there is something oddly charming about this very low key, sweet tale of a magical (in a sort-of-Saturday morning cartoon kind of way) forest.  Zombre is, well a zombie, but a friendly one who has apparently kicked the brains habit.  It's a reinvention of zombie as nonthreatening and cuddly forest creature.

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