Reviews

Despite the angst of the long underwear crowd bemoaning the lack of superhero comics for kids, it is such a great time in comics for kids.  The old model of kids going to the drug store for a few comics for a quarter is long gone, but it doesn't matter as libraries and book stores have a healthy stream of all ages graphic novels, not to mention that you can find great age appropriate webcomics too.  

The latest young adult graphic novel from publisher Scholastic is Ghostopolis by Doug TenNapel (creator of the videogame character Earthwork Jim).  TenNapel has created a spin on the traditional notions of purgatory, etc., by creating an afterlife way-station that functions very much like actual life with a city and different groups living together in it.  This gives TenNapel lots of room to stretch his visual imagination with skeletons, mummies, goblins and zombies populating the crowds.  The art is very sharp and TenNapel does a great job with the main characters — a boy named Garth and the "supernatural immigration officer" Frank Gallows who accidentally sends Garth on into Ghostopolis. There's also Claire Voyant, Gallows' ghost girlfriend and Garth's grandfather Cecil.  So much of the "world" that TenNapel built here is full of details and vibrant imagination that you're really sucked right into the book from the get-go.

Probably because it deals with death (and when the story opens, Garth is very sick) and some of the images could be a little intense for very young kids — this one is probably better for 10 years or up.  Just a guess really as my kids are younger than that and I'm not sure I'm going to let them read it… yet.

Continue Reading →

This spring saw the second issue of the Boston Comics Roundtable group's Outbound: The Science Fiction Comics Anthology.  The first issue came out in the fall of 2009 and it's pretty nice that the Boston group was able to get the second edition out the door in about six months.

Continue Reading →

Matt Melvin, one fourth of the team behind the webcomic Cyanide and Happiness has written a book titled .  It's full of illustration from Melvin and DJ Coffman, but basically it's a text book.  Which is kind of out the usual bailiwick of ComixTalk.  (Is there a TextTalk?)  Still we got a free copy of the book for review purposes and there is a pretty strong connection to webcomics so…

Continue Reading →

Steve Conley is one of webcomics' godfathers and while he's not unrecognized, he doesn't get nearly enough credit.  His groundbreaking comic Astounding Space Thrills existed both on and off the web and last year a collection of the offline comics was published.  You can also still read the webcomic archives online.

Continue Reading →

Raina Telgemeier has worked on Smile for a long time.  First posting parts of it online, she eventually inked a deal to publish it as a book with the Scholastic, the publisher of the Babysitters Club graphic novels Raina worked on.  As she explains in this interview, she had about half of it done online when the book deal came about:

I’d posted about 120 pages of Smile online, on a page-a-week basis, before Scholastic picked up the publishing rights. The pages were drawn over a four-year period and were written as I went along. So there were things I wanted to fix, a few continuities that needed to be straightened out…and I was suddenly working with editors! What I did was sit down and write out the entire rest of the book, and then we figured out what, if anything, from the first half needed revising.

The finished book is really good.  It should fit right in with other favorite young adult novels of the middle school set. 

Continue Reading →