What do we call the 24-ish pages soft paper comic book these days with the explosion of graphic novels, collections of comics in print, etc.? I guess we stick with "comic book" as meaning a 24-ish page floppy book. Randy Reynaldo is sticking with the comic book format for his series about intrepid adventurer Rob Hanes.
Kazu Kibuishi once again takes us back into the world of Amulet in Book Two: The Stonekeeper's Curse which is due out from Scholastic in September 2009. The Stonekeeper's Curse is a compelling story with tons of actions and opens up in much wider ways the world of the first Amulet book. It's a thrilling tale, a fantastic piece of comics from Kibuishi and a worthy successor to the first book.
The Dragon Players, the second book in Frank Cammuso's Knights of the Lunch Table series is scheduled for release this September. I got a chance to review a preview copy this month and it's a great sequel to the first book, The Dodgeball Chronicles. The version I got to read had a great color cover and a few pages in color (but the rest in black and white). The released version will be all in color and based on the color I saw, it will certainly be another bang-up job from Scholastic's GRAPHIX imprint.
A little late but better than never? The third edition of the solid-to-really-good anthology Inbound: Comics From Boston from the Boston Comics Roundtable group is all about the romance, the love, the heartache and pain and that's worth reading about now just as much as when I first read through this book back in the Spring.
Sophia Wiedeman's The Deformitory is a small, black and white, graphic novel that adds just a touch of realism to its magical realism style. The comic was also her masters thesis for her MFA in Illustration from The School of Visual Arts. Last year, Wiedeman won a Xeric Foundation grant which she used for publication of The Deformitory. Diamond will feature it in its August Previews issue and it will be available in comic shops this fall.
It is a very interesting work, a thoughtful literary comic that I read several times, each time finding new angles to think about. It's hard not to give away the entire plot in discussing the work, but I am going to try. So a partial "spoiler" warning perhaps…
Pax Avalon: Conflict Revolution by Steven "Reece" Frisen is a mess of a book.
I've had a copy of J.T. Yost's Xeric Award winning book, Old Man Winter and Other Sordid Tales for at least a couple weeks now. And it's got some good stuff in it – easy to see why it caught the eyes of the Xeric Grant folks. The first tale, "OId Man Winter" is new (the other stories in the book have all appeared elsewhere previously) and is a well-done small story with a lot of emotional punch about an old man's small circuit in life. It has the feel of a good character-driven indie movie and I'd recommend the book and future work from Yost on the basis of it alone.
This article was originally published on webcomics.com in 2008.
The old guard of boundary-pushing, technologically-empowered, makers of web-native, interactive, experimental comics have largely moved on to other things. Sure, most of them are still involved in making comics, one way or another. But they’ve left the work of exploring just how much farther technology can take us to the next generation.
Happily, B. Shur has stepped up to continue that work, and is busily taking comics in fascinating new directions.
Waltz With Bashir (subtitled "A Lebanon War Story") by Ari Folman and David Polonsky is a graphic novel adaptation of the animated film of the same name. I have not seen the film yet (although I fully intend to – the trailer looks quite intense). Ari Folman, wrote, produced, and directed the animated documentary and wrote this graphic novel version as well. David Polonsky was the art director and chief illustrator for the movie from which the art in the comic comes from (it’s not entirely clear whether the images in the book are altered in any way from their appearance in the movie). It is Folman’s own story and it appears it is a pretty faithful attempt to chronicle his attempts to fill in his memories of his own military service in the Israel-Lebanan war.
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