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Paper Girls: Book One
The four plucky, twelve-year-old heroines of Paper Girls have all taken what is traditionally thought of as a boys’ job of delivering newspapers by bicycle in 1988 suburban Ohio. On the morning after...
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Days of Hate #1
“Remember when we all hated on 2016 online?”, this comic begins. “Called it a trash fire? And then on 2017? 2018, the elections? People don’t even hate on 2022. We’re catatonic.” So what do we know?...
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Spy Seal: The Corten-Steel Phoenix
I will be completely honest, I did not intend to like Spy Seal: The Corten-Steel Phoenix! That the book won me over is a testament to the skill of its creator. Why didn’t I think I was going to like...
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“I Watch For Patterns”: An Interview with Aleš Kot
Aleš Kot writes and creates stories for comics, television, video games and film. Their new work, Days of Hate, is currently being serialized by Image Comics. Kot and the Journal spoke via email over...
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“I’m Very Low-Key About It”: Katie Skelly And Alex de Campi
I met writer Alex de Campi two years ago, after becoming Twitter friends and chatting film. de Campi is maybe the most focused person in comics I know, and I find her drive infectious: since meeting...
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VS #1
VS is the new Image series by Esad Ribic, Nic Klein, and Ivan Brandon. It takes place in the blurred borders between a first-person shooter and a reality show about war. The first issue follows...
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Excerpt: Bloodstrike Brutalists
Bloodstrike: Brutalists - the project I've been feverishly working on for a while - has just been officially announced! I've been given free rein by Rob Liefeld to write/draw/letter/color my take on...
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Ass Kicked
Todd McFarlane was fantastically successful for a brief span of the 1990s, successful enough that he was able to parlay a brief dalliance with the zeitgeist into a lifetime’s worth of cred in a very...
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Twisted Romance #1
Twisted Romance is a new four-issue anthology series from Image, with issues coming out every week this past February. Each issue consists of a main comics story that pairs writer Alex de Campi with a...
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Oblivion Song #1
A cataclysm has already taken place. Presumably hundreds of people are dead, missing, or being used for nefarious purposes. But there’s one man… a loner who isn’t duped. An outsider who’s been told by...
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The Beef #1
The Beef goes into very graphic detail about how cows are killed in slaughterhouses. You see the machine that puts the bolt in the cow’s brain. You see the animals being dismembered. Fun stuff. That...
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Prism Stalker
Sloane Leong’s Prism Stalker, a new series from Image, is a lush, psychedelic, and ambitious series that grapples with colonialism, complicity with oppression, and the borders of the self without ever...
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Bingo Love
In an era when representation has become an almost obligatory subject in any discussion about any art form, one objection that gets raised when critics weigh in on a story that isn’t written by or...
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The Pervert
The Pervert, written by Michelle Perez and illustrated by Remy Boydell, is that big, difficult, trans, queer-as-shit, pull-no-punches sad fucking comic that I’ve been waiting for. And now it’s here,...
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Street Angel Goes to Juvie
Before I started the latest entry in Jim Rugg's Street Angel saga, it flashed on my just how long the book has been around in some form or another. Rare indeed is the still-relevant creator that can...
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Death or Glory #1
The latest Rick Remender comic-book series, Death or Glory, makes me want to throw in the towel before I’m done reading page one. Full disclosure: I translated the first two volumes of Deadly Class, a...
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Son of Hitler
"Just remember this," a friend told me a few years back when I told him I was thinking of making a World War II comic. "The Nazis won." It's almost impossible to take intellectual provocations in good...
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“Expectations Are Right Next Door to Demands”: A David Brothers Profile
Printouts obscure David Brothers’ desk. They signal a full slate of projects. A branded company hoodie says something about belonging. “I want to see where it takes me,” he says. “I want to see how...
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Perdy
I was surprised at first to learn that Image Comics was getting into the Eurocomics translation business, but upon further reflection it seems a logical enough endpoint to a line drawn more or less...
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Beowulf
Santiago García and David Rubin’s graphic novel is not the first comic adaptation of the Old English poem Beowulf, nor will it likely be the last. This latest iteration is, however, the most...
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“I’m Well Past the Point Where I Need Comics to Love Me Back”: An Interview...
Joe Casey has spent his decades long career as a writer for comics carving an imaginative space for himself inside of corporate work — he’s done extended runs on X-Men, Superman, and WildC.A.T.s, as...
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Infidel
The death toll is high and the racial slurs fly in Infidel, Pornsak Pichetshote and Aaron Campbell’s horror series about a murderous presence that seems to feed on hatred. But to paraphrase one of...
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My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies
Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips have been working together for a while, since Phillips inked part of Brubaker’s Scene of the Crime at Vertigo. The first time they made waves together was Wildstorm’s...
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Street Angel Vs Ninjatech
Since reviving Street Angel in 2017, Jim Rugg and Brian Maruca have used the series of one-offs to mess around with storytelling on every level, frequently switching styles and genres, chasing ideas...
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Bloodstrike: Brutalists
I hesitated when offered the chance to review Michel Fiffe’s Bloodstrike: Brutalists. For one, I worried my lack of familiarity with the finer points of the original Bloodstrike’s continuity left me...
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Proxima Centauri, Vol 1
Farel Dalrymple occupies a curious place in contemporary comics. Anyone who’s heard of him tends to praise his work quite lavishly, and with good reason; but he’s neither so decorated nor so ubiquitous...
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Little Bird
There's plenty to like about this new dystopian-future monthly from Image. Pick up a copy and it's easy to figure out where to start: artist Ian Bertram, whom I last encountered as a highly impressive...
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Ascender #1
Ascender is the not-so-cleverly-titled sequel to Descender, Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen’s critically-acclaimed, Eisner winning series. Taking place ten years after the “rip-roaring and heart-felt...
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Little Girls
So let’s talk about negative space. A very important principle throughout the fields of visual art and design, and no less important in comics where negative space often fulfills the very necessary...
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Cemetery Beach
When you read tweets about “exposition!” in reference to some tv show or movie that’s enormously popular and that everyone on the planet feels the need to weigh in on… well, there’s a reason that those...
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Thumbs #1
The opening issue of the five-issue miniseries Thumbs, by Sean Lewis and artist Hayden Sherman, mainly focuses on a sister taking her wounded brother to the hospital for medical care. The press release...
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Dry County
Rich Tommaso’s Dry County has a regular-guy protagonist, Lou Rossi, who plays at being a detective. It’s hard to blame him for this bit of make-believe after he stumbles into what anybody would...
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Sea of Stars #1
For the most part, Jason Aaron’s creative approach has been to take whatever subject matter that’s presented to him either by a genre or assignment and take it squarely into his aesthetic. His Ghost...
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Shut Up ‘n Play Yer Guitar
Wait . . . one more for the road? OK. You talked me into it. Now, in exchange for your patience and kind forbearance I will finish this essay with my absolute best convention story. Trust me. It’s from...
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Bad Weekend
There’s a certain kind of inside baseball type of writing that has an indefinable quality that determines whether it’s good or bad. Like “movies about movies” describes all sorts of things, but movies...
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Copra #1
Accessibility is overrated! So is context. When I was myself a wee sprat just coming up in the world, most of the comics for sale at the local 7/11 seemed to operate according to the guiding principle...
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“It’s Not A Slam-Bang-Action-So-Quiet”: An Interview with Cliff Chiang and...
After 30 issues of time-traveling action, 2019 saw the conclusion of Cliff Chiang & Brian K. Vaughan's Paper Girls series. I spoke with them a few days before the final issue arrived in stores,...
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Criminal #11
Maybe some kind of line graph would represent this best? The older I get, the happier I am that stuff like this exists, while the less happy I am to actually read it. Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips are...
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Let’s Get Physical: An Interview With Elsa Charretier
It's easy to take the internet for granted these days. But then, completely by chance, you’ll come across something wonderful, as when a retweet showed me Elsa Charretier’s Batgirl 66 sketch, causing...
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Fire Power: Prelude
Let me begin by saying that I have a great deal of respect for Robert Kirkman. His qualifications at this late date go without saying. Whether or not you’ve ever been a fan of The Walking Dead in any...
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Hedra
Let’s talk about space. Not outer space, or rather, not directly. I’m talking more about the space on the page. You know, the area on which an artist draws. Every inch of the paper is empty space when...
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Pulp
Pulp, the latest collaboration between Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips (with coloring by Jacob Phillips, who only gets better with each project), is a rather typical work for the pair. Despite the...
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First Knife
It is the year 3241 and things kind of suck. There was a Great Disaster, see, maybe you’ve heard about it, it’s called the Anthropocene. Some other stuff happened too, between then and now, though the...
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“It Is Rare For Them Not To All Run Together In My Mind, Assuming I Recall...
Stuart Immonen has been making comics for more than three decades and in that time he’s become not just one of the great superhero artists, not just one of the great science fiction comics artists, but...
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Big Girls # 1
Big Girls revisits familiar ideas and tropes in our collective and popular imagination but repackages them in order to center women as simultaneously larger than life characters and the saviors of our...
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The Goddamned: The Virgin Brides
In a recent issue of Jason Aaron and R. M. Guéra’s series of twice-told biblical tales, The Goddamned: The Virgin Brides #3, Aaron doesn’t give a “fuck,” he gives eighteen, exactly, along with four...
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Planet Paradise
This one starts with a billboard hung above a dense set of skyscrapers and rush hour commute, advertising the conceptual namesake of the book, and then it goes on and on, depicting a hostile world of...
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The Department of Truth
The Department of Truth volume 1 will leave you feeling disoriented, confused, and incredulous, but is that the point? The creative team consisting of writer James Tynion IV, artist Martin Simmonds,...
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The Good Asian
Ah, representation - how unproblematic! If you’ve never had the joy of seeing your marginalized community constantly misrepresented in the media and throughout pop culture, well, let me tell you, it’s...
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Blue In Green
Ram V and Anand RK’s second original graphic novel together, last year’s Blue In Green, newly in its second printing, with an Eisner win for the art team, uses jazz and death as a counterpoint to their...
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