All We Ever Do is Talk About Wood
By Tom Horacek
Drawn & Quarterly
As one of the medium’s longest reigning genius, it’s nearly impossible to quantify Charles Schulz’s impact on the comic strip. Nearly every strip that has been conceived subsequently owes an incalculable debt of gratitude to Schulz’s long-running strip Peanuts, and while plenty have borrowed [...]

Amulet Book One: The Stonekeeper
By Kazu Kibuishi
Scholastic/Graphix
The mountains of praise that Jeff Smith heaped upon Amulet prior to its publication on Scholastic’s Graphix imprint, have likely already served as something of a mixed blessing for author Kazu Kibuishi. To have an artist of Smith’s stature fawn over what is arguably the author’s first major work [...]

Know Your Rights
by Ed Moorman
St. Stephens, St. Stephen’s Human Rights Prog. & HAH

Something about a cartoon mouse just makes me snap to attention. Mickey Mouse, Quimby the Mouse, Speedy Gonzalez and the huge cast from Art Spiegelman’s Maus - these mere mice, on some level, stand for something bigger.
In his latest project Know [...]

Freddie & Me
By Mike Dawson
Bloombury Books
The argument can certainly be made that the majority graphic novels are labors of love. The hours and days and months and years spent alone, pouring over panel after panel, tweaking the subtlest of plot points—lording over nearly every aspect of the creative process—are enough to drive any reasonably lucid [...]

James Bond is probably the favorite and best-known  pop culture spy. The word espionage inevitably evokes images of Sean Connery, Sir Roger Moore, or Pierce Brosnan—a different James Bond for each generation—and no matter which dashing man in a suit with a fancy sports car you choose, the ever-popular spy is always just that: a [...]

That Salty Air
By Tim Sievert
Top Shelf
Alternative comics tend not to age especially well. Even the best titles, birthed in the midst of some grand cultural movement, be it the hippies, or grunge or today’s indie rock-inspired books, have the tendency to lose some of their initial currency, when steeped in you-had-to-be-there cultural references. Of course [...]

Haunted
By Phillipe Dupuy
Drawn & Quarterly
Uttered to your average American comics fan—even those well versed in the ways of the indie publishing salt mines—the name Philipe Dupuy will invoke, at best, a blank stare. It’s a shame, to be sure, but all in all, not too altogether surprising.
Like nearly every other frontier of American culture, popular [...]

Tonoharu Part One
By Lars Martinson
Pliant Press
Travelogues are supposed to be sweeping affairs—grand epics of countrysides painted with broad brush strokes, external manifestations foreshadowing the key character changes our protagonist will undergo over the course of our story. In life, however, as anyone who has spent any time traveling can tell you, such changes are not [...]

How to Understand Israel in Sixty Days or Less, Chapter 1: Orientation
By Sarah Glidden
Self-Published

We are having the same thought: this multi-part mini has an inordinately long title.
Forgive it though, because Sarah Glidden’s book How to Understand Israel in Sixty Days or Less, Chapter 1: Orientation (hereafter called Chapter 1) was perhaps the most impressive debut [...]

Sour Leaves #3
by Brendan Monroe
Self-Published
Sometimes opportunity just falls into your lap. Sometimes though, it needs you to sniff it out. This dichotomy is pretty much the theme of Brendan Monroe’s Sour Leaves #3, but it’s also a nice summary for how I came to have this book.
I went to the comic shop and at [...]