Comic books are an excellent medium for non-fiction. This is not a novel insight—during the Second World War instruction manuals … More
Category: Comics
Clever joy
Nuria Martinez cultivates a self-consciously naïve cartooning style, but her sophistication as an illustrator, and her narrative facility as a … More
Built in the telling
A ‘silent’ comic, which is to say a wordless comic, relies on the grammar of sequential art. This is a … More
A museum of Tom Kaczynski
Behind their classically laid-out, commercially styled covers (complete with old-school colophons to tickle the collector’s fancy), the first two…
The city is not a city
A city is a complex organism. An ‘urbanist’ is a kind of sociologist, which suggests that to those who make … More
Perfectly lonely
This spectacular and lavish volume from Chris Ware is the second of his beautiful large books that I’ve read. Rusty … More
Elegant dismemberment
Zainab Akhtar at ShortBox is really the acme of independent comics editors: she just gets it. Everything she puts out … More
Eyes the same size as her stomach
Luchie (as illustrator and cartoonist Lucie Bryon likes to call herself) was apparently blessed with extremely large eyes as a … More
A book to sort you out apiece
A viral disease is sweeping the world, killing indiscriminately. Well, nearly. Its fatal impact is concentrated in a particular minority, … More
Abstract affective allegory
Like all the books published by ShortBox, Jonathan Djob Nkondo’s After Laughter is a beautiful object, printed to a high … More
Habitable insouciance
I haven’t seen a great deal of James Stokoe’s work, but what I have seen has been right up my … More
Good hair days
I keep threatening to cut my hair short. Spouse forbids it. Sometimes though, it feels like such a hassle wearing … More
No fable
Once you’ve made the hole the central metaphor of a lengthy work of fiction, you’re going to have to resign … More
Animal friends
Putting animal heads on the characters in cartoons is a widespread and long-established device—as I very recently noted with respect … More