Category: Comics
-
A positive view from the doldrums
I came across this book on the website of Lib Ed, formerly the Libertarian Teachers Association. It is one of their own publications, written by an author who had also written on topics more obviously relevant to their core mission. Given my interest in all things comics, and 2000AD in…
-
Thoughtful speculation
This is a small-format, short, perfectly-formed science-fiction story. Its basic premise would probably be quite implausible technically, if it was elucidated in sufficient detail to get a handle on it, but the way in which its implications are explored is absolutely exemplary as speculative fiction. A spacecraft propulsion technology uses…
-
Stoke-on-huh?
Sam Wade’s Stoke (published by the fabulous ShortBox) is set, presumably, in Stoke. Given that the place-name element ‘stoke’ means (roughly) ‘place’, there are quite a lot of those in England. With its ethnic diversity, mattress store and bare-knuckle kick-boxing, my guess was that it’s probably not the true-blue, rural…
-
Thrills and white poppies
It’s subtly positioned and easy to miss, but beneath the volume number, and below Rebellion’s logo on the spine, on each volume of this beautifully re-issued Charley’s War omnibus, is a white poppy. Nobody reading this could possibly miss Pat Mills and Joe Colquhoun’s intentions, but the old Titan Books…
-
Realistically surreal
Is the reality we construct for ourselves from our sensory inputs an orderly one in which every phenomenon is readily explicable, and chains of causation are visible, like the universe described by science? Or is it a confusing one in which things happen for mysterious reasons, and odd symbolic resonances…
-
Unofficial beauty
Pingu, a TV series I enjoyed entirely as an adult, has a special place in my heart similar to that reserved for the cultural artifacts of my childhood. For one thing it was on TV when the spawn was small; for another it has a brilliantly infectious, funky theme tune…
-
Only connect…
This short comic by Sophia Foster-Dimino is about relationships. ‘Relationships’ is such a debased and overused word that it has ceased to mean anything at all, except perhaps ‘what couples do other than sex’, so I need to clarify that. Did You See Me? is about network connections between subjects,…
-
Witness borne
It’s hard to know what to do about something like the Armistice centenary; at a hundred years it’s getting quite hard to bridge the historical distance, although as someone in the region of fifty I certainly knew a few people who lived through the First World War. Reading these beautifully…
-
Decoratively knowable
Monstress is really getting cracking now. Volume Three: Haven is clearly still well within the originary story arc, without any of the far-fetched desperation typical of series that have been running too long. Of course much of Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda’s opus is in many ways extremely far-fetched, but…
-
Angry apotheosis
I read bits and pieces of Charley’s War as a kid, in copies of Battle picked up from jumble sales and charity shops, but I was never a big fan of war comics, so I didn’t exactly follow it. The episodes I did see made a big impression on me…
-
Beaten, stabbed, tossed into traffic and hospitalised
A review of a comic like Kick-Ass really doesn’t mean much unless it’s written by someone who closely follows the commercial comics which are its creative context. It is itself a commercial comic, but in more or less exactly the same way that Quentin Tarantino makes films about cinema, it…
-
A gorgeous, rip-roaring feminist yarn
I started reading Monstress for a bit of relief in the midst of researching my masters dissertation – it was vaguely relevant, as I was looking into teratology (the study of monsters) as it relates to the idea of alterity and to fantasy fiction, but mainly it was an easy-to-read…
-
Short slick shred
I didn’t know much about Frank Quitely until I went to an exhibition of his work in Glasgow last summer. Given that he’s an artist who works in the top tier of Anglo-American commercial comics this is not surprising: I pay very little attention to the sort of superhero rags…
-
Heroically strange
And so The Prophet concludes. What started as the ostensible re-boot of a retired and obscure superhero can take its place on the library shelves as one of the most extraordinarily inventive science-fiction comics in the English-language tradition, and hopefully as an enduring element of the canon that is being…
Oliver Arditi 