“Scrambled Ink” seems like an obvious attempt to duplicate some of the beauties of the Flight series by utilizing some top animators for sequential art side projects of a charming variety and for the most part it works wonderfully. Animation and comics are finding equal ground as the elevated ghetto apart from the film world, [...]
Using the structure of a blues song as its own structure — and taking the kind of legendary subject matter of the music itself — “Bluesman” is both a a studied examination of the lives of blues performers in the 1920s and an infectious crime tale taking place within that sleazy underbelly.
Lem Taylor travels the [...]
Through books like “The Bear” and “The Snowman” Raymond Briggs has met with acclaim largely for books aimed at kids that have a dark edge to them. They stop short of actually being depressing, but the humor they disperse has a bite, peppered with an outlook that is not wholly sunny. Briggs has also branched [...]
French creator Emmanuel Guibert offers giddy science fiction tomfoolery with the fifth volume of his “Sardine in Outer Space” series, “My Cousin Manga and Other Stories.”
Guibert’s work follows. the adventures of the little witch-like girl Sardine and the cat hiding in her hat as they travel with goofball Captain Yellow Shoulder and the manic Little [...]
In the delightful “The Amazing, Remarkable Monsieur Leotard,” graphic novel treasure Eddie Campbell and his collaborator Dan Best take a look at old side shows and draw a direct line between those performers and the modern day superhero. This unexpected feat is accomplished by examining the structure of exciting narratives and sweeping adventures as experienced [...]
A nature tale about wetlands survival and the cycle of life unfolds as a suspense thriller, complete with a murder conspiracy and a plot twist involving just who really is the villain in the tale. Carol and Matt Dembicki’s “Mr. Big” delivers in its revelation of nature as an unsentimental and logical system that still [...]
Why do Americans love censorship so? We fight against fascists and dictators and communists, and yet we revere John Adams and the sedition act as a model for dealing with words and works we find uncomfortable. From Dixieland music to hip hop, popular culture has been at the forefront of the threat against American culture. [...]
Hidden away in children’s popular culture in Japan is a big-eyed cat named Dayan who inhabits a magical world not far down the street from the works of Beatrix Potter, thanks to its darkness and absurdity. The books are being translated into English for the first time, giving American kids the chance to encounter the [...]
Part science book and part career memoir, Neil Shubin’s “Your Inner Fish” takes an amiable journey through the evidence for evolution and what it really means to us now.
Shubin, a paleontologist and professor of anatomy at the University of Chicago, met renown upon the discovery of Tiktaalik, a landmark example of a transitional species. In [...]
Plunging confidently into the literary genre of small rodent adventures already populated by works such as “Redwall,” “Stuart Little” and “Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH,” “Mouse Guard: Fall 1152” by David Peterson does well in adding of the tradition.
Following the adventures of three guard mice on the trail of a traitor, Peterson’s tale [...]
Social Links