In the never ending struggle against misconceptions about those who are different from us, few people consider what preconceived notions oogly monsters have of humans. Eleanor Davis’ easy reader graphic novel “Stinky” investigates the possibilities through a mix of old-fashioned cartoon good feelings and modern gross humor that sit quite nicely next to each other.
Stinky [...]
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 [...]
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 [...]
In this primer for cartooning — a sort of how to be creative instructional text book — Lynda Barry takes a very different and very abstract approach. Instead of merely telling you how to fashion ideas and work with them, Barry takes the reader through an autobiographical journey tracing the movement of her brain and [...]
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 [...]
The 1970s was a great decade for weird science fiction — in fact, it was probably the last time that clunky pluck and scrappy strangeness combined with doom and gloom social satire in order to create some real oddities. By 1977, “Star Wars” had ushered in a more facile and flashy vision of science fiction [...]
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 [...]
In “The Ride Home,” Joey Weiser brings the fairy tale beings of a world long gone into the modern one with rollicking results.
Nodo, the van gnome (that is, a gnome who inhabits a family van, as one might have inhabited the forest or a bridge or something in legends) is happy in his vehicle, but [...]
It’s an old lesson, but one that each generation has to learn for itself in its own way — be careful what you wish for, you just might get it.
For a kid, that sounds like a promise, to be sure, but any adult with his or her fair share of realistic luck — that is, [...]
I went through that phase, the one I imagine many others do, where you begin to believe that Charles Schulz and his comic strip “Peanuts” is trite. The funny thing is that it’s not the comic strip that actually brings you to this conclusion — it’s the over exposure. You trudge through life being mentally [...]
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