Larry Hosken: New: Tag: comic

Comic ^W Game Report: The Beyond

I enjoyed the puzzle-y game-y comic book The Beyond, by Jason Shiga, though I played it wrong. Like his previous work Leviathan, The Beyond is a choose-your-own-adventure book, but comics instead of plain ol' text. This game's gimmick: you encounter some special items, each of those special items has a number. Sometimes when the instructions tell you which page to turn to, you use an item and add its number, so the item affects what happens next in the plot. It's a neat gimmick.

I played it wrong. I followed instructions: in the game, I found an item. Later on, I used the item and that affected what happened next in the plot, neat. But I failed to notice that in the comic, my character had left that item behind. Later on, I encountered other special-number items, and then a situation where I could use them. Not realizing that my character had left the first special-number item behind, I "used" it, again adding its number to decide which page to turn to—and jumped to a page in the book that the author didn't expect. So I was looking at a bit of comic with an abrupt transition. But I knew that Jason Shiga is a tricky writer, and I can be pretty tricky myself, so I "cleverly" constructed a probable plotline in my head, bridged the strange transition from my old situation to my new situation, figured that the author had just elided some parts and expected me to figure out what had happened. Then I encountered a puzzle where I was supposed to use my knowledge of the number that had brought me to this point…but of course I had used the wrong number. So when I applied my "knowledge," things got weirder and I figured out that I should start over. And when I played again, I finally noticed how the book was trying to call my attention to that first item getting left behind. Ahem. Anyhow. I eventually finished the comic-game legit.

I notice that the computer game version of this comic-game-thingy is coming out in a few days. Maybe it will have an "inventory" system that keeps track of which items you carry with you (or leave behind); maybe it won't, though. I dunno. Anyhow, if you like books, get the book. If you like computer games, get the game. It's tricky, and if you're too-clever-by-half, you can make it even trickier.

cover art for the comic, which features our protagonist carrying a harpoon against a background that suggests comic panels

Spoiler Warning: This post spoils a twist in "Not Your Typical Reincarnation Story."

I read a review of the comic "Not Your Typical Reincarnation Story." The comic falls in the isekai genre: the protagonist dies and is reincarnated as a character in a fantasy story. As in many isekai stories, the protagonist finds herself in the role of the fantasy story's doomed villain, but seeks to change the story to escape her fate. Unlike typical isekai stories, this comic's protagonist finds out that she's the 13th person to be thusly doomed.

As I said, it's an isekai story.

As someone who's had to identify the objects of phobias in a few puzzles over the years, I of course know that the ancient Greek word for 13 is triskaideka (τρεισκαίδεκα).

This leads us to the discovery of a new sub-genre, trisekaideka, a portmanteau packing "isekai" into "triskaideka". Some would say it's silly to define a sub-genre that contains only one work, but this word is too good to pass up (albeit difficult to pronounce).

Some Snoopy in the Sunset district from my last couple of exercise walks: A little free library just south of Moraga & 25th Ave; and Some sidewalk art at Judah and 20th Ave. ...

Leviathan by Jason Shiga I enjoyed the puzzle book Leviathan by Jason Shiga. It's a sort of choose-your-own-adventure comic book. (Shiga's made other such CYOA comics before, you might remember Meanwhile… from some years bac...

Marvel Comics should rename the villain Morlun to "Spider-Mans Georg." (This statement isn't really "on-brand" for me, not my usual topics. Sorry, regular readers! But it needed to be said and nobod...

Link: Free Burger Force Some time back, I recommended a comic book called Burger Force with the caveat that it was tricky to acquire, being published in the far-off land of Australia. Thanks to the power of the internet and...

Comic Report: The Secret to Superhuman Strength It's a graphic novel memoir by Alison Bechdel, who you might remember from Fun Home. It's about her attempt to keep mens sana in corpore sano (sound body, sound mind). She talks about her experiences...

Comic Report: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist This comic has been racking up awards lately, but it's good nevertheless. It's little autobiographic bits from a cartoonist, but it's funny nevertheless. (It's by Adrian Tomine, so you might worry it...

Comic Report: The Wizerd! and the Potion of Dreams This goofy comic takes place in a Dungeons-&-Dragons-style universe, but doesn't get too grim. E.g., the authoritarian ruler keeps all the townsfolk locked up (veering towards grim…) until...

Pull List In these unprecedentedly contagious times, I must not shop inside the comic book store. Instead, I can order ahead so the excellent proprietor can hand comics to me at the front door. This nudged me ...

Comic Report: Form of a Question It's an autobiographical graphic novel structured around the author's run on Jeopardy!. In the world of trivia, there are clear answers, but not so much in the real world. I'm guessing not so many fo...

Comic Report: Berlin Do you remember way back 20 years ago when you were reading comics and there was this lovely stark black-and-white comic "Berlin" by Jason Lutes? About Berlin in the Weimar republic? Street fights be...

I went to see the Rube Goldberg exhibit at San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum—or rather, I went to see "Contraption," an exhibit accompanying the Rube Goldberg exhibit. There was a Rube...

Oh hey, there's a new Cometbus out, snap it up. I'm about ten pages into it. So far, it's interviews with NYC cartoonists. The questions aren't about who would win in a fight between Thor and Superma...

"Pledging on Kickstarter is buying my future self a surprise gift." –Joshua Little This Baggywrinkles comic book by Lucy Bellwood was a pretty awesome surprise. Sometimes I think the projec...

Comic Report: The Twilight Children I read this The Twilight Children collection that just came out, filled in the gaps for the issues I'd missed. It looked good. Rest in peace, Darwyn Cooke. ...

Comic Report: Rebels Happy Free Comic Book Day! If you want a comic book that's Free as in America (versus Free as in Beer), you can purchase the newly-collected Rebels. It's tales if the American Revolution. Mostly from...

Comic Report: Patience It's a new Dan Clowes comic. If you're already a Dan Clowes fan, that's probably enough to know. I don't want to write about the story because: spoilers. But there are strange new worlds and halluci...

Comic Report: The Imitation Game It's a comic biography of computing pioneer/codebreaker Alan Turing. It's pretty good as you'd expect since it's written by Jim Ottaviani, who's done other excellent science-y biography comics. ...

Comic Report: The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye This comic is funny. I say that right away because when I tell you the premise, you'll be tempted to click away thinking "oh that is some fauxlitical artsy-fartsy bullroar to be purchased by earnest ...

No Exit "No Exit: Play by Sartre where he's forced to play a really boring Room Escape game." –Phonogram: The Immaterial Girl Hell is other peop...

Happy Free Comic Book Day! If you find yourself making an annual trek to your local comic book store and wonder "Should I buy something while I'm there? What comics has Larry been liking lately? Mayb...

Another Silicon Valley Comic Today I picked up a physical copy of Terms of Service, a non-fiction comic about how we decide to expose our private information to each other and/or to conglomerates. But I could have read it online...

Which Comics for the Silicon Valley Comic Con? Folks are organizing a Silicon Valley Comic Con. The idea is: there are plenty of nerds around here, enough for a con. Then again, there are already some bay area cons. But what if the Silicon Valley...

Sometimes, New Comic Day means buying new comics. And sometimes it means Erik Larsen is hanging out at Isotope showing some so-new-it's-not-yet-for-sale big Savage Dragon art. ...

"I'll keep this simple. One of you is a real human cop—and one of you is a robot. Only we don't know which is which!" ...

Comic Report: Clockwork Game This graphic novel (uhm, I mean, graphic documentary, I guess? this comic) tells the story of the mechanical Turk, the chess-playing automaton historied in Standage's The Turk. Since much of the stor...

It's Afternoon at Isotope a.k.a., one GC member's write-up about about #terngame 2013. I don't know how coherent it is, but by golly if I don't write it down now, I bet that this week's going to expu...

Comic Report: Apocalypse Nerd Since Valve is in the news with lots of news about virtual reality, you might think if I was going to review a Peter Bagge comic, it would be Reset. But only if you didn't know how far behind my book...

Comic Report: Papercutter 15 I was up in Portland for the WarTron Game, but I got into town a couple of days early to visit with relatives and ask them to think of locations that might be used in the WarTron game. I was especial...

Comic Report: The New York Four It's a soap opera of young lady university students making their way in NYC. One of the protagonists prefers to interact with the world through her phone instead of face-to-face. People give her a ha...

Comic Report: Madwoman of the Sacred Heart The plot was not so interesting but the art was awesome. Rest in peace, Mœbius. ...

Comic Report: Cages This comic is famous and arty and not my thing. The characters are artistic types; they feel trapped, they must make art to be free... Wow, deep themes. I definitely felt like a philistine for not en...

Comics Report: Torso, Goldfish It was a good holiday season. My cousin-once-removed Paul was in town, and once again wanted a treasure-hunt game. And once again, he wanted to be on Game Control, not just playing. So he and his dad...

Comic Report: Incognito: Bad Influences Incognito was a great comic book story of a supervillain who becomes an undercover agent infiltrating a super-crime syndicate In this sequel, he infiltrates another crime syndicate. You think it mi...

Book Report: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1969 Half the fun of the League of Extraordinary Gentlement comics is spotting the references. Just about everyone in these comics is a character from some other work of fiction. Apparently, I don't know ...

Comic Report: Criminal: The Last of the Innocent It's another collection of the noir-ish comic Criminal. The premise of this one is kind of twisted. What happens when the kids from Archie grow up and get tangled in a web of deceit and murder? Since...

Comic Report: A Very Sammy Day This comic's protagonist is the world's unluckiest thief. This means a plot that's driven by coincidences. I guess that could be interesting... but here, it just seems like a series of coincidences. ...

Book Report: A Gentleman's Game I've been reading a bunch of Greg Rucka comics lately and wondering whatever happened to his Queen and Country comics. Those were great grim spy stories, with Steve Rolston art. But they'd turned int...

Comic Report: The Tell This comic book might be called "The Tell" or it might be called "The Inventor's Story", part of something called "Sunless Circus Mysteries". It's kind of hard to tell what it's called, which might ...

Comic Report: Burger Force The premise doesn't sound promising, but oh man did I like Burger Force. Hapless youth joins an elite spy network with groovy 70s design that operates out of a secret base underneath a fast food rest...

Comic Report: Gotham Central I'm not a big Batman fan, but this isn't exactly a Batman comic. It's a crime comic, a police procedural. It's set in Gotham City, and the cops brush up against superheroes, supervillains, ... T...

Comic Report: Spacetrash It's a mini-comic! It's like two-mini comics in one. There's a silly parallel-universe-traveling story. Then, if you flip the book over, there's "Tomahawk City", little stories from a fictional NYC n...

Comic Report: Evolution: the Story of Life on Earth This is a comic about evolution: there's a framing story in which aliens talk about evolution on earth. I know some evolution. Some stuff I learned has since been shown wrong. I don't know all there ...

Comic Report: Empire State Not every Jason Shiga book is a choose-your-own-adventure nerdfest. "Empire State" is a book straight-up about human relationships (albeit with some nerd-ish characters). Special bonus cross-country ...

Comic Report: "Dark Horse Presents", "Noir" Dark Horse Presents, a periodic comic anthology, re-arose a few months back. It's good stuff. It was good before, and it's good now. There's a variety, so it's not all good. You and I probably wouldn...

Comic Report: All Nighter Calm down, puzzle freaks. This isn't about The Great All-nighter from Midnight Madness. But comic book fans of a certain age might want to know: Remember that comic "Private Beach: Fun and Perils in ...

Comic Report: Syncopated #3 It's an anthology of comics. Some are about New York City; some are about history; some are about New York City history. Special bonus: an interesting article about heading out to Staten Island to lo...

Comic Report: Three #1 Three #1 is a comic anthology featuring three LGBT comic artists telling LGBT stories, so you'd think it would be some boring thing that you'd read to one-up your sweater-wearing NPR-listening f...

Comic Report: Gravel (vol 1) It's a comic about the UK class system and magic and maybe a couple of other things I don't care about. A lower-class magician kills a bunch of upper-class magicians. Good for him, but I'd probably f...

Comic Report: The Martian Confederacy (vols 1-2) It's a comic book. It's science fiction. But the characters are interesting. Why would the author of a science fiction comic book bother to come up with interesting characters? Doesn't he know his ta...

Comic Report: Planetary It's superheroes, so you think I wouldn't be interested. But the emphasis is on information-gathering, not just beating each other up. If there's some bad guy who seems invulnerable, most comic books...

Comic Report: Stumptown It's a pretty good detective story, set in Portland OR. Kinda noir except it also has flannel and forest. ...

Comic Report: The Boys #53 The Boys is a brutal comic, and what could be more brutal than war? Issue 54 wraps up Mallory's WWII flashback. A group of superheroes shows up at a USA army base. In typical superhero manner, they r...

Comic Report: Parker, the Hunted; Parker: The Outfit These Parker comics are retro noir crime fiction. The retro's all over the art. It looks like graphics from ads from the early 60s. The violence and the menace of violence is all over the place. ...

Comic Report: The Fixer New York City was a lot of fun! It's great to be back home, though. I still need to re-adjust, though. Like, in New York, it's crowded, so the rules are different. People will just stop walking in th...

Comic Report: Hutch Owen: Unmarketable! A few stories in this collection... One good story, one story that kind of wandered around and didn't make much sense with ghosts, some sketchy bits, and some shorts. If you read just one Hutch Owen...

Comic Report: Scenes from an Impending Marriage I used to shop for comics at Comic Relief in Berkeley, CA. So did Adrian Tomine. Then he moved to—to Brooklyn, I think. I guess he buys comics somewhere else now. (Nowadays, I mostly shop at Is...

Comic Report: Castle Waiting vol II Oh man, if you think Castle Waiting is a slow comic in which nothing ever happens, this book sure won't change your mind. But if you're OK with stuff not-happening as long as it not-happens in an int...

Comic Report: Spiral-Bound Speaking of "spiral bound," a while back I saw illustrator/comic book artist Aaron Ranier talk. A couple of weeks later, I was in the Giant Robot store, which didn't have the 'zine I was looking for,...

Escapist Comics: as threatened, the Dark Carnival folks opened up a comic book store in Berkeley, bootstrapping it with the comics "left over" from Comic Relief. It's on Claremont Ave, out next to Da...

Wonderella reminds us that following trails of puzzles is dumb. ...

Puzzle Hunts are Everywhere, even the Art World There's this comic book artist, Jason Shiga. He makes these comic books that are puzzles; choose-your-own-adventure books that play with the flow of pages and frames within a comic book. You might ...

Comic Report: City of Spies My parents did pretty well playing the 2-Tone Game. Like, I don't think that the Burninators team needs to worry any time soon. But my parents did pretty well. And as they were walking from the &l...

Comic Report: Wilson! Some of my readers are gentlemen of a certain age and sophistication. To these, it is enough to say: There is a new Daniel Clowes comic book out, and it's pretty good. If you don't know about Danie...

Comic Report: Meanwhile... The local members of the National Puzzler's League had a party last weekend, their Equinox party. I didn't go—I'm still not quite enough of a puzzle enthusiast to want to join the NPL. But I wa...

Comic Report: Trotsky It's the morning after the GC Summit, and I'm still feeling inspired. One of the things I'm inspired to do is download a file with all of the Wikipedia article titles. That would sure be handy for ...

Comic Report: Persepolis An autobio comic about growing up in Iran. First under the corrupt Shah. Then under the Fundies. Getting away to Europe without parents, without much of a support system... You get the idea that ...

Comic Report: T-Minus Radven livetwittered a shuttle launch. The excitement shone through, even at less than 140 characters per. Hey, speaking of NASA, this must be a book report for T-Minus. This is a comic book about...

Book Report: Asterios Polyp It's a comic book about a stick-in-the-mud architect who gets out of Manhattan, out to the sticks, and there learns to appreciate other points of view. It's pretty artsy. It's pretty, it's artsy. ...

Comic Report: Suspended in Language Last night I had dinner with a few co-workers and conversation of course turned to what Albert Einstein would do if we extended his lifespan 1000 years. Would he ever get used to quantum physics? F...

Comic Report: Girl Genius Collection #8 (Agatha Heterodyne and the Chapel of Bones) | Act-i-Vate Primer It seems kind of silly to post an online review a comic book when folks can go read the comic online and decide for themselves. And yet, here we are: Girl Genius. Girl Genius is a darned fun story ...

Comic Report: The Question: The Five Books of Blood I picked up this comic book collection "The Five Books of Blood" because it was written by Greg Rucka, who has written some good stuff. So, he's written some good stuff. But he also wrote "The Five...

Comic Report: Ex Machina (the first several collections) When I first heard about the comic book "Ex Machina", I stopped paying attention too soon. I heard that the protagonist is a superhero who can talk to machines. And those do what he says instead of...

Book Report: Sleeper (Season One) Happy comic-con season! I guess I'll post a comic book report about Sleeper. This comic book is a combination of an undercover cop story with superheroes. Our hero has gone undercover in a superpo...

Book Report: Incognegro My domain, lahosken.san-francisco.ca.us, was out of commission for a few days. Sorry about the missing emails. Anyhow, the domain is back now. That calls for a celebration. Or a comic book report ...

Book Report: Super Spy It is a comic book, a collection of little spy stories. I bought it because it was an Amazon recommendation (albeit a tepid Amazon recommendation) and it had Morse Code on the cover. I didn't like ...

Book Report: The Complete Annotated Oz Squad, Volume One There's this comic book called Oz Squad. It's old. I read it long ago. At one point in the comic, one of the characters, Scarecrow, writes some graffiti: ALL ART MUST PERISH! That phrase stuck ...

Book Report: Casanova book one: Luxuria This comic book made no sense. It feels kinda plot-holish. You find out that the main character can make guns fall apart through mysteeeeerious powers, but earlier he didn't seem to use this power ...

Book Report: Station This comic book is a murder mystery set on the International Space Station. It was OK. Maybe if I were more of a space-nerd, I would have liked how the story brought in well-researched bits of ISS l...

Link: Free Andi Watson Comic You don't have to blog about the things you're thinking about. Sometimes the things you're thinking about... don't bear blogging. Sometimes you can use blogging as an excuse to think about somethin...

Book Report: Too Cool To Be Forgotten In this comic book, our hero goes under hypnosis and dreams he's back in high school. He gets a chance to get things right. It's nice enough.Labels: comic, drama, when's nap time?...

Book Report: Nothing Nice to Say Work is busy. BANG 19 is less busy, but fills up the waking hours that are not devoted to work. Lately, most of my reading has taken place only because bus breakdowns have prevented me from working. ...

Book Report: The Lindbergh Child It's rough being famous. You just want to go about your life, but there are jerks out there watching you. It's creepy. And some of those jerks do worse than just watch. The comic book The Lindber...

Book Report: Myth Adventures Myth Adventures is a comic book based on the swords-and-sorcery comedy Another Fine Myth. It's a few years old, but got reprinted recently. I picked up a copy a few weeks ago at Comic Relief. You ...

Book Report: League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier According to one election quiz, I should vote for John Edwards or Ron Paul. According to two election quizzes, I should vote for Bill Richardson. According to yet another, I should vote for Kucinich...

Book Report: Chiaroscuro: Patchwork Book #1 It's a graphic novel about a whiny artist who hangs out in cafes and goes to parties. Occasionally, something strange happens. It's pretty; some of the banter is witty; I'm glad I read it. The plo...

Book Report: Goodnight, Irene My internet service provider sent me an interesting email--in a few weeks, they will stop offering dialup service. Yes, my main computer is still on dialup. Stop laughing. It has an ethernet port,...

Book Report: Giant Robot #50 The 50th issue of Giant Robot magazine is pretty wonderful. I especially liked the journalistic integrity of this interview with Jason Shiga about his comic book Bookhunter, which you may recall is ...

Book Report: Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser Shinteki Decathlon 3 was awesome. Since then, I have had approximate 0.0 hours of unstructured awake time. Thus, not so much blogging. But I will paraphrase a conversation I was in a while ba...

Book Report: Phonogram I canceled out of the stuff I'd planned to do today. Instead, I am sitting, napping, eating. I wore myself out last week. First, getting over a cold. Then, having just gotten over the cold, stayi...

Book Report: The Boys I'm not at Comic-con this weekend. I just read comics, but I don't especially want to meet their creators. I especially don't especially want to meet the creators of "The Boys." "The Boys" is perha...

Book Report: India Authentic #1 (Ganesha) This comic book tells Ganesh's origin story. Apparently India Authentic is going to be a series of comic books full of Indian myths. I don't know much about Ganesh, and I was sorry that the comic bo...

Book Report: Houdini the Handcuff King I was going to start this off with a cute paragraph about how I'm "handcuffed" to Debian Sarge (an old version of the OS) on my main home computer because I only have dialup access, my dialup provide...

Book Report: First in Space I am back from the No More Secrets Game, which was pretty excellent. I think it was excellent. My memories are pretty hazy. Since coming back, I've sent one piece of email and left one voice mail ...

Book Report: Malcolm X Here I sit in a dark train somewhere in the vicinity of Menlo Park. The train is dark and stopped. An alarm bell rings constantly. We have stopped because we hit a car. At first, this was a sad s...

Link: We have Metonymy and They Are Ours The Brain Fist webcomic is often funny.Labels: comic, explosions, urban morphology...

Book Report: Super Market This comic book has fun art: cityscapes, curlicue clouds, silly signs. I bought this comic because its writer, Brian Wood, has written some good things. But in this comic, I didn't like the plot, t...

Book Report: American-Born Chinese [I'm testing out a new anti-spam tool. In theory, I haven't told it to actually discard any mail yet. So in theory you shouldn't see a difference. But mistakes can happen. So if you send me somet...

Book Report: Samurai Detective #1 Style versus substance, style versus substance. Last night, I didn't sleep well. Last night, I saw a vacation slide show. It was by Nat C., who had been in a shipwreck. She'd been helping to sail...

Book Report: Making Comics To me, this was a fun but useless book. This book is by Scott McCloud, the same guy who wrote Understanding Comics. I found UC useful even though I didn't find myself confused by comics--it talked ...

Book Report: The Books of Magic [I'm upgrading to a new Blogging service (beta.blogger.com). I wouldn't be surprised if that means that a bunch of my old articles show up as "new" in your feed reader. Or if it results in other li...

Book Report: The Squirrel Mother Well, after those relatively content-free photo posts, I'm sure you're glad to see I'm returning to my mainstay: informative and insightful Book Reports. Here is my Book Report on The Squirrel Mothe...

Book Report: Little Star It's a family drama about new parents making tough choices between family life and career. Ah, it's OK. It has pretty Andi Watson art, which helps a lot. Tags: comics | kids | art |...

Book Report: The Human Dilemma Concrete is a superhero. He can withstand gunfire, climb mountains, lift cars. But what can he do against global overpopulation? Now he teams up with a pizza company executive in a campaign to con...

Book Report: Girl Genius vol 4 (Agatha Heterodyne and the Circus of Dreams) Tonight is Sleater-Kinney's last concert before they "go on indefinite hiatus." I tried to get tickets, didn't try hard enough. But you know, it's not the end of the world. Each of the Sleaterians...

Book Report: Fun Home If my earlier snarky, whiny post about folks organizing a multi-day puzzle hunt in New Zealand made you think, "Ordinarily, this is just the kind of thing that would interest me, but Larry has talked...

Link: Fire Sings Beauty is where you find it... or make it. Tags: comics | blindness |Labels: comic...

Book Report: Robotika #1 This comic book makes no sense, but it's so pretty that you don't mind. Huge swaths of black, good lines suggesting graceful motion. OK, it depicts a future world in which cyborgs fight by means of ...

Book Report: Cravan In honor of Wondercon (which I'm not attending (yes, I am lame)), a comic book review: How often do you finish reading a comic book and think, "I wish there was a bibliography."? Arthur Cravan was a...

Book Report: The Super-Scary Monster Show Featuring Little Gloomy #2 Earlier, I complained about the way the black areas in this comic had been filled in. I rectract that complaint now. They're doing some interesting thing with textures and hatches, and it's growing...

Book Report: Polly and the Pirates #1 In this comic by Ted Naifeh, a girl is kidnapped from a boarding school to become a pirate queen aboard the Titania. This comic shows promise: all it needs now are monkeys, ninjas, and robots. Tags...

Book Report: the Girl Who Talked The other day I picked up a handful of mini-comics by Daniel Merlin Godfrey. "The Girl Who Talked" was my favorite, but they were all good. "The Girl Who Talked" is an interview with a girl who was...

Link: Shigabooks.com Jason Shiga's site has erupted from inactivity to interactivity. He makes these wonderful interactive comic books, some of which he has translated to web-o-matic form. Because this blog is more abo...

Book Report: Y the Last Man / Ring of Truth This collects comic books 24-31 of "Y the Last Man". The tail end of this story arc is in San Francisco. And it asks me to believe that our heroes successfully follow an evasive ninja through the P...

Book Report: the Super-Scary Monster Show (featuring Little Gloomy) #1 Walker and Jones continue to explore the cute/horiffic world of Little Gloomy. I liked the stories in this issue. I liked some of the art. I think they need to find someone to fill in their blacks...

Book Report: Smoke and Guns Women in short skirts fire guns at each other. But it works. When does the movie come out? Tags: comics | cigarettes | violence |Labels: comic, explosions...

Book Report: Sixgun Samurai #1 Once upon a time in old St Louis, a kid walks into a bar and starts waving around a katana. Just when you hope that this comic would descend into a blood-soaked massacre, a priest calms the kid down...

Book Report: Rex Libris #1 "I, Librarian" Oh, "Rex Libris" is a a comic book about a librarian, this sounds interesting. Oh, he's a time-traveling librarian. Oh dear. He's a time-traveling librarian who can withstand a vacuum and has super...

Book Report: Mr. T #1 This comic book shows us a Mr. T who stays concealed in the shadows. Why? If he emerges, then bad men will hurt good citizens so that they can frame Mr. T. But like King Arthur, we know that one d...

Book Report: Me and What Army This collection of short storylets by Michael Van Vleet was nice. Loosely-related stories about hypothetical armies. Zombie soldiers, shifting sands. Tags: zine | Amanda Summers | green g...

Book Report: the Murder of Abraham Lincoln This is another comic in Rick Geary's series "A Treasury of Victorian Murder". There are probably other places you can learn about John Wilkes Booth's various attempts upon the life and liberty of A...

Comic Book Shop News After spending all of yesterday tinkering with the New Zealand travelog, I needed to get out of my apartment today. So I walked to Isotope Comics' new location. I got my fortnightly fix and looked ...

Book Report: Sacrifice (Age of Bronze collection vol 2) It's another volume of Eric Shanower's great comic adaptation of the Iliad. Learn the strange story of Telephus. Feel even queasier about the fate of Iphigenia as you put a face to the name. See w...

Book Report: Diary of a Mosquito Abatement Man This comic book by John Porcellino was informative and thought-provoking. The mosquito abatement men walk through nature, learning its beauty. And they slaughter millions of insects along the way. ...

Book Report: Y the Last Man book 4 (Safeword) It is another collection of "Y the Last Man" comics by Vaughn, Guerra et al. There is a dumb story arc which uses a brainwashing attempt to give us a glimpse into the mind of the main character. Why...

Book Report: The Legend of Grimjack, Volume One I have been hearing about this comic book for years. It, along with "Sam & Max", were the great comics which I'd never be able to read because their rights were tangled up in legal limbo. One v...

Book Report: Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventures I enjoyed the Bill & Ted movies back when they came out. When Rob Pfile refers to my apartment's cross-street as "Wyld Stanyn", it cracks me up. It cracks me up every time. I enjoy Evan Dorkin...