Sarah Oleksyk, “Previously Possessed,” MySpace Darkhorse Presents, online issue 13, print volume no. 3, 2009. I guess MDHP was a really great anthology! I feel like every other one of these Notables have had that cover hanging up there at the top. Well, and here’s another one. Sarah Oleksyk is a BAC vet, and we Read More
People talk easily about “literary” comics (me among them), but there are books for which that comparison is truly apt. Danica Novgorodoff’s Slow Strom is one of those. A story of an unexpected encounter between two out-of-place characters (a female firefighter and an illegal Mexican immigrant) in a giant storm, the work evokes contemporary American literary fiction and independent film. It’s low-key, but with passion simmering under the surface.
This story is about young Corinne and her imaginary witches. Although it’s drawn in a sort of whimsical, children’s book illustration style, it’s really genuinely affecting on an adult level. Maybe it’s because I can imagine my own daughter having fears like this in a few years, it’s hard not to imagine how truly terrifying these witches must have been for Corinne.
A book/world made of more-or-less interrelated short stories that mix banal everyday rhythms with the absurd and the psychedelic by an author to keep an eye on.
A series of variations and transformations of what is perhaps the single most-parodied page of comics ever, the famous “Insult that Made a Man out of ‘Mac'” comic used to advertise the Charles Atlas correspondence bodybuilding course in old comic books. The original comic is opened to new vistas of post-modernism, literary allusion, absurdist humor, and even a touch of the poetic.
The thrill of reading Andrei Molotiu’s abstract comics is in watching images and rhythms and hints of narrative coalesce and then dissolve as you read. And each time you re-read them you get a different experience.
This story reads like either the last few or first few pages of a great Mike Mignola occult adventure tale. Perhaps he plans more of the Witchfinder adventures? Oh, wait, that’s exactly what this is: a prequel to the Witchfinder series now running. In classic Mignola style, it inserts a presumably completely fictional character, and (obviously) fictional occult doings, into actual history, in this case, in Victorian England. This opens up new frontiers for him of telling 19th-Century analogues to his Hellboy stories.
The daddy of a cute adorable bear family has some kind of disorder where his cute adorable big eyes have grown to grotesque proportions. Cute has its limits. But what’s best is that the story is it then takes the silly premise literally, and gets all thoughtful and existential on us.
The attention to detail as well as the balance between image, narration, and dialogue make Ellen Lindner’s history of Western civilization’s relationship with eyewear an exemplary non-fiction comic.
Subtitled, “An American Girl’s Adventures in the Israeli Army,” Jobnik! is a memoir about the collusion of post-adolescent hormones with institutional bureaucracy and Middle East Conflict-inspired anxiety. Drawn in an unusual, somewhat-naive pencil style, it’s an inside look at a life most of us will never see.
