Jarod Rosello, who wrote a great guest post for us (read it! it’s amazing!) partly on how he uses this story in his freshman comp classroom, describes it as “it’s the true story of improvements made to Riverside Park in New York City and the inadvertent creation of an underground graffiti movement and colony in the abandoned railroad tracks under the park.” Interesting, well-told, and intriguing. It really makes me want to go and see the graffiti art in real life.
This book is a quite well-done fish-out-of-water/mean girls tale about a boarding school with an interesting history. Not deep, not, probably, for adults, but it kept me eagerly turning pages, which isn’t that easy to do to a jaded BAC editor like me.
What this book does, strikingly well, is it teaches you how to be a webcartoonist. From website design issues specific to comics, to personal branding, to dealing with fans (and making more of them) to preparing for conventions (checklists!) right down to setting up a shipping station for your merch, this is by far the most comprehensive, reasonable, serious guide to being a self-publisher that I’ve seen.
John Hankiewicz creates formally elegant and enigmatic comics that are truly sui generis. Everyday people and objects combine and recombine in choreographic patterns that suggest but elude meaning.
Hilary Florido’s “Prescription Strength” is a silly spoof of the “never hit a kid in glasses” rule—at least I hope it’s a spoof! Stylishly drawn and funny, it’s a quick read and will be popular with anyone who wears specs or has witnessed a grade-school fight. And that’s pretty much anyone.
“Jess” travels in a time machine to visit younger versions of herself and try to save herself from embarrassing and scary situations, but her younger self won’t pay attention. Drawn in a an improvisational-seeming pencil style.
Age: teen. It’s risqué in that it references sex and masturbation, but the subject matter is so very perfect for those awkward years when every move seems to mean more embarrassment and self-doubt.
Theo Ellsworth’s Capacity is an idiosyncratic masterpiece, a creative coming-of-age story which narrates the story of its own creation along with its creator’s struggles to learn how to channel his to his dreamworld and fantasy life onto the page.
This appears to be a non-fiction story, or at least it presents itself as such. Dysart and Wimberly, along with Scott Allie, are invited to the campus of Ohio University, where a former insane asylum has been converted into graduate art studios. In an upper floor, yet unconverted, an inmate died and left…a reminder. Dysart is eager to see what he assumes will be a grisly treat for a horror writer. But the story takes a nice turn for the humanistic when they get there.
This is a wonderfully-told story full of layered, purely visual storytelling sequences. The action revolves around paid odd jobbers, with some very odd jobs, which are delineated visually for the reader to parse (and experience a satisfying sense of surreality). As the story wears on, one starts to get the slightly paranoid feeling that these people are out there, doing and undoing each others’ work all around us.
I have to admit, I never bothered to think very much about what might happen at Boy Scout camp, but there’s something so true and right about the way the boys do and don’t get along in this book. I love the additional level of the adult scoutmaster (or whatever you call them) discussion and the interior dialogue of the lefty, non-joiner-type, middle-class dad (i.e. the guy more like me). It makes what could be a compelling YA book and makes it into much more than that.
