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Paul Hoppe’s nearly-people-free story “The Horror” examines what your brain can invent out of ordinary reality to scare the pants off you. I love the implication of something just around every corner, and I completely recognize that feeling of dread you can get out of nowhere, that you then can’t quite shake or talk yourself out of.

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.

A weekly round-up of our tweets about comics and education.

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.

Nick Bertozzi is an amazingly talented and prolific cartoonist, a teacher, and a good friend. I was thrilled when I saw this post about the process he used to make his new book Lewis & Clark over at the First Second blog, and asked if we could repost it here. If you’re in NYC, come celebrate the book release with Nick at Bergen Street Comics on Friday, Feb 25. Matt and I will be there, too!

“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.

A weekly round-up of our tweets about comics and education.

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.

Here’s a cool activity where you make a little fold-out comic book out of a single sheet of paper.

I’m going to have a hard time describing Journal properly because, first of all, it’s a very had-to-describe work (Dandro said, “Half of the book documents my exploration of an area in Maine called Ryders Bluff while the other half is more of an exploration of the psyche”), and secondly, the book itself never came back to us from Neil Gaiman. I have no direct evidence of this, but I’d like to think that’s because he enjoyed it so much!

A Circuit Closed is a very well-told, very satisfying story in only 10 pages—not an easy feat. Scratchy pen work and aged-looking coloring, along with the unique Q-and-A method of introducing the scenario (both Q and A written by the main character?) gives the comic an atmosphere of melancholy and isolation. Daniels almost lost me when the main character’s desperate journey to find meaning seems to end with a dog (gag), but the last page holds a wonderful twist.

A great homage to Little Nemo—I love the idea that the “Nemo” character dreams himself into real life.

We called out “Vicissitude,” a story of a working-class couple on the rocks, in this issue for its lovely, subtle delineation of emotion through (minimal) expressions and body language. It’s beautifully drawn in a steady line weight, black, white, and one flat gray, which gives it a stark and clean look, despite its convincingly grubby L.A. setting.

A weekly round-up of our tweets about comics and education.

The Hunter is the first of four planned adaptations of Richard Stark’s hard-boiled Parker novels, and it’s a stunner. Anyone who’s seen Cooke’s art will be able to imagine how his trademark 1960’s-influenced style, swoopy brush work, classy color (here just black and a spot), and iconic character design line right up with the cool, murderous Parker.

Savvy comics artists have been using Deleter brand graphic white to correct their art for years. Despite the name, it’s a Japanese brand, very high density, easy to use, good coverage. Finding a good graphic white is tough: when you find a good one, you really feel some loyalty. Deleter has earned ours.

“This is a Ghost.” is one of Craghead’s best recent comics poems (or so I think of them). He uses a completely original approach to juxtaposition and composition of images, words, and fragments of both, to suggest meaning beyond what you see on the page. Ghost Comics is an anthology of, yes, Ghost comics. See another notable from the same volume: “The Offering,” by John Hankiewicz, below. We would have also mentioned Hob’s lovely “the Witness” in this volume, except he released it in minicomics form first, and it was on the 2009 Notables list.

Sword is a high-concept mini anthology where each artist had a sword “left” for them in the prior comic, and then had to create a comic that somehow “leaves” the sword for the next artist. Taken together with the endpapers, the story actually completes a circle (of death and destruction). Clever and fun.

American Virgin is one of a small group of books Vertigo puts out that really bends genres. It’s about a young charismatic Christian evangelist preacher who swears to remain faithful until he marries his fiancee…but then she’s killed. So he has to track down her killers, deal with a gender-bending pal, escape/reconcile with a nutty family of feuding fame-mad parents and rebellious step-sibs, and resist attraction to the opposite sex (while the ghost of his fiancee hovers overhead). What genre would you call that? I have no idea, but it’s a very entertaining read.

A very creepy tale of sleep deprivation and madness (or is it?). Genuine shivers ran down my neck.

Wednesday Comics was either a bold experiment, a trip down nostalgia trail, or perhaps a bit of a sandbox for DC comics. Maybe all of the above. It was a 12-issue series, printed on newsprint, at the size of a large daily newspaper, so that it resembled a Sunday comics section.

C.F., Powr Mastrs, no. 2. 2009 Cartoonist/musician C.F. (Christopher Forgues)’s Powr Mastrs appears to be a Lord-of-the-Rings scale epic that is just in its opening stages. The scenes so far appear episodic encounters between a variety of characters, human and otherwise, yet the more you read the more you see the stage being set for Read More

Far Arden is a funny, fast-moving adventure story about Army Shanks, “a crusty old sea dog… searching for a mythical tropical island in the middle of the Canadian Arctic.”

Mat Brinkman’s Multiforce is an oversize collection of Sunday page-style comics that Brinkman drew between 2000-2005. This tour-de-force of drawing and imagination is packed with incident and humor, creating the impression of a role-playing game viewed from the inside out: we see monsters and massive castles, but everyone talks like a stoned teenager.