Jin & Jam is about two disaffected teens creating somewhat-surreal chaos to make their suburban (OK, San Jose) life less ordinary. The details are funny (conjoined twins, fights over french fries) but it’s the elegant drawing that really sets this one apart.
A strange little story about an apparently-medieval peasant woman with a unique problem. It takes a few minutes to orient yourself and figure out what’s going on, but then it’s really quite touching.
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.
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.
