reading notes

by Doug TenNapel ISBN: 1891830341 Wow. This is an amazing and meaty book: one of the few (okay, okay, of admittedly not very many) graphic novels that I’ve read that really felt like a novel. TenNapel, while sweeping you into his story, does take his time to build characters, set a scene, and tell a [...]

by James Kochalka ISBN: 0966536347 Kochalka interweaves the quirky love story of his comic persona Magic Boy with girlfriend Amy, and Spandy (their cat) with a neighborhood bird. He creates perfect pictures of embarrassment, awkwardness, and yearning with this book. I love the way he draws: fluid, simple lines that capture the essence of scene [...]

by Brian Ralph ISBN: 0970085850 This book a sequel of sorts to Cave-In, Ralphs’s fascinatingly wordless first graphic novel. Here the monkey-boy hero speaks and so do the characters around him; that is the big change, as the visual style is consistent with the first book. I was afraid that adding speech to the mix [...]