When I first read Jen Wang’s spirited debut graphic novel, I couldn't help but be reminded of how quirky, unique, and just plain delightful Melanie Griffith once was in Jonathan Demme's 1986 film, Something Wild. Not that the plots are overly similar, but that contagious wild-child spirit infuses...
Federal employee Fujimoto delivers ikigami – death notices from the National Welfare Program, which insists that its arbitrary system of randomly killing one in every 1,000 citizens will teach people to value life. Fujimoto has been in doubtful turmoil about the death-system, although he knows...
I've been doing an annual New & Notable roundup of APA titles for The Bloomsbury Review for more than a few years now. This year's installment is running a little later than usual. I know you can't see it here, but the roundup is referenced...
I think this is my introduction to CLAMP, an all-woman collective of manga artists that began in the mid-1980s with varying members through the years, but consistently cranking out high-sales series that often get turned into anime. Go, girls, go! That said, I probably need to...
Holy moly! This manga is older than I am! No snickering, please! First published in Japan in 1956 by a then very young Yoshihiro Tatsumi (who memorialized his own artist-as-a-young-man development in his autobiographical graphic memoir A Drifting Life – in which you can also read more...
Award-winning Fumi Yoshinaga's dramatically entertaining gender-bender series, which offers an alternate history of premodern Japan, concludes the story began in volume 2 of how the first female shogun inherited her post and rose to power as recorded in the Chronicle of a Dying Day. Having grown...
Tracy White’s graphic sort-of-autobiography is “only mostly true because I skipped over things, moved events around, embellished, and occasionally just plain made things up,” she explains on the first page. “The technical term for this is dramatic license. I used it,” she adds in the...
The town of Musashigawa has a graffiti problem ...
With the too-often news of banned books that crop up to remind us that our reading choices can easily be restricted at any moment, the premise of Library Wars is not so far-fetched, regardless of its futuristic setting. Making its English translation debut this month,...
Stuck in a virtual version of 1971, Koizumi Kyoko knows that unmasking the Friend will have irrevocable consequences. Past and present, both the 1971 and 2014 versions of the Chief try desperately to save her ...
It's 2014 and just-escaped-against-all-odds Otcho and his manga artist sidekick Kakuta are finally back in Tokyo ...
At the rate I'm reading these, it's a good thing I only ordered the first three volumes to get me started ...
The mysterious doctor is back to do more good with another set of miraculous adventures. Jack's late mentor and savior lends his voice from beyond to remind him once again, "don't underestimate the human body," as Jack attempts to chase a needle tip gone missing...
"Once upon a time this was a true story ...
Having discovered manga late in life, I seem to be making up for lost time ...
Warning: I can't find any promises of a volume 2 (or 3, 4, or more!) anywhere in, on, or around this book. Nothing in the publicist's note, either! Uh-oh ...
For anyone and everyone who has or knows a middle-grader with braces (or about to get braces), this is the book of choice to share. "I've been telling people about what happened to my teeth ever since I knocked them out in sixth grade," writes...
If the observations, memories, and pop culture references here weren't so obviously recognizable in our post-9/11 western world, you might have read this graphic memoir as a hack comedy. The black-and-white panels initially seem almost unfinished, as if still in rough-draft mode. The contents might...
Gene Luen Yang, who made publishing history as the author of the first graphic novel ever to be nominated for a National Book Award, returns with an irresistible, hilarious little book that takes sibling rivalry to whole new heights. First serialized in The New York...
Regardless of your politics (although there's no mistaking where longtime comics creator Larry Hama and the rest of his funny cronies' loyalties lie), you will definitely find many moments to guffaw over in this four-part comic series too entertaining to put down! The New Ice Age has...
