#book-a-day

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Book-A-Day 2018 #380: Royalboiler by Brandon Graham

Book-A-Day 2018 #380: Royalboiler by Brandon Graham

This is not a comic. It’s an art book by a cartoonist, featuring covers (from his own books and guest covers for others’ comics), sketchbook pages, odd single-page comics from in-house Image newsletters, convention posters, a T-shirt design or two, some logos for porn companies and stars, a little bit of movie concept art, and other assorted stuff that Brandon Graham has created in the twentyish…

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Book-A-Day 2018 #379: Emma by Kaoru Mori (5 hardcover 2-in-1 volumes)

Book-A-Day 2018 #379: Emma by Kaoru Mori (5 hardcover 2-in-1 volumes)

Is it damning with faint praise to say of a painter that you love her brushstrokes but aren’t crazy about her paintings? I hope not, because I’m about to say that about Kaoru Mori’s first major manga series Emma.

Emma originally ran for 72 chapters — 52 of the main story, and a follow-up 20 side-story chapters — in Japan’s Beam magazine from 2002 through 2008. It was collected into ten volumes,…

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Book-A-Day 2018 #378: Bacchus by Eddie Campbell (2 Vols.)

Book-A-Day 2018 #378: Bacchus by Eddie Campbell (2 Vols.)

Bacchus was Eddie Campbell’s first taste of comics success, his “American-style comic book” about idiosyncratic versions of the Greek gods, in an idiom occasionally congruent with crime and/or superhero stories but often just focused on the joys of storytelling, camaraderie, and the pleasures of the vine (and, somewhat more darkly, the things one might do while under the influence of that vine).

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Book-A-Day 2018 #371: Saga, Vol. 9 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

Book-A-Day 2018 #371: Saga, Vol. 9 by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples

If you know anything about Saga, you know there’s a big change at the end of this book, and that the series is now on a longer hiatus than usual. If you know nothing about Saga, you might just have been living in a hole for the last seven years, and nearly anything I could say would be a spoiler for the first fifty-some issues and nine volumes.

But that’s always the issue with writing about a…

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Book-A-Day 2018 #370: Paper Girls, Vol. 5 by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang

Book-A-Day 2018 #370: Paper Girls, Vol. 5 by Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang

Hey! The time-cops finally get named in this book! They’re called WATCH — we don’t know what that stands for, but baby steps, man, baby steps — and the old guy who runs them is Jahpo Thapa.

And our heroines learn more than his name, which I won’t spoil: they learn who he is and how he matters to them.

So, just maybe, Paper Girls Vol. 5 sees this series moving on from throwing out ideas at random…

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Book-A-Day 2018 #368: Michael Moorcock's Elric: The Balance Lost, Vol. 1 by Roberson, Biagini, and Downer

Book-A-Day 2018 #368: Michael Moorcock’s Elric: The Balance Lost, Vol. 1 by Roberson, Biagini, and Downer

I looked at a Michael Moorcock “Eternal Champion” comic— primarily by other hands — a couple of months ago, and noted that Moorcock made several attempts overt the years to end that series. Well, I’m back with another EC book, from 2011. And that era is, as far as I can tell, well after the point when Moorcock realized the EC would outlive him, and that he only needed to give it as much…

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Book-A-Day 2018 #365: Love and Rockets, Vol. 4: Issues 1-6 by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez

Book-A-Day 2018 #365: Love and Rockets, Vol. 4: Issues 1-6 by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez

This is not a book; this post breaks one of my silly self-imposed rules. (I’m just noting that up front. I’m not going to do anything about it.)

The fourth run of Love and Rockets returned to a magazine size and a periodical publication: there have been six issues since it was launched in 2016. So, to close out I Love (And Rockets) Mondays for the year, I thought I should look at the most recent…

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