Oh high school… its trials and tribulations have provided fodder for some very cool writers and filmmakers. And now, Vera Brosgol, who has already made a name for herself in film and animation as storyboard artist for Coraline and story artist for Paranorman, has joined their ranks with her first full length graphic novel, Anya’s Ghost.Put out by First Second, it reads like a PG-13 Heathers with dash of cute.
Exactly fifty years ago, the United States Congress passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin became illegal. Yet even today we are repeatedly reminded that, in action, the civil rights struggle is far from over. The Silence of Our Friends, Mark Long’s graphic memoir of his childhood amid escalating racial tensions in 1960‘s Houston, is a nostalgic but frank portrayal of this time and place, so paradoxically innocent and sinister.
A literary graphic novel if ever there were one, The Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes is a hybrid of sorts. Partly, it is a biography of James Joyce’s daughter Lucia, a once promising ballerina who spent the last thirty years of her life in a mental institution. But Lucia’s tragic story is told via author Mary M. Talbot’s memoir. An account of her own childhood and relationship with her father, James S. Atherton, one of the world’s foremost Joycean scholars, the story explores Talbot’s ensuing and inevitable affinity with Lucia.
Photo Credit Oni Press
Harvey Award winning writer Joshua Hale Fialkov is well known for penning hair-raising horror titles including Echoes, I, Vampire, and Elk’s Run. The opening sequence of his upcoming Oni Press series, The Life After, may be his scariest scenario yet. In its plausibility…
We’ve all heard about the imprint the Beatles left on the world. We’ve seen the footage of those four handsome boys with matching mop tops and Pierre Cardin suits performing in vain before mobs of young banshees whose sobbing, swooning, and rapture were well beyond disruptive. By the end of the 1960‘s it was clear that a sort of paradigm shift had occurred in American culture, and, chicken or egg, Beatlemania is integral to that story. The Fab Four saw an entire generation through an era unparalleled in social tumult, metamorphosis, and mythology. While it’s difficult, in the here and now, to imagine a world without the Beatles, The Fifth Beatle : The Brian Epstein Story, writer/producer Vivek Tiwary’s love letter to the band’s original manager, reveals the underlying serendipity of it all.
Marvel’s Deadpool #27
When it rains, it pours, goes the old adage, one that has rung particularly true for Wade Wilson, aka Deadpool, and the folks at Marvel, this past week. Deadpool #27, released on April 9th, commemorates Deadpool’s marriage to Shiklah, an ancient succubus. While, of course, this is cause for celebration in itself, the cover of this “enormously oversized” and “most important issue” features a giant group pic of all of the event’s attendees, and thereby sports a stamp marking its place in the Guinness Book of World Records for “most comic book characters on a single issue cover”.
Gamenomics & Comicology 