J. Caleb Mozzocco is a way-too-busy freelance writer who has written about comics for online and print venues for a rather long time now. He currently contributes to Comic Book Resources' Robot 6 blog and ComicsAlliance, and maintains his own daily-ish blog at EveryDayIsLikeWednesday.blogspot.com. He lives in northeast Ohio, where he works as a circulation clerk at a public library by day.
The Smurflings By Peyo Papercutz The monotonous blue and white color scheme of the Smurf village gets broken up a bit in this fifteenth installment of Papercutz’s Smurfs reprints, which introduces a quartet of new characters to Smurf village, each of who eschew the white pants and hat ensemble that most Smurfs favor. [...]
Benny Breakiron Vol. 1: The Red Taxis By Peyo and Will Maltaite Papercutz American audiences have certainly embraced Belgian cartoonist Pierre “Peyo” Cuilliford’s most famous creation over the decades, with a successful cartoon series a cornerstone of 9 Saturday morning memories, 2011 live-action/CGI movie popular enough to generate a sequel and a series of [...]
Chicagoland Detective Agency #5: The Bark In Space By Trina Robbins and Tyler Page Lerner Publishing/Graphic Universe; $6.95 Meet the Chicagoland Detective Agency: Megan, tween goth who composes haiku out-loud on the spot, whenever she’s inspired; Raf, teenage genius and part-time employee of his parents’ pet food store; and Bradley, a talking dog. There’s no [...]
Superman Adventures: Men of Steel By Paul Dini, Rick Burchett and Terry Austin Superman Adventures: Distant Thunder By Scott McCloud, Rick Burchett and Terry Austin Captson/Stone Arch; $15.95 In looking for DC back issues to mine for hardcover reprints, Capstone stuck a particularly rich vein in Superman Adventures, the 1996-2002 series based on the [...]
Like most inspired literary creations that managed to strike a strong chord with a wide audience, the title character of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s 1943 illustrated novella The Little Prince never really went away. Whether in the original form or in one of the many media adaptations—the most familiar of which to Americans of a certain [...]
Lerner Publishing Group’s My Boyfriend is a Monster series has two popular publishing trends covered: Graphic novels and post-Twilight YA paranormal romance. The series of standalone, black-and-white, hardcover graphic novels by different creative teams all feature fast-paced, rather light melodramas in which a teenage girl falls for a boy who’s not quite human (but close [...]
Benjamin Bear’s bright ideas include unique methods of getting rid of fleas, herding sheep, and making two things out of nothing, but even the bear’s brightest ideas are out-shined by those of Phillipe Coudray, the artist/author who created Benajmin and, therefore, does all of his thinking for him. Bright Ideas is Coudray’s second offering through [...]
Among the latest offerings from Capstone’s fruitful relationship with DC Comics are a line of hardcovers reprinting some of the latter’s kid-friendly comics. Not collections of groups of comics, but single-issue reprints, differentiated from the original comics only by their hard, sturdy covers and spines—actual comic books never seem to last long in libraries, no [...]
Anyone who’s read many of Renée French’s highly-detailed black-and-white comics, like her surreal, dark and disturbing meditation on migraines and ants h day, or perhaps her off-kilter family melodrama about deformity and surgery The Ticking, may be a little surprised to hear her name in the same sentence as the words “kids comic.” But then, [...]
Cartoonist Joey Weiser’s latest work, Mermin Vol. 1: Out of Water, is about as close to a literal fish-out-of-water story as one would probably want to encounter in a comic book. After the title character, a young mer-boy, rescues a young surface-dweller boy from a shark, he’s invited to stay with the boy’s family and [...]
Recent Comments