The Mini Comic Library

My late teenage years and early twenties were plagued by a perpetual feeling that I didn't fit  in, probably common to many people at that age, but that felt deeply personal to me at the time. I felt awkward, clumsy, uncomfortable in my own skin, and more often than not ,  an outsider looking in at  other people who all  seemed  happier and  more self-assured than I  could ever dream of  being. Reading  The Adventures of Leeroy and Popo  brought those memories into sharp relief and  Roskosch's  work is a welcome addition to  an  established literary tradition of narratives focused on social outcast s who gaze in at the world from the fringes of society, exploring themes of alienation and self-worth, neatly wrapped in some virtuoso cartooning that all marks him as a creator worth looking out for in the future. Leeroy and Popo are outsiders in every sense of the word, perhaps most obviously in the anthropomorphic forms ...

A DEEPLY touching tale of love and loss, framed in a wonderfully imaginative and world of fantasy Chase Van Weerdhuizen's, Ashen; A tale of two sisters is an accomplished work of art that deserves the opportunity to reach more people.  Writing about Ashen is a milestone for me in that it's the first comic I've written about that I don't own a physical copy of.  That's a breakthrough of sorts to me and it's testament to how powerful Ashen is that it proved a tipping point for me in that regard.  Van Weerdhuizen has a maturity and an emotional range that I think is lacking in mainstream comics and honestly, it's books like this that I want to take time to talk about, to share with people and show some less adventurous readers the quality comics have to offer if you'll only dig a little deeper.  I don't know that it's possible to review this wonderful book without spoiling it, so fair warning, I'm going to go over the plot in detail here and I h...

I've been thinking a lot about comics criticism lately. How people write about comics, how they should, how I do, how I should, what I have to do to be better at it ... And I can safely say I've come to zero conclusions.  Hence the rather dull title to this blog. I'm blocked. I can't think of a clever way to say this or to format it or present it. What I know is that I love reading comics and I enjoy writing about them. Honestly, it helps me understand them. That might sound odd to some of you, but the insights that come out when I write are often fresh out of the keyboard, and frequently represent lightbulb moments where my appreciation for something I'd read and considered disposable is altered significantly. So snazzy title or not, unique format to hell, I'm going to keep writing what feels right to me at the time about each book. So, the following is essentially my pull list from the last few weeks. I'll write as I read and add each comic in as I finish ...