Review: Fear of a white planet in ‘The Danes’
In The Danes, Belgian cartoonist Clarke’s suspense-thriller with science fiction tones, takes an accepted apocalyptic trope, a devastating pandemic, and turns it upside down. In most stories like these society collapses because of a...
Review: Any of us could be ‘The Strange’
I’ve never been able to wrap my head around the anger directed toward undocumented immigrants, and the escalation of that topic hasn’t helped me parse the topic any better. I can understand if you...
Review: The gorgeous ‘A Sea of Love’ is both epic and intimate
Unfolding in total silence, from a script by Wilfrid Lupano, and with absolutely breathtaking art by Grégory Panaccione, A Sea of Love inserts broad strokes into very simple lives by portraying the slapstick, satirical...
Review: Catherine Meurisse offers raw honesty about the Charlie Hebdo massacre
So dire has the world situation been, even on the smallest levels, that the massacre of the Charlie Hebdo staff seems like it happened at least a decade ago. But it’s only been three-and-a-half...
Review: ‘Song of Aglaia’ puts a complicated, heady feminist spin on tired old myths...
Taking the traditional tropes of myths and legends and turning them on their heads, Song of Aglaia has French cartoonist Anne Simon trace the fairy tale life of a water nymph as she finds herself...
Review: Julian Hanshaw’s ‘Cloud Hotel’ keeps things mysterious
In his previous graphic novel Tim Ginger, Julian Hanshaw touched up on UFOs in context of their place in popular conspiracy culture, mysterious but unlikely. In Cloud Hotel, Hanshaw does the exact opposite —...
Review: Aaron Costain’s ‘Entropy’ suggests there might be too much to think about
Aaron Costain’s Entropy is the type of book that begs you to never give up on it. It’s built into the story itself, which follows a humanoid’s journey through a surrealistic fable as it...
Review: Gipi searches for humanity at the end of the world
In Gipi’s post-apocalyptic drama Land of the Sons, there’s a moment when a father laments whether he should reveal to his sons that dogs were once prized friends of humans to be cherished and...
Review: Weegee biography captures the big picture
Let it be said upfront that in this more enlightened time, legendary photograph Weegee is not the kind of person that is given a lot of sympathy. He is, to put it in current...
Review: Nick Drnaso’s ‘Sabrina’ won’t stop haunting me
The concept of fake news existed long before Trump, and conspiracy theorists have also, but one difference between now and even a decade ago is that the institutionalization of misinformation has exploded and brought...
Review: Charting homophobia’s personal toll in ‘Luisa: Now and Then’
We all have things we’d like to explain to our teenage selves, and I have a feeling the older we get, the more we want to unload. But there are levels of knowledge that...
Review: Zach Worton’s cautionary tale of artistic obsession
Zach Worton’s The Curse of Charley Butters begins with a mystery, but soon shifts gears to the more immediate story — that of the investigator and the devastating effect the mystery has on his...
