Controversial ‘Handbook for Mortals’ author to tell you to how to “Stand Out and...
The drama that's rocking the YA and publishing world today is the YA novel Handbook for Mortals, an out of nowhere book that suddenly debuted atop the NY Times bestseller list. And thanks to...
Review: Looking for truth in ‘Crawl Space’
I have a feeling that quite a lot of us would rather be somewhere else these days. It wouldn’t be so bad to be trapped in a place that was separate from the logic...
From Mallorn to Pipeweed: Learn all about Tolkien’s plants in “Flora of Middle Earth”
As frequent readers know, The Beat is something of an amateur Tolkienologist, having memorized The Lord of the Rings at an early age, and waded into theories of Elven geneology by reading all of...
Review: Yeon-Sik Hong understands that happiness isn’t supposed to be comfortable
There are going to be a number of American readers who see themselves in Korean cartoonist Yeon-Sik Hong’s Uncomfortably Happy, especially creative people and freelancers.
This autobiographical book chronicles the move Hong, and his wife...
Review: A Kafkaesque coming-of-age-tale by Pieter Coudyzer
Walking a line between a depressing coming of age tale and a Kafkaesque expression of emotional hurt manifesting itself physically, Outburst ends up twisting both of them together into a probably inevitable horror finale....
The Final Fate of Heidi MacDonald
Comics have a long history of killing off it's darlings: Superman, Ferro Lad, Gwen Stacy, Invisible Kid, Professor X and Captain Marvel. Marvel, in particular, has made a habit of this in recent years, killing...
Review: ‘The Wendy Project’ gives Peter Pan a new context
Fiction is an integral part of reality. It’s how human beings take the circumstances of their lives and their world and frame it all into some meaning. Naturally, the whole thing started eons ago...
SDCC ’17: Box Brown Discusses His Eisner Award Nominated “Tetris”
We all know the game “Tetris.” It’s addictive and embedded in the halls of video game history. Did you know though that it originated from Russia? How about that near the pinnacle of its...
Review: Eleanor Davis’ expansive bike path
You & a Bike & a Road is an amiable documentation of the kindness of strangers and the general amiability of most people you encounter has cartoonist Eleanor Davis riding a bicycle that her dad...
Review: The quiet poetry of Chaboute’s ‘Alone’
It’s 84 pages in before the subject of French graphic novelist Chaboute's largely silent work Alone finally appears, and even then, it’s only in the form of a hand dropping food to a goldfish in...
Review: Assessing the damage in ‘Roughneck’
Jeff Lemire has become quite a prolific comics creator since 2008. He’s largely devoted himself to the varying forms of genre fiction that comics offers, both his own creations, like Sweet Tooth or The...
Review: ‘The Interview’ examines the nature of meaning
I write a lot about contemporary art, and one of the areas that I find so many people get hung-up about is meaning. That is, the specific meaning of a specific piece of art,...
