Books

Just as soon as you recover from SPX, you'll be drinking in the comcis events at the Brooklyn Book Festival, the annual literary love-in which will be held Sunday, September 21st this year. Not only is there a full slate of comics panels, with Brandon Graham, John Porcellino, MariNaomi, Mike Dawson and MANY MORE, but there will be a signings, a screening and parties galore. You can check out the totally excellent (I will steal their theme) Tumblr jsut for BBF comics and graphic novels, but here is the whole schedule for posterity:

Okay this isn't "The Comics Diversity Times" but, issues of diversity and identity seem to be the most pressing ones these days. And so to cleanse the palette, here's a transcript of Gene Luen Yang’s speech at the 2014 National Book Festival this weekend. With American Born Chinese, Boxers & Saints and now The Shadow Hero, Yang has become one of the best selling and most important graphic novelists and he's also one of those heroes I was alluding to earlier, standing up for people who don't have as big a voice.

How do you follow up a phenomenon like Scott Pilgrim? Well, you take some time off and then come back with a beautifully realized standalone graphic novel that tells a story about..starting over. That's Bryan Lee OMalley's Seconds, which hits today.

Every year the Banned Books Week National Committee announces a theme, and for 2014 its comics and graphic novels. The announcement comes in the...

Richard McGuire's Here is a comics story originally published in RAW Magazine that used the comics form to dizzying effect, jumping from the dawn...

Although my take on the first BookCon was positive, it was definitely crowded and unorganized, and I'd be remiss if I didn't point...

So BookCon was, like the very first New York Comic-Con, a raging success that caught everyone by surprise. It may be surprising that so...

A graphic novel is dropping this week called The Forgotten Man Graphic Edition: A New History of the Great Depression . It's a 320...

One of the top graphic novels of the first half of 2014 is surely Roz Chast's Can't We Talk about Something More Pleasant?: A Memoir; the long time New Yorker mainstay has penned her FIRST (amazing) graphic novel and it's a true classic even though the subject matter sounds grim. The book follows Chat's experiences with her aging and increasingly vulnerable parents, a sad topic but a part of the human experience that a lot of us are going to have to deal with from one side or another some day. This being Chast it's also full of laughs, as she limns her eccentric sometimes annoying parents in rich comic detail. Anxiety and love mingle, as they do in real life.

The third volume of Charles Burns' great Nitnit trilogy is finally coming out in December! It's called and it completes the story from The Hive and X'ed out about the varying levels of reality among a man who has overdosed, a weird world of worms where a reverse Tintin named Nitnit is finding his way, and angsty drama that will be familiar to readers of Black Hole.

It's that time! Time for the #1 graphic novel of the year to be announced!

§ Words like "TV" and "Broadcast" are long ago relics as streaming from many sources takes over the sitting in front of a screen time. And many comics properties are getting a second (or first) life on these new platforms. F'rinstance, Powers, the Brian Michael Bendis/Michael Avon Oeming series that was made into a pilot then passed on by the FX network, is getting revived as a streaming series for Playstaton. The show will go straight to series for 10 episodes. The cast and crew of the previous pilot has been scrubbed, with Charlie Huston on board to write, with Michael Dinner (director of everything from The Wonder Years to Masters of Sex) to direct. According to THR, Huston and Bendis will be the showrunners—it's nice to see Bendis getting a good title on this. Circle of Confusion (which also reps The Walking Dead) is among the exec producers.