Ariel Baska reviews the new Cowboy Bebop #1 series from writer Dan Watters, artist Lamar Mathurin, and team, and what she finds is a book that feels like a lost episode of the series that fans never knew they needed.
Read MoreMarvel’s Voices - Legacy #1 is a fitting collection to celebrate storytelling and representation, holding up the Black experience and wrapping a blanket of context and love around the heroes of beloved comics.
Read MoreAdventureman Vol. 1, The End And Everything After is a thrillingly pulpy epic with dazzling artwork and strong, inclusive storytelling.
Read MorePolitics and spectacle have always gone hand in hand, and never more so (or more entertainingly) as in Chuck Brown and Prenzy’s new trade collection, On The Stump, Vol. 1.
Read MoreCan’t sleep, clowns will eat me. Ariel Baska reviews Pirouette, the new trade collection from Black Mask Studios that has scary clown things at its center.
Read MoreMarvel's Voices - Indigenous Voices #1 features a delightful trio of indigenous superhero stories designed to continue and extend the Marvel lore through artfully crafted storytelling.
Read MoreRedbone: The True Story of a Native American Rock Band is a new documentary-heavy graphic novel that speaks to an untold chapter in rock history.
Read MoreKindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation sees the creative team of writer Damian Duffy and artist John Jennings translating Octavia E. Butler’s iconic work to comics.
Read MoreBy Ariel Baska — Mtsyry Octobriana 1976 opens with a bang on page one, with an experimental sexual orgy, amid psychedelic color contrasts. Opposite, there appears the figure of a woman, naked but for her leopard print scarf, sniper rifle, and belt of ammo. One character looks out of frame to ask, “Who are you?”
Read MoreBy Ariel Baska — Hands up, who read all 448 pages of the Mueller Report when it was released last year? Those of you who did, you feel like re-reading it? No? Well, never fear. Regardless of your relationship to the original (and redacted) tome, this graphic novel is an invaluable resource for navigating this moment in our country’s history, while simultaneously providing an enlightening, gripping, and rather hilarious take that fills in missing pieces you never knew you needed.
Read MoreBy Ariel Baska — From the first pages of this rather abrasively titled book, the palette of textured blue and gold, with sumptuous fabrics and Gothic-fonted German, immediately let me know I was in for a visual treat. Though from the title, fin-de-siècle Klimt references in a decadent Viennese setting were not what I was expecting.
Read MoreBy Ariel Baska — As an ardent fan of John Bivens’s work on Spread, how could I pass up an opportunity to check out his new work on Cult Classics: Creature Feature? In this work, he applies his unique style to a tale of the town of Whisper, where the same aliens who wiped out the dinosaurs happened to submerge a mysterious capsule.
Read MoreBy Ariel Baska — The dark shadows of this horror story threaten even the most innocuous of frames as a loving couple stumbles back drunkenly to their Filipino home. Even as they fool around, the divisions between the two women are subtle but immediately apparent, as one remarks disparagingly, “Americans!” and the other indicates expressions of jealousy.
Read MoreBy Ariel Baska — This sweet new science fiction series from Action Lab centers on Miranda, a third-eyed dimension-skipping heroine, utterly devoted to her shark-dog Noodles, who apparently can chew through anything. The set-up appears to be a pretty hilariously science fiction version of Oz, with cyclones of swirling vampire mobsters, mecha warrior foes, and vegan allies. I say “appears to be” because while the tone of this series looks to be sweetly comic, judging from the good-natured dialogue and a palette of orange, pink and purple, don’t judge a book by its cover. Or even the first issue.
Read MoreBy Ariel Baska — Excellence is real, but Excellence is, to put it simply, excellent. On the surface, Excellence appears to be a story of a father and son set in a magical universe, but more importantly, it’s a story made for this moment - a story about what one does with anger.
Read MoreBy Ariel Baska — Don’t ruin the plot. Don’t ruin the plot. That’s every reviewer’s fear, but I think I’m safe in this case, since the titular family plot is already in ruins, and as to the comic book’s plot, every issue, including the most current one (#5, reviewed here) leaves you off-balance on a spinning wheel of fire - where she goes nobody knows....
Read MoreBy Ariel Baska — This is a harrowing and relentless debut from Allison Conway, and it follows a newly-minted big-headed biped on a twisted journey through a sinister lab. Notably, the narrative is completely silent of commentary, except for the pathos wrung from our protagonist’s small, pained eyes. Those eyes are the first lights we see in the cross-hatched gray and black nothingness from which the vision of the lab emerges.
Read MoreBy Ariel Baska — Continuing in the universe of BLACK, Volume 1, by the same authors, this story picks up further into a future where Black people with superpowers are taking on the media and the government agencies that see them as a threat to be neutralized or experimented on. Where BLACK was centered on a male protagonist named Kareem aka X, and his discovery of his superpowers and their political implications, BLACK AF: America’s Sweetheart takes a different approach.
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