Spider-Girl #1 comes out this week–the first issue of an ongoing series by Paul Tobin and Clayton Henry, starring Anya Corazon, the young superheroine formerly known as Araña. But she’s far from the first woman to wear a variation on Spider-Man’s costume. Here’s a quick history of the half-dozen-or-so Spider-Women and Spider-Girls …
Nick Spencer is the up-and-coming mainstream comics writer of the moment–he’s responsible for the Jimmy Olsen back up in Action Comics and for T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents, among other titles. He’s also currently writing Morning Glories, an ongoing series of his own, drawn by Joe Eisma and Rodin Esquejo, about a prep school where many things …
Techland’s Comic Book Club was very enthusiastic last week about The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec–the new English translation of the first volume of a Jacques Tardi series about a fearless, cold-blooded adventuress in the mysterious Paris of 1911. Now, courtesy of Fantagraphics, we’ve got an exclusive look at a scene from …
It’s going to happen someday. The host of pulp magazines dwindled away to a last tenacious few (Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, for one, is still going); radio dramas disappeared one by one; the final soap operas are slowly being picked off. And eventually the herd of hundreds of serial periodical comic books are going to be thinned out …
This is what happens when Techland goes to the comic book store: we end up discussing what we picked up. This week, Douglas Wolk and Graeme McMillan talk about The Extraordinary Adventures of Adele Blanc-Sec, vol. 1, and Amazing Spider-Man #648.
DOUGLAS: First off: a round of applause to Kim Thompson for his translation of The …
This week sees the first-ever reprint of Superman Vs. Muhammad Ali, the semi-legendary giant-size 1978 one-shot in which Superman faced The Greatest in a boxing ring to save Earth from an alien invasion. (It was created by the reunited Green Lantern/Green Arrow team of Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams, and is significantly better than it has …
Icons: The DC Comics and WildStorm Art of Jim Lee comes out this month–a big coffee-table book surveying Lee’s past two decades as a comics artist. It includes a hefty sampling of his work on Superman, Batman and the various titles Lee created for WildStorm, as well as a new Legion of Super-Heroes story drawn by Lee and written by Paul …
Lars Martinson won a Xeric Grant for the first volume of Tonoharu, a series of graphic novels about a young American named Dan Wells who moves to rural Japan to become a schoolteacher. (It’s loosely based on Martinson’s own experiences teaching in Japan between 2003 and 2006.) The second volume comes out this week from Martinson’s own …
This week’s Amazing Spider-Man #647 marks the end of the three-year, 102-issues-long “Brand New Day” sequence–a consistently entertaining run that could have been more than that. The premise of BND, when it started, was that Amazing was going to be the only Spider-Man book, that it would come out three times a month (giving Marvel …
This is what happens when Techland goes to the comic book store: we end up discussing what we picked up. This week, Douglas Wolk, Graeme McMillan, Mike Williams and Evan Narcisse discuss Grant Morrison’s final issue of Batman & Robin and Strange Tales II #2. WARNING: Bat-spoilers lurk below.
DOUGLAS: The more I think about the Big …
Sarah Glidden is the remarkable cartoonist behind How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less–a book released today that documents her experiences on a Birthright Israel trip in 2007, as she grapples with history, culture shock, and the looming question of Palestine. (We previewed it here a couple of days ago.) She talked to us about …
Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely’s superb All-Star Superman appears in an oversized “Absolute” hardcover edition this week. It’s one of the best Superman stories ever created–a beautiful encapsulation of everything that’s great about the character. As with a lot of Morrison’s work, it’s also filled with tiny details that don’t call …
