Grovel

Hiyama

Andy — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 08:00:47 +0000

UPDATE: Volume 2: Devils Within out now. The British seem to be particularly good at dystopian near-future sci-fi, and its comic creators certainly don’t shy away from the genre. Hiyama is the latest to fan the flames with a manga-esque illustrative style disguising a horrific future, where corruption in the criminal justice system is so rife [...]

Best Erotic Comics 2009

Andy — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 08:00:55 +0000

If your taste in comics veers off towards the pornographic, this should prove a tasty morsel, especially if your sexual fantasies are of an eclectic nature. This anthology, featuring some of comics’ great names – Gilbert Hernandez, Peter Kuper, Alison Bechdel and more – features sex in more ways than you might guess. There’s a [...]

Stitches: A Memoir

Andy — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 08:00:02 +0000

Graphic autobiographies – those written and illustrated as comics – tend to be deeply personal affairs. Illustrator David Small gets extremely personal in Stitches: A Memoir, which shares the story of his childhood with the world. Small is now an illustrator of children’s books (check out When Dinosaurs Came With Everything, to pick a personal [...]

Blake & Mortimer

Andy — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 08:00:08 +0000

UPDATE: The sixth volume – S.O.S. METEORS – is out now. Clearly influenced by the ligne claire style of illustration developed by Hergé for Tintin, this series first appeared alongside the boy reporter’s adventures in his eponymous magazine. And in Blake & Mortimer, Edgar P. Jacobs created a series as packed with rip-roaring action and adventure [...]

Secret Saturdays, The: The Kur Stone

Andy — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 07:00:56 +0000

Following hot on the heals of Ben 10 comes another Cartoon Network series reformatted as a short graphic novel to appeal to young readers – The Secret Saturdays. This family of cryptozoologists (yes, I had to look it up too – it means people who search for legendary or mythical creatures that haven’t been proven [...]

Thomas Wogan is Dead

Andy — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 07:00:57 +0000

Every now and again you come across a little book that carries so much charm and character that you can’t help but love it. Thomas Wogan is Dead is a quirky book, in which the lead character finds himself in a waiting room of the dead. His companions are animals – a bat that’s been [...]

Batman: Cacophony

Andy — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 07:00:21 +0000

Kevin Smith takes the writing helm of this Batman adventure, in which the villains of Gotham City turn on each other in an attempt to rule the underworld. Disguising himself behind all this background noise, a new killer is stalking the streets. Can Batman catch him and resettle Gotham down? Reprinting the three-issue mini-series, this collected [...]

Red

Andy — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 07:00:02 +0000

Paul Moses is a retired CIA hitman, who’s travelled the world and assassinated hundreds of people. When a new CIA director is appointed and shown what Moses has done, which includes some extremely high-profile and controversial assassinations (think targets like JFK), he immediately orders Moses’s own assassination. He believes that Moses’s knowledge, were it to [...]

Thorgal

Andy — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 07:00:46 +0000

UPDATE: The sixth volume – Thorgal: City of the Lost God – is out now. Having sold more than 13 million graphic novels in Europe, Jean Van Hamme and Grzegorz Rosinski’s Thorgal is a true fantasy epic. It’s set in a fictional seventh century, where magic exists and gods still roam the Earth alongside man. Like a [...]

Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again

Andy — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 07:00:06 +0000

Two decades ago, a burst of adrenaline generated by The Dark Knight Returns was so intense, it scorched and irreversibly altered my cultural DNA forever. The guilty sequence was the return of Batman to the streets, viewed only through half-glimpsed shadows, third-party reactions and increasingly anxious news bulletins. The trick – so beloved of Hitchcock and [...]