“Once we were a thousand separate kingdoms, spread over a hundred magic worlds. We were kings and cobblers. Wizards and woodcarvers. We had our sinners, our saints, and our blatant social climbers. And from the grandest lord to the lowliest peasant girl, we were, for the most part, strangers one to another.” “It took an invasion to unite us.” Reimagining fairy tales is not necessarily a new endeavor. They have ranged from the cute and fun “Tangled” to the popular TV series “Once Upon A […]
The Saga Continues
If you’re a comic book reader, I shouldn’t have to tell you that you should be reading Saga. What you might not know is that the award-winning series written by Brian K Vaughan (Y the Last Man, Runaways) and illustrated by Fiona Staples (T.H.U.N.D.E.R. Agents) was recently released in its 4th trade paperback volume. This is a review of it. No spoilers, I promise. Read the rest of it here.
A sneakily intellectual graphic novel about a girl learning to love gaming.
Read this all in one go before work one morning last month and really, really liked it. If it had just been a story about a girl and her second gaming life I would have liked it anyway, but it also had some really unexpected stuff about economics and labor, which is not something you exepct to find in a book whose artwork makes you want to hug a pillow because it’s so adorable. You know pretty quickly, though. The book opens with an essay by […]
March (Book 1): An Origin Story
What’s hard for kids to recognize – hell, what’s hard for people to recognize – is that we’re living through history right this minute. That, someday, there’s going to be a kid, bored of his mind, doodling in the margins of his brain tablet (or whatever space technology kids are learning on in the future), barely listening to his teacher drone on and on about ‘the geopolitical ramifications of US drone strikes in 2014’ or – in deference to today’s book – ‘Let’s compare and […]
“No matter how we’re eventually raised, all of our stories begin the exact same way. They all end the same, too.”
An infrequent reader of comics and graphic novels, I was intrigued by the Saga series, mainly because of the glowing reviews from Malin. It promised several of the most fun genre conventions: epic war, forbidden romance between opposite sides of battle lines, mercenary assassins, imaginative new alien species, and MAGIC! Our narrator is Hazel, child of Alana and Marko, the forbidden lovers. So far, the narration has been retrospective, but still not completely linear. We enter in the middle of Alana and Marko on the […]
I Finally Dive into a Graphic Novel
My husband kindly takes many of my book recommendations, but pointed out last night that I don’t often take his. So today I sat down and plowed through Blankets, my first foray into graphic novels. It definitely did not turn me off of the genre, but this one wasn’t exactly my cup of tea. And in my husband’s defense, he read it a few years ago and only really remembered that there was a brotherly relationship in the book. I don’t necessarily think he would […]