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Comics Criticism: Even comics critics don’t care about it
(or everyone has tunnel vision except me; or in the land of the blind, everyone is blind) [Allegory of Comics Criticism by Wallace Allan Wood] TCJ.com recently published an exchange between Frank...
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Why Michael DeForge is the greatest cartoonist of his generation: The Critics...
The word of mouth has been abundant and the acclaim unremitting, but what exactly can we learn from the outpouring of reviews of Michael Deforge’s Very Casual—that work of unremitting “genius”, and...
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Watchmen vs Fail-Safe: A Short Response to Kristian Williams
Kristian Williams’ recent article on “Sacrificing Others: Watchmen, Fail-Safe, and Eichmann in Jerusalem” is a worthy read but it does require some suspension of belief concerning the narrative logic...
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Best Online Comics Criticism 2013
This is late because I was feeling lazy. Also, who needs comics criticism anyway? The following list is meant to be as inclusive as possible in terms of subject matter, stylistic tone, and ideas. I...
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The Athenaeum of David B.
A Review of Incidents in the Night Volume 1 by David B. Comic translated by Brian and Sarah Evenson “Like all the men of the Library, in my younger days I traveled; I have journeyed in quest of a...
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Which Margaret Sanger?
I first came to hear of Peter Bagge’s Woman Rebel: The Margaret Sanger Story through reading Sarah Boxer’s review at TCJ.com; an article which I approached with a mind to find articles to include in my...
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The Zombie Apocalypse and the Dangers of Empathy
A response to Christa Blackmon‘s “How The Walking Dead became the Realest Show on Television.” “American popular media is in dire need of stories that help us build empathy with the rest of the world,...
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Nijigahara Nihilism
A review of Inio Asano’s Nijigahara Holograph. Translated by Matt Thorn. “If only the last dozen years were just a dream my younger self was having, how wonderful that would be.” * * * When...
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Ms. Marvel: Deliciously Halal?
Would you give G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona’s Ms. Marvel to your daughter or young nephew to read? I think the answer in most instances would be a loud and affirmative, “Yes!” It is after all...
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Chinese Choices
Li Kunwu and Philippe Ôtié’s A Chinese Life is the kind of book I would normally resist reading; the chief reason being it’s overly familiar subject matter. For a period during the 80-90s, it seemed...
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Brief Notes on The Encylopedia of Early Earth
“Without myth, however, all cultures lose their healthy, creative, natural energy; only a horizon surrounded by myths encloses and unifies a cultural movement.” The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich...
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How to Cry: On Ice Castles
Systematic readers of HU will note that Noah has been running periodic weekend surveys in the interest of fostering chatter and garnering recommendations for further reading and viewing. In general,...
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Captain America: Half-Truths
I was looking forward to reading Truth: Red, White, and Black following the smattering of positive notices the comic has received on HU of late. Noah’s recent article certainly gave me the impression...
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How to Read Hilda
(with apologies to Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart) Luke Pearson’s Hilda series seems to have fallen into that strange fault line lying between comics elitism and wide commercial acceptance. The...
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The Dishonourable Woman
Let me attempt to describe the experience of watching the BBC’s widely acclaimed 8 part mini-series, The Honourable Woman. Imagine walking into a five star restaurant and being ushered to your seat...
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Snowpiercer and the Last Messiah
(Spoiler alert: The endings of both the comic and movie are spoiled utterly and completely) Films are quite often acts of misreading and miscommunication. The presence of fleshy humans and...
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Best Online Comics Criticism 2014
2014 was a pretty bad year for comics criticism. On the basis of my simple survey there was hardly anything of note from the first third of 2014 as far as comics criticism was concerned (though things...
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Sam Zabel or How the pen became mightier than the penis
Sam Zabel is suffering from a terminal case of writer’s block. He also thinks, not without reason, that he is a talentless hack churning out inferior versions of late Golden Age superhero comics to...
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The Fade Out: Hollywood Meh
A Review of The Fade Out by Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, and Elizabeth Breitweiser. _____________ Synopsis: 1948 Hollywood. Charlie Parish wakes up from a drunken stupor to find a dead starlet in the...
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The Tragedy of Adrian Tomine
The tragedy of Killing and Dying isn’t that the collection is focused on hopeless men and their supportive spouses. Rather, it resides in the fact that Adrian Tomine hasn’t produced a comic of any real...
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