‘Red Colored Elegy’ Is a Most Un-manga Manga Classic
Seiichi Hayashi renders struggles through sometimes obscure, but always evocative imagery in Red Colored Elegy.
Chris Gavaler
Chris Gavaler is an associate professor of English at Washington and Lee University. His books include On the Origin of Superheroes (Iowa 2015), Superhero Comics (Bloomsbury 2017), Superhero Thought Experiments co-authored with Nathaniel Goldberg (Iowa 2019), and Creating Comics co-authored with Leigh Ann Beavers (Bloomsbury forthcoming 2020). He is the comics editor at Shenandoah magazine, and he blogs weekly at thepatronsaintofsuperheroes.wordpress.com.
Graphic Fiction ‘The Smell of Starving Boys’ Inverts Images and Expectations
Loo Hui Phang emphasizes the nature of image-making from the first panel: an upside landscape as viewed through the inverting lens of the protagonist's camera.
‘Blue Is the Warmest Color’ Is Better As a Comic
Julie Mahor's hand is deft in so many ways, producing a visually and emotionally complex tale of coming-of-age love uniquely grounded in the comics form.
Graphic Novel ‘I, Parrot’ Presents a Children’s World Inhabited by Grown-ups
Although Unferth's family-oriented plot and Haidle's style sometimes evoke children's illustrated books, this is for grown-ups—and the intentionally simplistic rendering is more than surface details.
‘Black Dog: the Dreams of Paul Nash’ Gives Chaotic Reality to the Dreamscapes of a War-haunted Painter
While no imitator, Dave McKean shares kindred tastes with Nash and creates a fictionalized memoir and dream journal of Nash's WWI experiences.
Poetry, Photography and Hybrid Comics: A Softer World
Imagine a daily comic strip on an imaginary newspaper page of dark and genre-disturbing funnies.
My Favorite Sex Fantasy
Uncovering the not-so-simple world of cartoon sex with Sophia Foster-Dimino's graphic fiction, Sex Fantasy.
‘Toward a Hot Jew’ Is No Joe Sacco – And That’s a Good Thing
Politics and the personal collide in the convention-challenging and genre-bending graphic narratives of Jewish artist-memoirist Miriam Libicki.
‘Language Barrier’ Illustrates That Words Are Pictures Too
This surreal exploration of the peculiar boundary between words and pictures dives directly into the deep end of the image-text pool.