Month: October 2003

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Little Lit: It was a Dark and Silly Night…

Edited by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly
48 pages, color
Published by HarperCollins

There’s a stronger relationship between illustrated children’s books and comics than most people consciously realize. Both of them involve a series of images that, coupled with text, tell a story. The only real structural difference is that children’s books usually employ narration boxes instead of word balloons, and comics use panels much more often than children’s books. Still, the overlap between the two is pretty strong, and maybe that’s what Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly had in mind when they invented their Little Lit series, with children’s books and comics creators coming together to form an anthology of stories for both children and adults.

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Human Target #2

Written by Peter Milligan
Art by Javier Pulido
32 pages, color
Published by Vertigo/DC Comics

When Peter Milligan and Edvin Biukovic brought The Human Target back as a mini-series back in 1999, Milligan’s take on a man addicted to professional impersonations took the comic world by storm. After the original mini-series and a graphic novel also by Milligan, The Human Target is back once more under Milligan’s guidance, this time as an ongoing series. In an era where hidden faces are feared instead of creating fascination, though, will The Human Target still have a place to fit in?

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Between the Sheets

By Erica Sakurazawa
208 pages, black and white
Published by TokyoPop

As more and more manga comes overseas into English-speaking countries, there are phrases you hear thrown around a lot. Shonen (“boy’s manga”) and shôjo (“girl’s manga”) are two of them, with people quickly pointing out which story elements make a book meant for which gender. Well, if you read Erica Sakurazawa’s Between the Sheets, the question then becomes: What’s the name for women’s manga?

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Southpaw

By Scott Morse
128 pages, orange and white
Published by AdHouse Books

Some of the best “all-ages” books are ones that have different appeals to different ages, while still being enjoyable. As a child, you can read and enjoy the book on a very simple level. As an adult, you might see more to the story, an added level of understanding and recognition. It’s great because you can keep reading the book throughout your life, always enjoying what you picked up on early read-throughs, but still finding more lurking beneath the surface just waiting to be discovered. That, to me, is one of the big appeals of Scott Morse’s Southpaw.

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Lone #1

Written by Stuart Moore
Art by Jerome Opeña
32 pages, color
Published by Dark Horse

What is it about the wild west and zombies? The number of books that have merged the two (Deadlands, Jonah Hex, Priest, etc.) seems to grow by the hour. So I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that Dark Horse’s new science-fiction apocalyptic western has… you guessed it… zombies.

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