Month: October 2010

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Flesh and Bone

By Julia Gfrörer
40 pages, black and white
Published by Sparkplug Comic Books

I’m cutting right to the chase here: Julia Gfrörer’s Flesh and Bone is a creepy, disturbing, comic. I mean that in a good way; Gfrörer mixes love, death, occult, and betrayal into a fascinating story that takes a simple starting point and then moves it down a dark and twisty road. If I had to try and compare Flesh and Bone to an existing comic, it would probably be Hellboy, but a story in which Hellboy himself never comes to save the day.

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Slam Dunk Vol. 12

By Takehiko Inoue
192 pages, black and white
Published by Viz

I am rapidly running out of comics by Takehiko Inoue to read. When the next volume of Real is published in November, the translations will have caught up to the series in Japan. And while I have the last couple volumes of Vagabond stashed in reserve for a rainy day, once again the series in English is about to catch up to the series in Japanese. So, after quite a few years, it seemed like a good a time as any to read an older series from Inoue that’s being translated, his other basketball comic: Slam Dunk. Having read his more recent works as of late, going back to Slam Dunk feels a little surprising in places.

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Nancy Vol. 1: The John Stanley Library

Written by John Stanley
Art by John Stanley and Dan Gormley
152 pages, color
Published by Drawn & Quarterly

I never really "got" Nancy. I’ve heard for years about Ernie Bushmiller’s original strips and how fantastic they were, but Bushmiller died right around the time I started paying serious attention to comic strips in the early 1980s. So I’ve never seen any of the originals, just the interpretations of other writers and artists over the years. I have, however, read some John Stanley comics in the form of Little Lulu, and I thought they were adorable. When I heard that Stanley had created stories for the Nancy comic years ago, I couldn’t help but wonder if this would finally be my introduction to the world of Nancy that so many other people had raved about.

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