Jeff Lemire's style is immediately recognizable. The colours are sombre, earthy. Faces are often smudged with shadow. Sometimes entire pages appear to be shadowed. The lines are raw, sometimes inexact. Details in the background are sometimes perfectly drawn, like expertly squared tiles, and other times they are hasty cross-hatchings, a
In which I chatter about Rick Riordan's The Lightning Thief, the Mythlopedia series, the third in Bill Willingham's Fables series, and make hasty notes about my other reading for the un-challenge. The Lightning Thief is intended to be larger than life. Percy Jackson is not a normal boy. He is
We want that "paradoxical search for familiarity combined with strangeness; want more of the same – but with a difference," says Victor Watson in Reading Series Fiction. Watson's book considers series written for children, but it still applies, doesn't it? There's nothing like reading a series. Robert Kirkman's The Walking
In eleventh-grade English class, we studied "Oedipus Rex" and I fell in love with the idea that a story so old could still be compelling. But the idea of reading these classic texts outside a classroom seemed unthinkable. You know how some books become all-the-more intimidating the longer you leave
In the mid-90s, the Lairds were used to publishing 36-page comic books; they were all about entertainment, not about a one-stop volume of African American history. It was quite a challenge for Roland and Taneshia Nash Laird to move from that kind of production, to a full-length book, and
