A review blog of new comics and graphic novels by writer, professor, and comics scholar Jessica Baldanzi
Author: Jessica Baldanzi
Photo by Jill Steinmetz
I’ve been a comics fangirl since I was a kid—Betty and Veronica to my big brother’s Spider-Man comics—and Chris Ware and Lynda Barry helped complicate
my understanding of the genre when I lived in Chicago and their comics were
serialized in New City and The Chicago Reader. I first brought comics
into my professional life when I created and taught a course called The Graphic
Novel in 2008. I’ve taught that class many times since then, have also given
talks about comics to general audiences and scholars alike. Commons Comics began in 2013 as a way for
me to learn how to blog and to stay current in the field. It was hosted first by
my college, then picked up by The Elkhart
Truth, a local newspaper, before I moved it to my own page.
I teach English at Goshen College, a small but mighty liberal arts
school in the “Michiana” area, east of Chicago on the border of Michigan and
Indiana. My specialty in graduate school was twentieth-century and more recent
American Literature, but my teaching has brought me into multiple fields. My
upper-level courses have ranged from critical theory and gender and popular
culture to memoir writing, and my introductory courses from to composition and
speech to creative writing.
I am now co-editing an essay collection with comics and religion
scholar Hussein Rashid about Kamala Khan, the new Ms. Marvel. Look for it on
the University Press of Mississippi in the coming year. (Working title: Ms.
Marvel in America.)
“Monica” Written and illustrated by Daniel Clowes. Fantagraphics. $30.00. October 2023. 106 pages. Adult.
Thanks to Fables Books, 215 South Main Street in downtown Goshen, Indiana, for providing Commons Comics with books to review.
Check Fables out online at www.fablesbooks.com, order over the phone at 574-534-1984, or email them at fablesbooks@gmail.com.
A new book by Dan Clowes is always an event. A veteran indie comics artist, Clowes writes, draws, letters, and colors all of his own work by hand, a time-consuming and increasingly rare creative process in this age of digital tools. “Monica” showcases that mastery, especially in illustrating his characters’ faces, where miniscule shifts betray complex emotional storms:
My blog’s homepage has been graced since its inception by an image of Enid Coleslaw, from “Ghost World,” the most beloved of Clowes’s “Eightball” comic book series. It’s about time that I review one of his books. Continue reading ““Monica,” by Daniel Clowes”
“Shubeik Lubeik” Written and illustrated by Deena Mohamed. Pantheon. $35.00. English translation January 2023, 528 pages. Youth to adult.
Thanks to Fables Books, 215 South Main Street in downtown Goshen, Indiana, for providing Commons Comics with books to review.
Check Fables out online at www.fablesbooks.com, order over the phone at 574-534-1984, or email them at fablesbooks@gmail.com.
NOTE: I received a free review copy of this book from Pantheon.
Egyptian comics artist Deena Mohamed posted her first webcomic in a 4 a.m. rage, when she was only eighteen. She had been up late fuming at a misogynist article, “Ten Things to Look for in a Muslim Wife.” It was far from her first encounter with such content, but this time she hit a breaking point—fortunately for her fans, a productive breaking point. She channeled her fury into the creation of Qahera, a Muslim Egyptian superhero who not only fights back against such rhetoric, but uses her powers to battle suffering and injustice wherever she encounters it:
“Kwändür.” Written and illustrated by Cole Pauls. $25.00. November 2022, 140 pages. All ages.
“Shelterbelts.” Written and illustrated by Jonathan Dyck. $20.00. May 2022, 224 pages. Teen to adult: Contains drug references.
Thanks to Fables Books, 215 South Main Street in downtown Goshen, Indiana, for providing Commons Comics with books to review.
Check Fables out online at www.fablesbooks.com, order over the phone at 574-534-1984, or email them at fablesbooks@gmail.com.
NOTE: I received a free review copy of Shelterbelts from Mennonite Quarterly Review. Portions of this review have been adapted from that one.
“I see publishing as an art form,” Andy Brown, founder of Conundrum Press, told “Broken Frontier” in late 2022. Valuing careful curation over profit has paid off for the press. Brown started Conundrum in 1996, but narrowed its mission and focus to literary graphic novels in 2010, catching the early edge of our current comics zeitgeist. Now based in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, Conundrum continues to steadily and quietly gain readers and recognition.
Conundrum also works to build comics community, and has instituted a fund—or “bursary,” in Canadianese—to publish mini-comics by emerging black and indigenous authors. Keep an eye out for example, for rising stars Talysha Bujold-Abu, Jazz Groden-Gilchrist, and Jordanna George, the first three recipients of this funding, which began in 2020.
Conundrum was diversifying its library long before the summer of 2020, however. One indigenous author that Conundrum has been publishing since 2019 is Cole Pauls. The Canadian Broadcasting Company calls Pauls’ work “Indigenous Punk,” but he told an interviewer for “Discorder Magazine” that “Indigenous Futurism” might be more precise. For “Dakwäkāda Warriors,” the young adult sci-fi allegory that Pauls began in 2016 as individual zines, he worked with elders from his community to make the book bilingual, placing the Southern Tutchone language alongside English. (Pauls calls himself a Champagne and Aishihik Citizen and a Tahltan comics artist.) The words share the page with aliens and space lasers to create an allegory against forced assimilation.
from Vault of Culture, https://www.vaultofculture.com/vault/oncomics/paulsdakwakada
