Introduction

Blankets by Craig Thompson

I've been reading books for all my life, but then again, who hasn't?  In 2010, I started writing books, and in 2013, I started reading comic books.  My mother is a high-school teacher, and she noticed that a graphic novel was on her school's summer reading list, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi.  I helped her buy it, and she handed it to me, saying, "you read it first."  I was hooked.  A few months after I started reading comic books, I started reviewing them, starting with a post on a boxing message board with a few comic readers on it.  The review was about Craig Thompson's Blankets, pictured to the right.  It's still one of the best books I've ever read.  Thompson has also written Habibi, Carnet de Voyage, Goodbye Chunky Rice, and most recently, Space Dumplings.  I could list my favorites here, but I would run out of room.  I'll try to update this blog every day or so because I try to read something every day.  If you haven't read Jeff Smith's Bone, you really should.  It's a solid 1300 pages, and I've either lent or bought copies of it for three people, all of whom love it.

I mostly write about comic books in their original, 24-to-32-page format, known as "floppies."  The 

Monstress, issue #1

picture to the left is the cover of Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda's Monstress, which is a relatively new title, with only three issues coming out so far.  It's very promising.  The art is fantastic, the story engaging, and the lettering by Rus Wooton varied and consistent at the same time.  I do talk about the lettering of comics because I think it's an important part of the art.  In Monstress, Wooton uses four or five different styles of lettering for different aspects of the comic.

I write about floppies mostly for several reasons.  If you really want to support comics, you should of course enjoy them in the format you like, but by buying floppies, you're really on the forefront of whether a comic continues or gets cancelled.  Monstress, issue #1 was a 72-page triple issue, and it has run to three printings so far.  The collector in me likes to organize the comics; I have a long box with 100 or 200 comics in it.  By reading comic books in their original form, you get to see them before people who read them in trade paperback (TPB) format.  Finally, comics are simply meant to be read month-by-month.  I was having a lot of trouble understanding East of West in TPB format until I started reading it one comic at a time.  We still tend to treat books as novels, and that takes away from the reading of comic books because while there are arcs within comic book series, each floppy is an entity of its own.

I also read manga, manwha, omnibi, European comics, and South American comics.  I don't read too much superhero stuff, as I didn't grow up reading it, but I do dip into DC and Marvel once in a while.  Oh, and I read real books from time to time as well, mostly as audiobooks while I'm driving.  In audiobooks, I like solid literature, science fiction, and genre-bending writers like Stephen King and Salman Rushdie.  Well, that's it for now.