Meanwhile...

Okay I realize content has been pretty light around here lately, but I have had lots of good stuff in other places this week. First up, I had the opportunity to interview Gene Luen Yang for Good Comics For Kids about Boxers & Saints, which is maybe the best comic I've read so far this year. As an interview, I didn't get to talk about it too appraisingly, but let me take this opportunity here to note that it is a really quite astonishing book and one I'd highly recommend. It's a really difficult book/s to describe, but Boxers is a big, epic, action adventure story with bright colors, violence, melodrama and emotional and spiritual turmoil. And it's pretty funny, too. Saints isn't quite as colorful or action-packed, but I Four-Girl is maybe the Sensational Character Find of 2013, and for a book dealing with often bleak topics, I found myself laughing a lot while reading it. So go read my super-long Q-and-A with Yang if you like; but definitely read the book we discuss.

I also spoke to Fairy Tale Comics editor (and contributor) Chris Duffy about that must-read anthology, which pairs fairy tales with some of your favorite cartoonists for adaptation into comics, almost always with rather extraordinary results (I still can't decide which is my favorite; Luke Pearson's "The Boy Who Drew Cats" or Graham Annable's "Goldilocks and the Three Bears"). (Oh, and I reviewed a pair of board books about Superman and Batman too, although I confess that I mostly wrote that piece just to get some free superhero books to give to my nephew on his first birthday, as he's just about finished digesting his first book).

Finally, I reviewed all 13 of DC's Villains Month books this week at Robot 6, for part three of the four-part "Crisis on Earth-3D!" series. (I neglected to mention that the rabbit that Anton Arcane is tearing in half above actually gets better; Arcane is in his own personal hell, which is a nice meadow with a bunny rabbit whose corpse will never rot, as I guess rotting corpses are Arcane's heaven, and thus their absence his hell. Forget it, Jake; it's Comics).

Oh hey, and speaking DC, I should probably throw in a link to Andrew Wheeler's thoughtful opinion piece about the state of the publisher, given that we were just talking about just that so recently (and that I guess I ended up unknowingly contributing an illustration of sorts to the piece, but man, there's no beating that Alex Ross painting of Superman where he just looks bushed, above. I remember the source, but not the exact scene, so I can't recall what's really going on there. Superman is maybe supposed to be brooding about how he's not doing enough, or worrying he's doing too much. But to me it looks like he just got home from a long day of work and just had to sit down for a minute).