Grovel

UPDATE: Volume 3 out now
Osamu Tezuka is back, albeit from beyond the grave, with a series that first saw publication in Japan in 1967. There’s little to date though - this is a timeless Japanese fantasy about a young man called Hyakkimaru, who embarks on a quest to fight a series of demons.
Before Hyakkumaru is [...]

Once again we can look to Japan to provide us with a comic that explores a genre that has remained popular in all sorts of other western media, but seems to have stayed out of comics – the disaster genre. The standard format is to spend at least half the story in a pre-disaster scenario, [...]

Jessica Alba’s break into the comics big time came with La Perdida, the story of a young woman called Carla’s lost year in Mexico. Starting out as a fresh-faced young American traveller, she finds herself reigniting a crappy relationship with ex-boyfriend Harry simply because he has an apartment in Mexico City. While she fulfils her [...]

Obsession is a graphic novel is about a young girl called Clarissa, stuck out in the middle of nowhere, looking after her disabled mother. Her father absconded years before, leaving her mother in a mess of bitterness, obsessed with bringing her daughter up to be a perfect model of behaviour. Like most average sixteen-year-olds however, [...]

Batman is undoubtedly one of the most interesting of the superheroes. Usually written as a deeply intelligent man - a detective and scientist - with a billion dollars of gadgetry at his hip and a thing for going out at night and kicking the living daylights out of crime.
All-Star Batman & Robin, however, sees Frank [...]

Sfar and Trondheim’s epic fantasy comedy gets more fleshing out with Monstres, the back story behind a few of the incidental characters featured in the other books. Just for the sake of a recap, the whole Dungeon series revolves around a castle – run by an entrepreneurial bird – who rightly believes that if you [...]

War stories are enjoying something of a renaissance in the world of comics at the moment, with World War II probably topping the chart as favourite real-world setting.
Chuck Dixon has the sort of name that makes you think he ought to be able to write a solid war story and he doesn’t disappoint. Team Zero [...]

Jack Kirby is most famous for having spent much of the 1960s co-creating many Marvel superheroes alongside writer Stan Lee, including The Fantastic Four, The X-Men and The Hulk. He’s almost as famous for departing from Marvel to join DC Comics to write, edit and illustrate his own creations, including such notables as The New [...]

Some of comics’ finest moments have come from finite series - epic dramas that unfold over hundreds if not thousands of pages. Classics like The Sandman and Preacher spring immediately to mind, though Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra’s Y: The Last Man seems destined to follow in their footsteps.
Based around the premise that the [...]

Paul Gravett is one of Britain’s preeminent authorities on comics, with books, academia and exhibitions to his name. So who better to choose a collection of all-time greats? This book really lives up to its name - it’s just short of 500 pages, collecting 24 stories by some of the biggest names in comics, including [...]

Walt Kelly is often considered one of the classic comic artists and, in this reprint of his long-running strip Our Gang, it’s easy to see his appeal. Having honed his craft as an animator at Disney, he converted many movie licences to comics, including these Our Gang strips, which originated as a popular movie franchise [...]

With Frank Miller devoted to transferring his noir visions to Hollywood, we’re left looking to the next generation for our gritty, black and white, trench-coat clad anti-heroes. And visually at least, Mike Henderson is turning Ben Fisher’s script for Smuggling Spirits into something that looks like it’s been heavily influenced by Miller’s work on Sin [...]

Eddie Campbell works magic with the graphic novel yet again in this curiously tall tale of life in a Victorian circus. With performance artists that could almost be the superheroes of their time, Campbell and writing partner Dan Best take their fictional travelling circus around the trouble spots of the time, from the sinking of [...]

Despite a ridiculously dubious sounding name, don’t let first impressions based on the title put you off this teen-romance comic presuming, of course, that teen-romance comics are your thing. The titular father of the piece is Sangbum, a plastic surgeon who finds out he has a 13-year-old daughter called Myunghae, courtesy of a sperm donation [...]