Archive | Reviews

Yakari: The Island Prisoners

By Derib & Job Publisher: Cinebook ISBN: 978-1-84918-010-0 Like the previous review about Melusine: Love Potions, this books offers a way into comics and cartooning for younger readers that is sadly lacking today. Yakari is a little Native American boy, and along with his mustang, Little Thunder, explores the world around him in the North […]

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Melusine: Love Potions

By Clarke & Gilson Publisher: Cinebook ISBN: 978-1-84918-005-0 The Melusine books are collections of, usually, lengthy gag strips that fill the whole page. Melusine is a young witch who inhabits a world of fairytale and folklore, and they're both charmingly written and beautifully drawn. The theme of this one is love, and often how it […]

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Grandville

By Bryan Talbot Publisher: Jonathon Cape ISBN: 978-0-224-08488-8 I wasn't quite sure what I was expecting from Grandville. Bryan Talbot is a flexible and innovative creative individual (Alice in Sunderland probably shows this off best) so would I be getting social commentary, science fiction, a gritty action piece or a throwback to the more creative […]

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Spirou & Fantasio: Adventure Down Under

By Tome & Janry Publisher: Cinebook ISBN: 978-1-84918-011-5 Back at the beginning of the year I was asked to teach a course in Winchester to get adults into cartooning. One of the students was from Portugal, and he spent quite some time enthusing about his personal favourite, Spirou and Fantasio. Unable to lay his hands […]

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World War II In Cartoons

By Mark Bryant Publisher: Grub Street ISBN: 978-1-904943-06-8 Newly reprinted, this is an amazingly detailed and fantastically researched book that deserves a space on any cartoonist's or history buff's shelf. Divided into yearly sections that map the progress of the war, it offers a wonderfully rich selection of cartoons that reflect the events of the […]

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The Bluecoats: The Navy Blues

By Willy Lambil & Raoul Cauvin Publisher: Cinebook ISBN: 978-1-905460-82-3 It's baffling at how this sort of book can be created in mainland Europe but spectacularly fail to exist in the UK and US, and there's the added irony here that the subject matter is the American Civil War. Certainly in the UK, we have […]

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