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Tag: comics

Why can’t you shut up about Hamilton?: A links round-up

The marvelous Kiese Laymon on Confederate flags and SEC football. On competing for the one single diversity spot in the writers’ room: Aisha Harris writes about the unbearable whiteness of TV writers’ rooms. Nobody could be more excited about the new Star Wars trailer than stars John Boyega and Daisy Ridley. Recovering the history of years in slavery, and the story of a forgotten forced deportation: An article that opens with an oddly upsetting anecdote. New details emerge about that Harry Potter play! (It’s not a prequel, it’s a sequel! Joke’s on you, prequel-wanters! You’ll never ever learn more about…

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Comics round-up!

The recent launch of Book Riot’s sister site, Panels, plus the many comics posts of folks like Sarah and Andi and Memory, have put more new comics on my radar than I have the money to keep up with. But now and then my library abruptly has all the comics I have been wanting, and then I get to do a jolly little binge. So here’s what I’ve been reading: Nimona, by Noelle Stevenson This is the same Noelle Stevenson of Lumberjanes fame! And, okay, this isn’t something the library had, because the print edition of Nimona won’t exist until May. It began its life as a…

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Review: Skim, by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki

“Being sixteen is officially the worst thing I’ve ever been,” says Kimberly Keiko Cameron at one point in the comic Skim. And the book certainly reminds you of all the things about being sixteen that were garbage — if not Kim’s particular problems, then certainly the general experience of being sixteen. Called “Skim” as an unkind joke — she isn’t slender, white, and blonde like the popular girls — Kim is an outsider at her private high school. She’s not an outsider in a Carrie way, but more in the sense that high school makes so many people outsiders: that…

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Review: Boxers and Saints, Gene Luen Yang

Before I get started with this review, it’s time for PRAISE PLEASE, a segment I do sometimes because I need praise like oxygen. I decided that in 2014, I was going to read 20% non-white authors. I got a slow start because by the time I resolved this, I already had ten reviews scheduled or in need of writing, and they were all of books by white authors. However, in the first third of the year, my books have been 40% by authors of color. Half POC authors would be best, but I am still pretty pleased with myself. (I’ve…

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Review: Marbles, Ellen Forney

I started keeping a new TBR spreadsheet a few months back, with different tabs for pleasure reading, research reading, and forthcoming books. Maybe some weekend when I’m bored, I’ll set it up so that I can track when I read/review one of the books on the list, and it’ll make automatic pie charts of my percentages of gender, nationality, and whether the American cover was better or the British one. (Currently all that stuff is on another spreadsheet.) (Yes, I like spreadsheets. Sue me.) Anyway, Marbles, by Ellen Forney (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository), was the very first book…

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Review: The Imposter’s Daughter, Laurie Sandell

Throughout her childhood, Laurie Sandell’s father would enrapture her with stories of his brilliant, varied, and successful life: top grades at the best universities, meetings with Henry Kissinger to advise on policy, multiple awards for valor in the Vietnam War. As an adult, she spun through years of dysfunction and uncertainty before becoming an interviewer of celebrities. But Sandell also begins to learn things about her father that make it clear he isn’t, and never was, the person he claimed to be. Cover report: Same cover in England and America. I like it! To begin with the good things about…

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Review: Saga, vols. 1 and 2, Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples

Upon finishing the second volume of Brian K. Vaughn’s most recent series, Saga, I have decided to be excited about Vaughn. This could have happened sooner, except unfortunately Runaways was my introduction to him, and it is not great around race and it put me off him. But having read Y: The Last Man and Saga, I think that Vaughn’s writing is great, and I like that he creates comics with end-dates in mind, so I’ve decided to hop (at last!) on board the Brian K. Vaughn train. My favorite thing about Saga is the relative tininess of its stakes…

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Review: Relish, Lucy Knisley

I had a dream the other night where NetGalley had changed the way its Dashboard looks so that when you logged in, it had a list of all the books you’d requested and whether you’d reviewed them. And it was like, color-coded as it went down the list, in increasingly angry colors, to indicate that if you ignored THIS book you’d have reviewed half the books you requested (yellow), if you ignored this book too it would be forty percent (orange), and so forth down the list, in darker and angrier shades of orange and red. It was intense. (Sometimes…

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