Best known for his acclaimed graphic nonfiction, the creator turns to graphic fiction to tell the story of a young sitcom actor in the 1980s.
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Mobile Subscription Service Aims to Lure Manga Fans
Looking to tap into the continuing demand for English-language Japanese comics, a group of American and Japanese investors are launching Mangamo, a mobile manga subscription service that will offer access to hundreds of translated manga titles for $4.99 per month.
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New from Acclaimed Publisher First Second
The groundbreaking World Citizen Comics graphic novel series is a master class in engaging with the world that will have readers standing up to make their voices heard. Now more than ever it's important to stay informed and participate in government, and this series will help readers channel their passion into making the world a better place.
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Essay: Superman and Me by Gene Luen Yang
In this exclusive preview of an essay-afterword, acclaimed cartoonist Gene Yang uses his childhood love of Superman—and his personal experience of racism—to deliver a history of the Ku Klux Klan, the rise of white supremacy, and the role the 1940s Superman radio show played in fighting American bigotry.
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Interview: PW Talks with Erin Geiger Smith
PW talks with Smith about her new book on the history of voting rights, which looks at the landmark struggles of black Americans and women to vote, and, in the contemporary era, troubling issues around voter suppression, gerrymandering, and frustrating efforts to get reluctant young people to vote at all.
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Review: Ping Pong by Taiyō Matsumoto
Matsumoto’s powerful fictional evocation of young elite Japanese table tennis players shows once again the masterful ability of Japanese manga artists to create sports manga that combine dynamic renderings of sports action with in-depth, nuanced characterizations and narrative complexity.
- Post-Virus Novels We Expect to See: Over at The Millions, Edan Lepucki, with lots of time on her hands, imagines a series of Post-Coronavircus novels flooding the market in the years after we emerge from our various places of shelter: Social Distance Warrior, a leftie activist cooped up with cat, wine and canned foods, finds herself falling for her most vicious rightwing online critic; maybe opposites do attract? or Untitled: The Cursor Is Still Blinking, a novel left unfinished before the pandemic is brought out during the lockdown only to remain so.
- Pandemic Comic Con: First Second, Macmillan's graphic novel imprint, has organized a day long online comics festival scheduled for April 18 featuring a lineup of acclaimed First Second comics authors who will conduct virtual panels about how they make comics. Among the First Second artists giving presentations are artist/First Second publisher Mark Siegel, Gene Luen Yang, Lucy Knisely, Ngozi Ukazu, and Kate Leyh.
- Help for Comics Retailers: The Book Industry Charitable Foundation (BINC) is raising funds to help comic book retailers as well as indie bookstores slammed by the pandemic and by a social lockdown that prevents many of them from doing any kind of business at all. Now’s your chance to make a donation.
- Cinematically Atypical: Published to mark World Autism Day earlier this month, the animation news site Dot + Line has a review of the Disney + animated short Loop, which pairs Pixar’s first nonverbal autistic female teen character with a very verbal neurotypical boy at a summer camp. The reviewer says, “Autism is rarely presented in the media with this kind of dignity and accuracy.”
- Fan-Free Baseball?: Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top expert on infectious disease and a point guard on his high school basketball team, says that in certain cases, professional sports—Major League Baseball, for instance—could possibly return by the summer, if MLB isolates the athletes in hotels, tests them weekly, and hold the games with no fans in the stands.
This Week on the More to Come Podcast
This week the
More to Come crew—Calvin Reid, Heidi “The Beat” MacDonald and Kate Fitzsimons—shelter in place and discuss the rise and fall of ComicHub's doomed digital plan to save comics retail; the plight of comics retail under the Covid-19 lockdown; direct market and trade bookstores under the pandemic; and, on a lighter note, 'Vagrant Queen,' a new live-action sci-fi TV show based on the Vault comic by Magdalene Visaggio and Jason Smith, now on the Syfy channel.
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Set in 1930s depression-era New York City, Giant by Mikaël, follows the story of a massive, laconic Irish immigrant (who harbors a deep secret) as he works high above Manhattan on the construction site of Rockefeller Center. When one of his fellow Irish steel workers falls to his death from high atop the fast-rising tower, Giant is tasked by the union with informing the victim’s wife back in Ireland of her husband’s death. Instead he writes the wife pretending to be her husband, lying to her about his life in New York and sending whatever money he can to her. In this 10 page excerpt Mikaël renders the vibrant rough streets, colorful characters, and desperate poverty of 1930s New York City, while Giant exchanges letters with the unsuspecting young widow as she dreams of reuniting with her husband. Giant will be published in May by NBM. Click the image above to view the full excerpt.
Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall
