Etelka Lehoczky

Riad Sattouf's sense of irony goes deeper than his bones: It runs in his lines. Inside every panel of The Arab of the Future, his graphical memoir of his early childhood, Sattouf's pen frisks and wiggles like it hasn't a care in the world. But both his drawings and his ...

Life surges and flows, unstoppable, in Jennifer Hayden's graphic novel The Story Of My Tits. This autobiography may be loosely organized around Hayden's experience of having breasts and losing them to cancer, but it's far more than just a record of the existence of two bumps of flesh. It's also ...

A wish, frail and plaintive, lies at the heart of James Tynion IV's zombie apocalypse comic. Its presence goes a long way toward explaining why Memetic, which on a flip-through might seem like just another splatter tale, is actually fun to think about after you're done reading it — and ...

Four-eyed robot birds really shouldn't be necessary to get kids excited about computers. For that matter, Gene Luen Yang and Mike Holmes' whole book (in which four-eyed robot birds are prominently featured) ought to be laughably superfluous to the education of today's youth. With computers mediating everything we do, exchanging ...

A family story is always something of a mystery story. The mystery, of course, is, "How could I possibly have come from these people?" The more you know about your family, the more the mystery deepens. How has it affected your life's path that your great-uncle sold insurance, or that ...

September is about more than kids heading off to school, all bright shining faces and expensive new electronics. This month also kicks off a horrifying gauntlet of fear, tedium and aggravation (mostly aggravation) for a beleaguered species, the college professor.

Or so Owen King and Mark Jude Poirier suggest in ...

This book is a weapon that doesn't look like one. A graphic novel done in pink and gold, it's populated by rosily flushed characters drifting through unbounded space. Leah Hayes' lines are aggressively unassuming. They're hasty, even a bit clumsy, and her figures' expressive physicality seems to happen almost by ...

As summer winds up, everything seems to slow down. The last of the hot days seem to demand you take it easy before fall really kicks in. These three works — two collections of comics and one graphic novel — are perfect to pore over in a patch of muggy ...

Ever heard of a tengu? How about a jorōgumo? You'll know them after you read Wayward, Image Comics' action-packed romp featuring Tokyo teenagers fighting the supernatural. It's been likened to a Japanese version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and its emphasis on epically battling the Big Bad (to use the ...

Romance comes in many forms — and never so many as in manga. Let loose in the black-and-white planes of comic-book reality, an army of creators has envisioned every schmooptastic scenario imaginable. But even setting aside certain extremes (Male pregnancy? A guy whose true love gets miniaturized and stuck to ...

The problem with an outsider trying to write about street culture — or any form of culture that hasn't yet been munched up and spat out in salable blobs by the behemoth of mass commercialization — is the whole voyeur thing. There's nothing more embarrassing than some bystander's yearning to ...

If you're in any doubt whether women are having a Moment in the comics world, take a look at the new incarnation of superhero Black Canary. DC Comics' Annie Wu has taken the character's platinum hair and fishnets from kittenish to riot grrrl by way of the Rocky Horror Picture ...

There are lots of different ways to smoke a cigarette. Some of them are as potent as the tarry concoction inside each little white tube. Every drag was suffused with irony on the notoriously cigariffic Mad Men. In The Fault in Our Stars, Augustus Waters made a spectacle of ...

Remember how it felt when, as a kid, you opened up a fresh-from-the-library book to discover the illustrations weren't in color? It wasn't a good feeling. Most of us still have a foot planted firmly in childhood when it comes to the ol' rainbow. It means that sticking to black ...

For a minute, forget there's anything significant about The Complete Eightball.

Forget that it contains the seminal works of one of the greatest artists in modern comics, unexpurgated for the first time since they were penned in the '90s. Forget about the charismatic heart-burnings of Ghost World's Enid Coleslaw, immortalized ...

A play that drives anyone who reads it insane? How delightful! Add a spooky Victorian gothic atmosphere and language that's positively zippy for its era, and it's no wonder Robert W. Chambers' The King in Yellow — a collection of short stories centering on the aforementioned play — has kept ...

"I guess you can't trust any Batgirl these days," Barbara Gordon says roguishly (she does everything roguishly) in Batgirl Vol. 1: Batgirl of Burnside. It's a sly, even subversive line, referring to the fact that the role has been played by many different characters — and in many different ways ...

There are places, according to popular belief and classic TV shows, where everybody knows your name. At these mythical sites you can find reasonably priced drinks and eats, great music and, most importantly, a certain elusive kind of people. They're the people you always wish you could meet — and ...

Imagine putting on a suit of armor to go to battle with a hot fudge sundae. That, Kurt Vonnegut famously said, is what critics are doing when they express "rage and loathing" toward novels. The metaphor has its limits — not all novels can be considered hot fudge sundaes — ...

What could be more seductive to the imagination than the Walled City? A 6.9-acre patch of Hong Kong's Kowloon peninsula, it was a discrete, warrenlike enclave, full of twisting passageways and tiny rooms, that grew up around an old military base and flourished throughout the 20th century. Though it was ...