Undiscovered Country, Vol. 1 - TRADE REVIEW

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By Jacob Cordas — “The American Dream will never---,” our Uncle Sam surrogate shouts before being riddled with bullets. He, of course, stands up in a display of grit and determination that would make the Founding Fathers proud to yell at his assailants, “The American Dream will never die! But you will.” And in that insane moment, I realized two things about Undiscovered Country: 1) I unabashedly love this comic and 2) I have absolutely no idea what this is about.

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TETRIS: THE GAMES PEOPLE PLAY - Review

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By Bruno Savill De Jong — William Blake once wrote of seeing the world in a grain of sand. It is unlikely he was referring to the video game Tetris, but Box Brown’s documentary-comic Tetris: The Games People Play capitalizes on his principle, building outwards from the simple puzzle game to detail its complex history, touching upon developing technology, international relations, and the nature of gaming itself. Everyone recognizes Tetris, but Brown’s book excavates the various threads contained beneath those colorful tetromino tiles.

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J + K by John Pham - Trade Rating

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By Zack Quaintance — The first quality one is likely to notice within the new Fantagraphics book J + K by John Pham is the work’s striking aesthetic. Printed in three fluorescent pantone inks, J + K achieves a singular palette that is at once washed out and pastel-futurist. This pairs quite well with Pham’s linework, which itself walks a rarely-seen line between simple character cartooning and casual geometric patterning, evocative of an artful extrapolation of a classic video game. I’m entirely unsure whether I’ve ever seen a book quite like J + K, purely on the surface visual level.

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TRADE RATING: The Golden Age by Roxanne Moreil and Cyril Pedrosa

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By Zack Quaintance — We are in the midst of a U.S. election cycle where the status quo is a looming figure in all discussions, at least as it applies to the Democratic Primary. Early in the political process, candidates staked out positions on healthcare that essentially became bellwethers for their willingness to topple established systems, and off we went. As is so often the case, our politics were reflecting the fascinations of the electorate, an electorate that like many populations across the globe is largely finding itself on the wrong end of rapidly widening resource and income inequality gaps.

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TRADE RATING: ROADQUEEN manga features a compelling story of love and motorcylces

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By Danielle L. — Last month as part of Trade Rating, I wrote about the 2017 Kristen Gudsnuk comic, Henchgirl. Today I’ve decided to change things up a bit, and so I’m going to be writing about manga. Specifically, the manga I’ve chosen to discuss today is Roadqueen: Eternal Roadtrip to Love, which is both written and illustrated by Mira Onga Chua.

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