When Canadian cartoonist and musician Geneviève Castrée passed away in 2016 at age 35, she left behind heartbroken friends who had long recognised her genius, as well as an audience…
“Perfect cheer-me-up”, is how a reader describes Revenge of the Librarians, Tom Gauld’s latest collection of comic strips, on an online forum. As a succinct critique of everything he does,…
There’s a reason established musicians sometimes put out collections of early demos, late into their careers. There’s a hint of vanity, of course, underpinning the assumption that someone wants to…
The period between childhood and adulthood has confounded, engaged, and frustrated the world’s most amazing minds. To write about this transition is to account not just for physical or intellectual…
It would perhaps be of some tiny comfort if we could say that when Darryl Cunningham’s Putin’s Russia: The Rise of a Dictator was published by Myriad Editions in the…
“The world’s most destructive oil operation.” That is the description National Geographic went with for a 2019 profile of Alberta’s oil sands region north of Fort McMurray. A distressing report…
The handle ‘@birdsofmainecomic’ on Instagram has over 450 posts and a little over 7,400 followers. Each panel gets hundreds of likes, and Michael DeForge’s bio for the comic promises a…
In 2017, Martine van Elk, professor of English at California State University, published a comparative study of early modern English and Dutch women writers. It documented responses by women to…
Storytellers use the world they inhabit to shape the stories they choose to tell. When looked at from this perspective, there is nothing particularly weird about Rumi Hara’s stories, despite…
There are moments in every memoir involving a certain kind of trauma where one can sense the writer reaching deep within to find something worth holding on to. Those moments…
Nostalgia is a tricky thing, painting the past to be a lot rosier than it often is. That overriding scepticism comes to the fore whenever the great Lynda Barry approves…
There is something extremely perceptive about Luke Healy’s response to a question about what he expects readers to take away from his work. He says he wants them to make…
School libraries in America banned more books in 2021 than ever before. Adding to this disturbing fact is the possibility that the LGBTQ+ community in that country is under attack….
A colostomy involves the creation of an opening for the colon through the abdomen. The cartoonist Matthew Thurber refers to it as something in the body that passes out in…
There is an early panel in Time Zone J where a version of Roy Lichtenstein’s 1962 pop art painting, Kiss II, appears to show up. One isn’t quite sure about…
It is impossible to read Emily Carrington’s graphic memoir, Our Little Secret, dispassionately. The pages are weighed down by her documentation of a traumatic personal history, but so many panels…
To immerse oneself in a book by Darryl Cunningham is the equivalent of signing up for a history lesson by a particularly engaging lecturer. This isn’t only because of his…
It sometimes feels as if Jeff VanderMeer lives in a world far removed from our own. The American writer was once referred to ‘the weird Thoreau’ and even a cursory…
“My Brain Broke, and Out Came Donuts” – Neill Cameron Looks Back on ‘Mega Robo Bros’ and Forward with ‘Donut Squad’, the Latest Smash Hit Strip from the Pages of ‘The Phoenix’November 4, 2025
“The Biggest Challenge for Me Was Having to Think More Like a Director” – Michael Schwartz on Writing for Comics for the First Time and His Supernatural Ghost Story ‘Armored’October 31, 2025
“It’s a Fantasy Adventure about Growing Up” – Joe Latham Talks ‘Haru’, the Self-Publishing Journey, and Using Colour as a Narrative ToolOctober 30, 2025
“I Cannot Wait to Really Dig into the Nuts and Bolts of Literary Adaptation” – Kristen Haas Curtis on Bringing Chaucer to Comics and on Moderating the Thought Bubble Literary Adaptation PanelOctober 29, 2025
“Themes Around Human Connection and Loneliness Are a Constant Throughline in All of My Works” – Rein Lee on Exploring Identity and Queerness in Comics, and Finding Your Way in the Small Press CommunityOctober 28, 2025
