Please note that this review is based on the UK release by Sphere. A North American edition is also available from Papercutz. * * * With a press run of five million copies (three million of those in French) and translated into almost 20 languages simultaneously, the 40th Asterix album, "The White Iris," was released at the end of October 2023. It is the sixth album of the series to be illustrated by Didier Conrad, and the first to be scripted by the “star” of French humor, Fabrice Caro (Fabcaro)—a comics scriptwriter, prose novelist and musician—following a rigorous selection process conducted ..read more

Robbins and Mary Fleener (head turned) at the San Diego Comic Fest in March 2019. Photo by Chris Anthony Diaz, used with permission.INTRODUCTION I met Trina Robbins only once. It was last December, and she had come to New York to accept the Macherke Award at the inaugural Jewish Comics Experience convention and exhibition staged by the Center for Jewish History. I was intrigued by the fact that Robbins–who had as recently as 2011 said that her Jewishness had “not much” influence on her work, and that “mostly what influences my work is that I’m a woman”–seemed to be formalizing a late-period em ..read more

Trina Robbins and Steve Leialoha at the San Diego Comic Fest at the Four Points Sheraton in March 2019. Photo by Chris Anthony Diaz. Please Note: All Trina Robbins quotes in the following article are from her memoir, Last Girl Standing, published by Fantagraphics in 2017, unless noted otherwise. * * * “Well, I’ve been in this business a few years. It would be grossly naive and presumptuous to think that a comic book can change the world’s thinking. But it doesn’t hurt to try.” Trina Robbins–a fictionalized version of Trina, anyway, one who lived and worked as a comic book creator in the DC Uni ..read more

With the changing of the seasons, the passing of the years, and a look at my comics shelves that are nearly full once again, my thoughts slip away to how things used to be - back when publishers entering the age of collected editions seemed vehemently opposed to series numbering appearing on the spines (I’ve never been a buyer of periodicals (boo, hiss, chiz, etc), except for indies and small presses), and so I’d have to spend a good deal of my non-refundable lifespan in shops squinting at indicia, trying to figure out which volume was the next I’d need to buy, in order not to skip 20-odd issu ..read more

Robert Beerbohm at an early comic book convention. All photos courtesy of Kathryn Beerbohm Young. Comics historian and retailer Robert Beerbohm died on March 27 at his home in Fremont, Nebraska, after battling colorectal cancer. He was 71.  As the New York Times notes in its obituary, Beerbohm was one of the co-founders, along with Bud Plant and John Barrett, of what is considered to be the first comic book retail chain, Comics and Comix. The store initially opened in Berkeley, California, in 1972, but later expanded to seven locations. After parting ways he opened his own store, Best of ..read more

Newspaper comics take many forms, from domestic comedies, to funny animals, to workplace drama. But one workplace seldom seen in the funny pages is the retail store environment. From 2006 to 2020, Norm Feuti wrote and drew Retail, a syndicated strip surprisingly low on wacky antics, preferring to deal with the mundane farce of retail employees stuck between intractable corporate policy and arbitrarily unreasonable customers. Feuti spoke with me about this and the other comics of his career. -William Schwartz The January 1, 2006 installment of Retail, a comic strip by Norm Feuti. WILLIAM SCHWAR ..read more

“Tetsuwan Atomu no nazo” Episode 12 of “Natsume Fusanosuke’s Manga Yarns” (“Natsume Fusanosuke no manga yotabanashi, sono 12”), posted on November 30, 2022. Translated by Jon Holt & Teppei Fukuda * * * ​Tezuka Osamu’s Astro Boy (Tetsuwan Atomu) originally began in the monthly magazine Shōnen (Boys, published by Kōbunsha), with the character first appearing in the Ambassador Atom story serialized from 1951 to 1952, before he was repurposed as the protagonist picking up with the April 1952 issue of the magazine; his series would continue until the magazine folded with its final March 1968 i ..read more

Hi. How’re things going for you? Pretty awful? Yeah, me too. I don’t know what else to do, so I’ll just write about some more comics. Crooked Teeth #9 by Nate Doyle Here we have part four of the ongoing “Blood and Thunder” story, which takes up 23 pages in the ninth issue of Nate Doyle’s one-man anthology. God bows to math. Honestly, if anyone gets anything out of this monthly column I hope it’s this: it should be mandatory for cartoonists to include at least one “In the Previous Issue…” page if they are working a serial story. I’ve saved Comics now, thank you. With all that said, I’m glad I ..read more

Back in 2015, when I was chewing over an exhausting congratulatory message for Alex Niño's then-75th birthday, cleverly disguised as an article for a German newspaper and to be later refurbished when working as a Comics Journal scribe on saluting his 80th birthday, I became convinced that there wouldn't be more new material from the absolute master of the form that the Filipino artist was and still is. To use a phrase lifted from countless letters to the editor in comics published during the 1970s and 1980s, books from the former Big Two where Niño was so prominent: “Boy, was I wrong.” German ..read more

I first encountered Matt Lesniewski's comics while sitting in a candlelit church waiting for a violin and piano duet to walk onto the podium and play the hits of Fleetwood Mac. It was then that I received a text from a friend that read “Check this out” with a link to Lesniewski’s incredibly detailed work. The few minutes before the concert spent scrolling and zooming under candlelight left a strong enough impression on me to order all of his comics when I made it home (after an excellent duet). While I was at first unsure of how to conceptualize the shifts in Lesniewski’s style over the years ..read more