Kelson Reviews Comics

Birding Is My Favorite Video Game ★★★★★ Rosemary Mosco
A fun collection of cartoons about nature (not just birds!) collected from Bird and Moon. Mostly funny, a few serious.

Chivalry

Detailed calligraphy with a knight in armor and an old woman in a modern apron on either side of the holy grail.

★★★★★ Neil Gaiman and Colleen Doran
Beautifully drawn and illustrated, a charming tale of Arthurian legend brought into modern times.

The Comic Bug ★★★★★ Open, inviting, and kid-friendly, with friendly staff and a wide selection. Frequent artist/writer signings.

Comics Toons N’ Toys ★★★★★ The best comic store I’ve been to in Orange County. The staff is friendly and helpful, and the selection is incredible.

Dark Knights: Metal ★★★☆☆ Scott Snyder, Greg Capullo, and Jonathan Glapion
The art is great, and the scope is ambitious, but the story follows the same beats as Final Crisis.

Final Crisis (Audio and Graphic Novel)

Superman grimly holds the lifeless body of Batman, with other members of the Justice League behind them.

It actually flows better than the comic book, especially toward the end, when the comic starts fragmenting the narrative.

Final Crisis: Revisiting the Tie-Ins Superman Beyond is essential. Submit and Reqiuem show the street-level perspective. Rogues Revenge is not a good as I remember.

Flash: Stop Motion (Audio)

Album cover: Painted close-up of the Flash's torso while running, motion blur added.

Mark Schultz
The concepts are intriguing, the characters are handled well, and the full cast and sound effects make up for the lack of visuals in superhero novels.

Good Time Travel Comics ★★★★★ Some DC stories I can recommend include DC One Million, JLA: Rock of Ages, Time Masters, and Chronos.

iZombie (graphic novels)

A figure wrapped in bandages like a mummy, wearing a smoking jacket, lifts the cover from a food tray to reveal a brain. Reflected in the lid, a woman with short white hair, yellow eyes and very pale skin is licking her lips as she looks at the brain.

★★★★★ Chris Roberson, Mike & Laura Allred, Todd Klein
A horror/comedy that ranges from Scooby Doo to Lovecraft by way of Moorcock, featuring thinking zombies, vampires who run paintball, ghosts, secret societies, and a were-terrier. Off the wall concepts and a clean, sharp art style that contrasts with the monsters and gore. The TV series was loosely based on these comics.

New Spring (Comic Book) #1

Character collage: Portraits of two women, looking downward to the left and right. Behind each is another woman standing, one regally in an elaborate blue dress with a necklace and hair ornaments, the other in a plain white dress. They are also looking away from the center. In front are three men standing, two in armor with swords drawn. The man in the center is holding up his sword, dividing the image in half. The man on the right is holding his sword pointing downward. The man on the left is wearing middle-ages-looking clothes and balancing the point of a dagger on a fingertip.

The first issue of the New Spring comic book was surprisingly good.

New Spring (Comics): The Long Publishing Saga It’s taken a long time (and three publishers) to complete this adaptation of the Wheel of Time prequel, even though it only covered eight standard-sized comic books

Pebble and Wren ★★★★★ Chris Hallbeck
Hilarious and heartwarming tale of a girl and the monster who lives under her bed.

Stan Lee’s Starborn

Cover featuring a man in sci-fi armor standing with his arms out in front of a column of purple energy and yelling.

Stan Lee, Chris Roberson and Khary Randolph
An unpublished writer discovers that the science fiction saga he’s been building since childhood is actually very, very real. And it wants him dead.

Tales From The Bully Pulpit

Comic book cover. A blue woman with antennae and long white hair wearing a red jumpsuit clings to Teddy Roosevelt (in his classic suit and cowboy hat), who wields a lit torch against menacing green aliens (also with antennae) in space suits. In the distance, a man sits in a high-tech chair surrounded by a floating bubble. Stars and planets are visible in the background.

★★★★★ Benito Cereno and Graeme MacDonald
A sci-fi comedy graphic novel featuring a time-traveling Teddy Roosevelt and the ghost of Thomas Edison, battling a descendant of Adolf Hitler. On Mars. Wearing mecha armor.

Tinyview Comics ★★★★☆ Good comics formatted for small screens.

A Wizard of Earthsea (Graphic Novel)

A painting, either watercolor or a similar style. Seen from above, a lone figure stands on a sandy beach, holding a staff. His shadow stretches back toward the ocean, toward the bottom of the image, widening and losing its shape as it crosses the line of foam and falls on the blue-green water beyond it. The land and sea are almost, but not quite, evenly split, with a curving line of wet sand running across the middle of the cover.

★★★★★ Ursula K. Le Guin and Fred Fordham
Fordham’s watercolor-style art is absolutely gorgeous. The adaptation plays to the medium’s strengths, allowing the visuals to tell the story when possible, keeping Le Guin’s prose when needed. Wide seascapes, rocky coasts, forested landscapes, people (not whitewashed!) and dragons…