Todd Klein's Blog, page 374

And Then I Read: DAYTRIPPER 5-7

I've come to look forward to each issue of this book as a refreshing view of life on a different continent and in a different but somewhat familiar society, and as a new look at some of the book's characters each time. The simple idea of telling about the life of one Brás de Oliva Domingos and his friends and relations, usually one day per issue, always a different year per issue, is fascinating. The story skips around to all different ages (ages 11, 38 and 33 in these issues), and the...

And Then I Read: LOVE AND CAPES: GOING TO THE CHAPEL

© Thomas Zahler.

Thom Zahler is a smart man. I was not surprised when he sent me a package of his LOVE AND CAPES issues a while back, hoping I'd read and review them. I did, and liked them enough to happily buy this second collection of the series. What I like best about it is the characters, the situations (it is a situation comedy, after all) and the humor. The comics context and in-jokes are a bonus if you're a longtime comics reader.

The first six issues culminated in Crusader proposing to ...

And Then I Read: LOCKE & KEY, WELCOME TO LOVECRAFT

© Joe Hill and IDW, LLC.

Sitting next to writer Chris Roberson in San Diego, we were talking comics, and he raved about this new series, and its writer Joe Hill. "The guy can do anything, he's already won awards for his horror writing, and now he's doing comics. I wanted to hate it, but instead I was very impressed." (Chris, forgive me if I've just put words in your mouth, but that was the gist of it.) I had to get the collection and read it after that endorsement, and I completely agree.

LOCKE...

Incoming: INTO THE LAND OF SHADOWS

© King Features Syndicate.

Here's the first of several things I got in San Diego that you might be interested in. My friend Gary Gianni has been drawing the Sunday comic strip Prince Valiant for several years now, and this year King Features has allowed him to collect about a year's worth of strips, reformat them to magazine size (8.5 by 12.25 inches), and publish them himself under his own Hieronymus Press imprint. With dialogue and I assume co-plotting by Mark Schultz, the stories here...

Sand By For Mars!

We did go to the beach again Sunday, and while it began with cloudy weather and a light shower, it cleared later and warmed to a fine beach day. Tim, Gabe and I were sand sculpting, of course. Tim wanted to try his spiral pyramid again, but smaller, while I decided to carve a spaceship. Not a realistic one, but the kind seen on science fiction magazines in the 1950s. I began with a tall tower created with the pancake method, stacks of very wet sand pancakes, then started carving it away.

My...

Ziggurat in the Sand

My friend Tim and his son Gabe are here for the weekend, and as usual, we went to the beach to construct something out of sand, among other things like swimming. Tim always arrives with interesting ideas, and this year it was for a large pyramid with a spiral path to the top. We began by making the sand pile.

Here's the finished pile, packed down and sprinkled with water to keep it solid and moist. Now, I would have simply cut the spiral path out of this, but Tim had other ideas.

Using...

And Then I Read: BLACKSAD

Images © Juan Díaz Canales & Juanjo Guarnido.

I've been wanting to read BLACKSAD for years, having heard many good things about it, and this new Dark Horse hardcover collecting the three European albums published so far (with English translation) was the perfect chance. And the book itself is about as close to graphic and story perfection as I've seen in some time. Blacksad is a private detective operating in a film noir world, playing on all those themes, and weightier ones like racial...

And Then I Reread: LORD OF LIGHT

© Roger Zelazny estate.

I was already an avid Roger Zelazny fan when I bought this book in 1969. I'd even read two of the seven sections of it in "Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine," and been quite impressed with those. After my first reading of this complete novel I put the author on a par with my two other favorites, J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert Heinlein. But while I've reread many of their works many times, I don't think I'd reread this one until now, so I was interested to see how it...

And Then I Read: THE REVENGE OF RANDAL REESE-RAT

© Tor Seidler, illustration © Brett Helquist.

If you can suspend your disbelief long enough to accept a society of New York City rats that act more like people than animals, and live in the underground pipes and the docks of the city, you might find this book entertaining. It's a sequel to "A Rat's Tale," which I reviewed previously. The title character was the love interest of the first book's heroine, Isabel until she was swept off her feet by Montague, a classic artistic loner who won...

Home Again

Monday was my travel day, and it went pretty well. There was a 45 minute delay for bad weather in Dallas, my plane-change city, which isn't too bad. Got home around 11 PM. Today, after unpacking and getting caught up with mail and print orders I was back to work, but it's always a tough slog the first day. I keep nodding off at the computer. Not enough sleep. There was plenty of lettering work waiting for me, no surprise, so I'll be playing catchup this week, and we have company coming for...