Author: Jessica Baldanzi

Photo by Jill Steinmetz I’ve been a comics fangirl since I was a kid—Betty and Veronica to my big brother’s Spider-Man comics—and Chris Ware and Lynda Barry helped complicate my understanding of the genre when I lived in Chicago and their comics were serialized in New City and The Chicago Reader. I first brought comics into my professional life when I created and taught a course called The Graphic Novel in 2008. I’ve taught that class many times since then, have also given talks about comics to general audiences and scholars alike. Commons Comics began in 2013 as a way for me to learn how to blog and to stay current in the field. It was hosted first by my college, then picked up by The Elkhart Truth, a local newspaper, before I moved it to my own page. I teach English at Goshen College, a small but mighty liberal arts school in the “Michiana” area, east of Chicago on the border of Michigan and Indiana. My specialty in graduate school was twentieth-century and more recent American Literature, but my teaching has brought me into multiple fields. My upper-level courses have ranged from critical theory and gender and popular culture to memoir writing, and my introductory courses from to composition and speech to creative writing. I am now co-editing an essay collection with comics and religion scholar Hussein Rashid about Kamala Khan, the new Ms. Marvel. Look for it on the University Press of Mississippi in the coming year. (Working title: Ms. Marvel in America.)
Posted on

Growing Up in Comics: “The Love Bunglers,” by Jamie Hernandez

In late October, I’ll be reviewing “The Dragonslayer,” a TOON Graphics collection of Latin American folktales by Jaime Hernandez. If you’re not familiar with Hernandez, he’s a massive figure in the U.S. literary scene. Here’s a bit more context in an post from December 2014, the early days of Commons Comics at the “Elkhart Truth.”

Thanks to Better World Books, 215 S. Main St. in Goshen, for providing me with books to review. You can find all of these books at the store.

 

I’ve been reviewing a lot of young adult books here on Commons Comics since it moved to the “Truth” back in August, partly because I’m wary of breaking into comics that put the “graphic” in “graphic novel.” But this reluctance means that I’ve been neglecting a seminal subset of work that makes comics great. So, fair warning: Jamie Hernandez’s new collection “The Love Bunglers” contains nudity, offensive language, and a sex scene. Don’t buy this book for young kids as a holiday gift. But please also don’t dismiss this brilliant work because of a couple of pages that show adults being adults. Continue reading “Growing Up in Comics: “The Love Bunglers,” by Jamie Hernandez”

Posted on

Jersey Justice: Review of “Ms. Marvel: No Normal”

This post was originally published by the Elkhart Truth in November of 2014. Ms. Marvel hit its 50th issue in June, and the collected trade of the series is now up to Volume 9, which just came out in July. If you haven’t read this series, it’s the perfect time to start: you’ve got a year or two to get caught up before the release of the Ms. Marvel film.

Thanks to Better World Books, 215 S. Main St. in Goshen, for providing me with books to review. You can find all of the books I review at the store, or order them for free if they’re out.

“Some people get to hide out in space stations. I get a Circle Q.” So speaks the edgy yet grounded Kamala Khan, a.k.a. the new Ms. Marvel. In “Ms. Marvel: No Normal,” the first collected trade volume of the most recent incarnation of Ms. Marvel, Khan is a second-generation Pakistani-American from Jersey City who has just inherited superpowers she doesn’t yet fully understand. She’s a Muslim teenager who writes superhero fan fiction, both loves and resents her parents, and like many North American teenagers no matter their faith or lack thereof, just wants to fit in. Continue reading “Jersey Justice: Review of “Ms. Marvel: No Normal””

Posted on

“Sabrina,” by Nick Drnaso

“Sabrina,” by Nick Drnaso. 204 pp. Drawn and Quarterly. Cloth, $27.95. Adult.

Drawn and Quarterly sent me a free review copy of this book. Thanks also to Better World Books, 215 S. Main St. in Goshen, for providing me with books to review. You can find or order all of the books I review at the store.

You might expect the first graphic novel to be nominated for Britain’s high literary Man Booker Prize to prove energetic, possibly frenetic, trying to accomplish in images what past winners—powerhouse novels like “Life of Pi” or “Lincoln in the Bardo”—have done with just words.

Yet flip through the pages of Nick Drnaso’s “Sabrina,” and it looks drab, muffled, absent any emotion. Characters range from lumpy to boxy, usually with mere dots for eyes, echoing the work of Chris Ware and Rutu Modan. Yet unlike Ware’s and Modan’s figures, Drnaso’s characters move slowly—painfully slowly. Continue reading ““Sabrina,” by Nick Drnaso”