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.)
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Cloudy with a Chance of Manga: “Sunny” by Taiyo Matsumoto

A version of this post was originally published in the “Elkhart Truth” in August or September of 2014. Volume Six of “Sunny” was released in November 2016 to complete the series.

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.

Not much is sunny at Star Kids Home, the Japanese foster home where Taiyo Matsumoto’s “Sunny” is set. This series is much closer to “Little Orphan Annie” than to “Sesame Street,” but without either the wealthy benefactor or the clear-cut villains. Most of the young residents of Star Kids Home have living parents unable to care for them, but for unexplained reasons. Continue reading “Cloudy with a Chance of Manga: “Sunny” by Taiyo Matsumoto”

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A Story of Improbable Hope: “Fatherland: A Family History” by Nina Bunjevac

This review first ran in the “Elkhart Truth” in April 2015.

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.

Nina Bunjevac’s “Fatherland” is about many things, some quite difficult, some—like the history of the former Yugoslavia—quite dense. At root, this story is about a young girl losing a father she barely knew. Peter Bunjevac, a Serbian nationalist, died in a garage explosion in 1977 in his adopted country of Canada. No one knows exactly what happened, but he was likely assembling bombs. His daughter Nina was preschool age at the time, living in Yugoslavia with her mother, sister, and grandparents.

Now in her forties and living in Toronto, Bunjevac understands a lot more, both about the history of the region that her parents came from—now Croatia—and about the politics behind the Serbian loyalist terrorist organization with which her father became entangled. Continue reading “A Story of Improbable Hope: “Fatherland: A Family History” by Nina Bunjevac”

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“From Lone Mountain,” by John Porcellino

From Lone Mountain, by John Porcellino. 304 pages, Drawn and Quarterly, March 2018. Paperback, 22.95.

NOTE: Drawn and Quarterly sent me a free review copy of this book.

Thanks 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.

This is King Cat:

This is his creator, John Porcellino:

Continue reading ““From Lone Mountain,” by John Porcellino”