Courtesy of Sloane Leong/John Paul Leon/Adrian Tomine
From heartbroken Canadian cartoonists to Superman punching racists, this year s top releases had a lot to say about the world we ve been living in over the last twelve months.
It’s been a rough year for the comics industry, with the COVID pandemic forcing many stores to go into temporary shutdown (and, sadly, some stores to close permanently). Publishers, too, were affected, with some halting production and others pulling back on plans including previously scheduled projects as the industry tried to come to terms with the new reality of 2020’s pandemic year.
December 18, 2020 3:00pm
by
Graeme McMillan
Courtesy of Sloane Leong/John Paul Leon/Adrian Tomine
From heartbroken Canadian cartoonists to Superman punching racists, this year s top releases had a lot to say about the world we ve been living in over the last twelve months.
It’s been a rough year for the comics industry, with the COVID pandemic forcing many stores to go into temporary shutdown (and, sadly, some stores to close permanently). Publishers, too, were affected, with some halting production and others pulling back on plans including previously scheduled projects as the industry tried to come to terms with the new reality of 2020’s pandemic year.
âKent Stateâ On Top of PWâs 2020 Graphic Novel Critics Poll By PW Staff |
Released in September during the 50th anniversary year of the 1970 tragedy,
Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio (Abrams ComicArts) by veteran comics journalist Derf Backderf garnered the majority of votes in
PW’s annual Graphic Novel Critic’s Poll, receiving eight votes from a panel of 14 comics critics.
In this deeply researched work, Backderf, best known for his Eisner-nominated 2012 graphic nonfiction work
My Friend Dahmer, reconstructs the lives and last days of the student activists and bystanders killed when the National Guard fired on unarmed antiwar protesters on the campus of Kent State University. The book presents a nuanced portrait of the equally young National Guardsmen, who were under extreme pressure and suffered from a severe lack of training, while deftly examining the polarized political context, anti-communist paranoia, and rampant government surveilla
Portland creators are getting in on the boom.
By
Julia Silverman
12/13/2020 at 5:00am
Published in the December 2020 issue of
Portland Monthly
An hour before the panel of authors was set to take the stage, the line at the 2019 Portland Book Festival event was already at least 1,000 hard-core, book-clutching fans deep, most of them craning their necks and standing on tiptoe, trying to game out whether they were close enough to the front of the line to snag a spot inside the 376-seat Whitsell Auditorium in the Portland Art Museumâs basement.
Clearly, festival organizers had underestimated the intense enthusiasm for the featured authorsânot pop sociologist Malcolm Gladwell or former United Nations ambassador Susan Rice, who were the festivalâs nominal headlinersâbut instead a group of middle-grade graphic novelists, among them one of the formatâs biggest rock stars, Bay Area author-illustrator Raina Telgemeier, whose 2010 debut memoir,
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