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In the hinterlands of old Norway, Leidah Pietersdatter is born blue-skinned, with webbed hands and feet. Upon every turn of season, her mother, Maeva, worries as her daughter’s peculiarities blossom inside the root of the tiny child, a strange power is taking hold.Maeva tries to hide the girl from the suspicious townsfolk of the austere village of Ørken, just as she conceals her own magical ancestry from her daughter. And Maeva’s adoring husband, Pieter, wants nothing more than for his new family to be accepted by all. But unlike Pieter, who is blinded by love, Maeva is aware that the villagers, who profess a rigid faith to the new God and claim to have abandoned the old ways, are watching for any sign of transgression and are eager to pounce and punish. Following both mother and daughter from the shadows and through time, an inquisitive shapeshifter waits for the Fates to spin their web, and for Maeva to finally reclaim who she once was. And as Maeva’s elusive
This ended up having to be a double column and a bit late because I spent the last two weeks in self-isolation after a Covid exposure. Now I’m back in the world (more or less – I’m under a stay at home order) and I got to catch up on two week’s worth of comics!
Best Comics of the Fortnight:
Beta Ray Bill #1 – I’ve loved Beta Ray Bill since I first saw him in Walter Simonson’s Thor comics, and have long felt like he’s criminally underused in the Marvel Universe. I was really happy to see that he’s getting his own miniseries, and that it’s written and drawn by Daniel Warren Johnson, who is an incredible creator. This issue ties in with the King In Black event, as Bill attempts to save Asgard from a symbiote-covered Fin Fang Foom. Johnson does amazing work here – Bill looks really cool, and he has a strong feel for the character’s tragic side. He also recognizes how he’s always stuck in Thor’s shadow. I enjoyed Johnson’s recent Wonder Woman Bla
Top 20 Manga Graphic Novels For March 2021
While we saw the overall month explored before with the general mix of graphic novels for the month of March 2021, ICv2 has now broken out the manga to its own category to explore and see how things went down. Unsurprisingly, it’s once again a month dominated by Viz Media with only three slots not theirs. Kodansha Comics ranks fifth with the first volume of
Attack on Titan while Yen Press grabs two spots for the first and second volumes of
Toilet-Bound Hanako-kun.
With Viz Media, it is again the big block of mainline titles taking up space here with lots of new and first volumes for popular series. But so many of these backlist titles are even edging out new volumes of pretty popular series that didn’t chart in the top twenty nor did the new
Top 20 Adult Graphic Novels For March 2021
The folks at ICv2 have pulled together the data to build a top twenty list of what moved during the month of March 2021 when it came to non-kids graphic novels. The month tends to be filled pretty heavily with manga and that is the case here once again. Out of the twenty spots, all twenty of them are manga titles – showing that manga sales are pretty dominant over American comic trades these days.
Of those slots, it’s no surprise that
My Hero Academia dominates with six volumes charting here. We do see
Chainsaw Man doing well with the top spot and the third volume also charting. A lot of first volumes are still charting high as people get into projects, which ICV2 notes is a trend during the pandemic, with some good titles making ground with subsequent volumes adding to their overall haul.
Copy
Graphic novels fold drawings of people, space, and time into their narrative structure to produce powerful visual stories. Graphic novels and architecture also share a set of common tools that are central to their depiction drawing, sequencing, text, action, character, etc. This makes for a natural allegiance between graphic novels, architecture, and the city. In this episode, Stewart pulls the graphic novels off his bookshelf to show how and why they influenced his approach to architectural design and led to the creation of award-winning competition entries. In particular, David Mazzuchelli’s City of Glass and Asterios Polyp, and Chris Ware’s Building Stories offer lessons for developing a holistic approach to architecture that involves multiple points of view, politics, fiction, and visionary design.