Boing Boing » Comics

Carry On X-Men

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 02:56:58 +0000

Chris Weston's poster for a notional "Carry On X-Men" has me wanting very badly to inhabit his alternate universe. He says of the film, "Despite the bawdy humour, 'Carry on X-Men' is in many ways more faithful to the source material than Bryan Singer's films. Definitely one of the best of the later 'Carry On' films."

Carry On X-Men poster (Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

Tank Girl cosplay

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 20:00:52 +0000

KayLynn-Syrin's Tank Girl cosplay is just about the greatest bringing-to-life of one of my fave comic characters I've ever seen.

Tank Girl!

Superformula against cancer: Superhero chemotherapy for child cancer patients in Brazil

Xeni Jardin — Fri, 14 Jun 2013 17:35:37 +0000

Ad agency JWT Brazil created a "Superformula" to fight cancer. Here's a video explaining the project. They worked with the A.C. Camargo Cancer Center in Brazil and another agency client, Warner Bros., to transform chemotherapy into "superformula" with hopes of changing child patients' negative perception of the treatment.

As someone who has gone through the hell that is chemotherapy as an adult, I love this idea and wish I'd had some myself.

The agency explains:

We made covers for intravenous bags based on characters from the 'Justice League.' Creating, for the first time, a child-friendly version of the treatment. Co-developed with doctors, the covers are easy to sterilize and handle and meet all hospital hygiene standards. To give these covers a more powerful meaning, we started to produce a special series of cartoons and comic books in which the superheroes go through experiences similar to those of kids with cancer, and recover their strength, thanks to this "Superformula."
An experience that went far beyond the covers by also providing a new look to the entire Children'sWard: the game room was turned into the Hall of Justice, corridors and doors were decorated in the same theme, and the exterior acquired an exclusive entrance for these little heroes.
An idea which, since it has been up and running, is helping the children in their own struggle against one of the real world's greatest villains.

Video Link. Man, someone's cutting onions up in here.

(Thanks, Doug Maddox!)

Twin Peaks art show in Los Angeles

David Pescovitz — Wed, 12 Jun 2013 18:11:31 +0000

Meltdown, my favorite Los Angeles comix shop, is currently exhibiting "Damn Fine Coffee: An Artistic Tribute to Twin Peaks." The show of work by several dozen talented artists runs through June 21. Above, Kate Freund's "Bob the Bunny" (plush) and Sara Pocock's "Diane" (digital print). You can also check out the art right here!

Kickstarting an omnibus edition of the Digger webcomic

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 18:48:19 +0000

Carl sez, "Remember Digger, Ursula Vernon's Eisner award nominated/Hugo Award winning webcomic about a wombat searching for a way home? Publisher Sofa Wolf has launched a Kickstarter for an all-in-one omnibus edition. It's currently available in six individual volumes or free online, but this will put it all in one convenient book. Plus it's the first kickstarter to offer a wombat-sized pickaxe as a reward (in foam or metal)."

Digger Omnibus (Thanks, Carl!)

Akissi: kids' comic about a mischievous girl in Cote D'Ivoire [now in the USA!]

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 13:23:55 +0000

Back in April, I reviewed Akissi, a delightful kids' comic about a mischievous little girl in Cote D'Ivoire, translated from the original French. Back then, it was only available in the UK, but as of today, you can buy it in the USA, too! Here's my original review:

Akissi is a French-language comic about the adventures of a little West African girl, now available in English translation thanks to the astoundingly excellent Flying Eye, a new kids' imprint of London's NoBrow. It was created by Marguerite Abouet, whom you may know from Aya, a series of comics for adults set in Cote d'Ivoire, widely available and appreciated in English translation.
Akissi's adventures are both universal and absolutely particular to her milieu. My young daughter -- born and raised in London -- has never kept a pet monkey, had a tapeworm come out of her nose, or had to contend with an older brother who wouldn't take her pigeon hunting; but Akissi's struggles with authority, her close friendships, and her misunderstandings are immediately recognisable to my daughter and her friends when they come over, and I've read the book aloud to them a good half-dozen times since I brought it home last week. It's the perfect combination of gross-out humour, authority clashes, and general mischief to capture a kid's interest.

Akissi comprises seven short stories, each of which stands alone, and, as with all of the NoBrow titles, it is a beautiful package -- great binding, endpapers, paper stock, and spine -- suitable for both your own library and as a handsome gift.

Akissi [Amazon]

AKISSI [Flying Eye]

Walking Dead 18: a magnificent villain who makes Hannibal Lecter look like Mr Rogers

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 10 Jun 2013 14:50:48 +0000

When the 17th Walking Dead collection came out last December, I called it "grim," and mentioned that Kirkman and co had introduced some new bad guys that made the Governor seem like a Smurf. Well, now Book 18: What Comes After is out, and the new badguy, a psycho named Negan, is back, and holy. frigging. hell. is he ever evil. Seriously. Hannibal Lector is a comforting Mister Rogers figure next to him. If you like the TV show and haven't read the comics, do. You can get the entire emotional rollercoaster punch of a whole season in one or two volumes you'll be able to inhale in about an hour. By the time you get to book 18, you're basically mainlining it, distilling it to pure granules and letting them dissolve under your eyelids. And book 18 is special, even by those standards.

The Walking Dead 18: What Comes After

Previous volumes

Archie, the live action movie

David Pescovitz — Fri, 07 Jun 2013 17:37:45 +0000

Warner Bros. announced production of a live-action Archie film. According to the Washington Post, "Glee" writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa is working on the script that Jason Moore ("Pitch Perfect") will direct. And lest we forget the last time this was tried, here is a clip of the 1990 TV movie "Archie: To Riverdale and Back Again," which you can also watch in full here. (Gotta love Jughead dancing to The Replacements though.)

Doonesbury's transvaginal ultrasound/Republican state house strips

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 06 Jun 2013 17:49:23 +0000

I missed this back in March 2012, but it bears re-visiting. Here's a series of Doonesbury strips that some newspapers refused to run in spring 2012. The strips criticize Republican state legislatures' plans to require transvaginal probes for women contemplating abortion, with special emphasis on Texas governor Rick Perry.

Trudeau wrote: "Ninety-nine percent of American women have or will use contraception during their lifetimes. To see these healthcare rights systematically undermined in state after state by the party of 'limited government' is appalling. "In Texas, the sonograms are the least of it. The legislature has also defunded women's health clinics all over the state, leaving 300,000 women without the contraceptive services that prevent abortions in the first place. Insanity."
Trudeau is dismayed by the newspaper reaction. "I write the strip to be read, not removed. And as a practical matter, many more people will see it in the comics page than on the editorial page," he wrote.
"I don't mean to be disingenuous. Obviously there's some profit to controversy, especially for a satirist. If debate is swirling around a particular strip, and if its absence creates blowback, then I'm contributing to the public conversation in a more powerful way. But I don't get up in the morning and scheme about how to antagonise editors. Some of these folks have supported me for decades."

Oh, Texas... This is why I want to leave you. (via Reddit)

Beast Academy: grade three math textbooks in monster comics form

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 05 Jun 2013 12:56:32 +0000

Beast Academy is a set of grade three math textbooks and practice books structured as comic books about monsters. The books are "aligned to the common core state standards for grade three," if that matters to you. What's more significant is that they're actually really good math textbooks that introduce their subjects in a clear and easy-to-follow fashion, carefully linking each concept to the last; and the exercises are lively, fun, and built around stories that dovetail smoothly into puzzles, games, and other ways of putting the knowledge into practice. The monsters are great, too -- wonderful illustrations from Erich Owen, whose work you may recognize from the graphic novel adaptation of my story I, Robot.

Beast Academy 8-book set

UK's comics industry mag TRIPWIRE turns 21

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 17:00:19 +0000

Joel sez, "TRIPWIRE is a magazine that for over two decades has covered comics, genre and related fields. Described by Guillermo Del Toro as 'the touchstone of comic book culture in the UK and one of the leading periodicals dedicated to this narrative art form', this year sees the publication of TRIPWIRE 21, a book that celebrates 21 years of covering comics and its related culture. TRIPWIRE treats comics with the respect and depth that the field deserves."

Deluxe hardcover of Watchmen

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 03 Jun 2013 13:07:24 +0000

The new Deluxe Edition of Watchmen landed in my post-box today. It's a very well-made hardcover edition of one of the canonical modern graphic novels. Everyone should have at least one edition of Watchmen on the shelf, and this is a pretty nice one to have -- the classy, matte-finish dustjacket goes over a set of full-color boards with the traditional Watchmen cover-image. There's a couple dozen pages' worth of early sketches for the book, and a fascinating intro by illustrator Dave Gibbons. All told, a great package -- perfect for a gift, or to replace your tattered paperback.

Watchmen Deluxe Edition

Satan's Spiritual Scorecard: how'd you do?

Cory Doctorow — Sun, 02 Jun 2013 16:12:19 +0000

This list of the components of Satan's Spiritual Structure appears on handouts given to attendees at San Diego Comic-Con by evangelical picketers. It seems to originate with a Jack Chick Tract, though I'm not sure if the protesters elaborated on the original or if it came from ChickCorp itself. Still, it's a great party game: I scored 20. How'd you do?

Update: Mark posted this last year and it turns out it's a hoax handout, parodying those infamous Chick tracts. Too good to be true, I suppose.

Ronald McJoker

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 01 Jun 2013 03:22:37 +0000

This terrifying Ronald McDonald/Joker mashup cosplayer was snapped at San Jose's FanimeCon 2013 by David Ngo.

Ronald McDonald (via Neatorama)

Legal analysis of the conclusion to Dark Knight Rises

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 29 May 2013 01:00:49 +0000

If you saw The Dark Knight Rises, you know that at the end of the movie... [SPOILERS FOLLOW]

Bruce Wayne is declared legally dead, despite there not being any body. Law and the Multiverse tackles the thorny question of having someone declared dead, in a guest-post by ~~James Daily~~ Mike Lee:

As is Law and the Multiverse’s convention for Gotham, let’s look at New York law.
By statute, New York has reduced the common law’s seven-year period of required continuous absence to three years. N.Y. Est. Powers & Trusts Law § 2-1.7, available at http://codes.lp.findlaw.com/nycode/EPT/2/1/2-1.7. Alternatively, the statute establishes that exposure “to a specific peril of death” might suffice to establish death in absentia, even if the three-year statutory period has not yet run. Id. at § 2-1.7(b).
New York’s three-year timetable doesn’t help the Wayne estate much. So the question is whether Bruce has been “exposed to a specific peril of death” so as to meet the requirements of § 2-1.7(b).
Now, Batman clearly meets the requirements—a plane exploded with him apparently in it, so he could easily be declared dead without a body. This is the classic scenario for “specific peril”: missing planes, wreckage of boats found, houses burned to the ground, that sort of thing.
But this doesn’t help us much with Bruce Wayne, because the courts don’t know he was in the nuclear explosion that consumed the not-a-Batwing-Bat-plane. So what might count as “specific peril of death”?

Guest Post: The End of The Dark Knight Rises

Bank of Canada kills editorial cartoon, calls it "counterfeiting"

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 28 May 2013 17:11:29 +0000

Canadian Conservative senator Mike Duffy is in disgrace over the news that he submitted fraudulent expense claims totalling $90,000 and secretly borrowed a like sum from the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff to pay it (and kill an auditor's investigation into his conduct). So Dan Murphy drew an editorial cartoon depicting a notional Canadian $90,000 bill bearing Senator Duffy's leering face. But the toon only ran briefly, because the Bank of Canada threatened Canadian newspapers with criminal prosecution for counterfeiting if they ran it.

That gets to the crux of the matter. Laws that fight counterfeiting are fine (though really, any forger gifted enough to back-engineer a single-sided cartoon of a $90,000 bill that bears the image of Mike Duffy and a hologram of Nigel Wright deserves a medal, not jail time) but the Bank of Canada has no business playing Thought Police.
Parodies of bank notes are nothing new. In 1819, British cartoonist George Cruikshank, angered after seeing a woman hanged for passing a forged note, drew a Bank of England note that featured 11 men and women dangling from nooses. During the currency panic of 1837, a series of “shin plasters” — typically five- and six-cent bills — poked fun at U.S. economic policy.

Jack Knox: The ($90,000) Duffy buck stops here, Bank of Canada decides [Jack Knox/Times Colonist] (Thanks, Derryl!)

Oh Joy Sex Toy: dildo funnies

Cory Doctorow — Mon, 27 May 2013 18:16:32 +0000

Oh Joy Sex Toy is a weekly webcomic that features reviews of sex toys, porn, pinups, sex clubs -- basically, the whole pervy gamut. It is written and drawn with such gosh-darn sweet enthusiasm by Erika Moen (with the occasional guest-shot from husband Matthew, who provides a dude's perspective) that even if your tastes are tamer than Moen's, I think you'll find it a perfectly wonderful read.

Oh Joy Sex Toy - Introduction [NSFW] [Duh]

(Thanks, Fipi Lele!)

The Man Who Laughs: grotesque Victor Hugo potboiler was the basis for The Joker

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 23 May 2013 09:54:03 +0000

The Man Who Laughs is a graphic novel adaptation of a 1869 Victor Hugo novel that is chiefly remembered for inspiring a 1928 film whose poster-art, in turn, inspired the character of the Joker.

As legions of disappointed Batman fans have discovered, the Victor Hugo novel is just not very good. It's one of Hugo's later works, written from exile in the Channel Islands, and it's a meandering political treatise grafted onto a novel. But there is a novel in there, buried amongst the self-indulgence and sloppiness, and it's this that author David Hine and illustrator Mark Stafford have teased out to make an absolutely stunning and grotesque new work.

The titular Man of Laughs is Gwynplaine, a horribly deformed boy who rescues a blind baby from her frozen mother's breast and then rescued by a traveling doctor who takes them both in and turns them into performers. They tour the countryside, and Gwynplaine and his blind adopted sister Dea fall in love, even as their mountebank father, Ursus, teaches them about the injustices of the English monarchy and shows them the relationship between the dire poverty around them and the fatted lords and ladies in London.

Gwynplaine's destiny becomes further entangled with the English aristocracy when he is discovered to be a long-lost nobleman himself, and is inducted into the House of Lords, where he makes impassioned, revolutionary speeches that fall on deaf ears -- and is forced to confront that all the riches he's gained have cost him his family and his love.

This adaptation is remarkably streamlined and razor-sharp, flensed of Hugo's excess by Hine's pen; the accompanying grotesque illustrations by Stafford hit the perfect mix of horror and sorrow. The Man Who Laughs is out in the UK now, from the great press Self Made Hero, and will be out in the USA on Oct 1.

The Man Who Laughs

Little girl in a Stan Lee costume

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 22 May 2013 19:53:56 +0000

The bestest kid costume yet: tiny, female Stan Lee!

Little girl's cosplay of Stan Lee (i.imgur.com)

Jack Kirby's grandson is kickstarting a coffee-table book about the "King of Comics"

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 22 May 2013 16:24:52 +0000

Zack sez, "Jack 'King of Comics' Kirby's grandson is looking to raise funds for a coffee-table-sized book that will look at Kirby's life and times...along with a never-before-seen play by the master of comics. The book will include a wide variety of unpublished personal photographs and artwork from Kirby dating through the 1980s."

You have to pledge at least $50 to get a copy of the book, which is a lot, though the book sounds rather spectacular. Kirby's grandson doesn't list any publishing experience in his bio and doesn't list any helpers experienced in printing, layout, QA, or fulfillment, so caveat emptor.

Personal Look into the life of Jack Kirby The King Of Comics (Thanks, Zack!)

Kickstarting the next Girl Genius volume with Kaja and Phil Foglio

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 16 May 2013 21:00:09 +0000

Kaja and Phil Foglio have launched a Kickstarter to fund the printing of volume 12 of the wonderful Girl Genius webcomic, and to reprint the older books. These are multi-award-winning, independent steampunk delights, and $30 gets you "an actual, dead-tree, SOFTCOVER copy of Girl Genius Volume 12: Agatha Heterodyne and the Siege of Mechanicsburg. 192 pages in full color. Shipped to you by means of one of the largest government agencies on Earth!"

Printing the actual books is our biggest single expense. The first print run of a typical volume costs in excess of US$25,000. If that seems high, you must remember that we print eight thousand of them, and they usually run to around 120 pages. Our latest volume, number 12, will be even more expensive, as it comes in at 192 pages, and we’ll be printing nine thousand of them, because eight thousand wasn’t enough last time. Exciting? Yes, but one can’t pay the printer with excitement.
We also have to ship the books. Actually, we have to ship them twice. Once from the printer to the fulfillment center, and once again from the fulfillment center to the customer. And whether a book is shrink–wrapped with thousands of its friends onto a pallet and loaded into a truck, or carefully packaged for individual shipping, several thousand pounds of books cost serious money to transport.

It's got a short fuse on it because they want to get the books in hand in time for San Diego Comic-Con. Act now!

Girl Genius Volume 12 Printing and Reprint Frenzy! (Thanks, Phil!)

Hilda (from the kids' comic) as an 8" vinyl toy

Cory Doctorow — Thu, 16 May 2013 13:05:06 +0000

The good people at London's Nobrow Press have done an 8" vinyl toy for the outstanding kids' comic Hilda, created by Luke Pearson (reviews: Book 0, Book 1; Book 2). The Hilda toy is grownup-collector-expensive, but it's also a very nice piece -- I saw one in person last night when I brought my daughter and her friend to the Nobrow store on the way to our weekly daddy-daughter pizza dinner.

Hilda Toy

We Can Fix it! - a graphic novel time travel memoir

Mark Frauenfelder — Wed, 15 May 2013 23:40:17 +0000

Cartoonist Jess Fink, creator of the erotic Victorian-era robot graphic novel Chester 5000-XYV has a new memoir out called We Can Fix It: A Time Travel Memoir.

It's got a premise that reminds me of something Nicholson Baker would come up with: Fink invents a time machine and travels into the past to visit younger versions of herself to warn herself not to do things that she ended up regretting as an adult. She visits her college-age self and tries to stop her from taking a drug that gives her a bad trip. She tells her high-school-age self not to make out with an unsavory boy. She tries to save her elementary-school-age self from a scary encounter with her mentally ill, violent father when he goes on a rampage with a crowbar. She intervenes dozens of times, but does it do any good? I'll let you read it and decide for yourself.

Unlike Chester 5000-XYV, there's no nudity involved in We Can Fix it!, but it does contain a fair number of scenes in which Fink has sex with versions of herself, and many of the incidents are about Fink's sexual encounters as a teen and young adult. Despite some of the heavy subject matter, Fink tells the story with charm and a light heart and renders it with appealing art.

We Can Fix It: A Time Travel Memoir

Odd Duck: great picture book about eccentricity and ducks

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 15 May 2013 13:00:59 +0000

Cecil Castellucci and Sara Varon have a new picture-book/kids' comic out from FirstSecond today called Odd Duck, and it's a delight (no surprise there, I never met a Cecil Castellucci project I didn't like).

Odd Duck is the story of Theodora, "a perfectly normal duck" who likes her routine -- swimming, stretching, taking books out of the library, buying duck kibble, doing craft projects (with duck burlap, naturally) and star-gazing. When Chad moves in next door, Theodora can tell she's not going to get along with him. He makes weird abstract sculptures, dyes his feathers funny colors, and talks a mile a minute.

When both of them are stuck together overwinter (Theodora never manages to migrate, and Chad breaks his wing making abstract sculpture) they discover a shared love of the stars, and become best friends. But when they overhear a mean duck in town say, "Look at that odd duck!" they both assume she's talking about the other one, and that kicks off a rotten fight, and a lot of soul-searching.

This is a beautiful parable about eccentricity, friendship, self-awareness, the majesty of the night sky, and the benefits of balancing a cup of tea on your head (for posture!). The artwork is gorgeous (thanks to FirstSecond for supplying the first chapter excerpt below), and the writing is absolutely charming. When I got my advance copy, my five-year old demanded nightly readings of this one for a solid week.

Odd Duck

Phenomenal styrofoam cup art

David Pescovitz — Mon, 13 May 2013 18:32:54 +0000

This exquisitely-illustrated styrofoam cup is reportedly the work of an artist named William Hersey. More photos. (via Reddit)

Patrick "Electric Sheep" Farley returns with a new webcomic: Steve & Steve

Cory Doctorow — Sat, 11 May 2013 01:00:12 +0000

Stefan Jones sez, "Web comic master Patrick "Electric Sheep" Farley switches styles with frightening ease. The First Word, an enigmatic story about australopithecine, was done in lovely photorealistic CGI. His new work, Steve and Steve, is sharp line art with sepia-tones. It's about . . . Steve and Steve. Jobs and Wozniak, BSing about evolution, witchcraft, and the cold war under the skeleton of a ruined geodesic dome. I hope he can keep this one going."

Steve & Steve | Prelude: Electric Funeral (Thanks, Stefan!)

Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong: YA graphic novel about robots, romance and school elections

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 07 May 2013 12:45:52 +0000

Back in September 2012, I posted about Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong, a fantastic YA graphic novel about robotics, cheerleaders, and school council elections adapted by Faith Erin Hicks (a favorite of mine, thanks to great comics like Zombies Calling, Friends With Boys) from a YA novel by Prudence Shen. Hicks and her publisher, the ever-excellent FirstSecond, serialized the comic on the Web through much of 2012/13, and now they've published the book between covers.

Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong is a beautifully told story about a pair of unlikely friends: Charlie, a jock who is nevertheless rather uncompetitive, and Nate, a high-strung roboticist and head of the school robots team. The story kicks off with a conflict: the cheerleaders and the robots kids are squaring off to convince the student council to allocate crucial budget to each of them, and there's only enough for one. Nate decides he's going to solve the problem directly by getting himself elected council president. The cheerleaders retaliate by running Charlie against him, bulldozing him into the job with their military discipline and formidable organization. After the elections shenanigans get out of hand, they make an uneasy peace, predicated on the idea that if the robotics kids use some of the cheerleaders' money to militarize their prized robot, they can win enough at the robot games to pay for both teams' necessaries.

What follows is the most epic robot battle in comics history. Seriously. Screw the Transformers. Hicks's illustrated robot war makes use of every one of the comics creator's tricks to accomplish something genuinely pulse-pounding. It's like a killer mecha ate a copy of Understanding Comics.

Woven into all this is a series of relationship stories that are well-told, and provide richness and texture and depth to the story, reaffirming Hicks's position as an awesomesauce dispenser of great skill and reliability.

Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong

Homemade Thor's hammer with an 80,000 volt Tesla coil in it

Cory Doctorow — Fri, 03 May 2013 13:27:11 +0000

Not content with a "crappy plastic Thor's hammer," Caleb from Hackaday made himself a Tesla-coil-equipped Mjolnir with a tiny, 80,000 volt Tesla coil in its head. It shoots lightning! Lots of built photos on the Hackaday site, too.

I had seen some videos of [Staci Elaan] showing off her battery-powered coils and I really liked her results. I figured, with her experience, she could probably do a better job than I could on getting the most bang out of a small package. She was happy to be involved and delivered a small 12v powered coil for me to work with. I should also point out that the coils [Staci] makes are usually donated to educational groups. This woman is awesome.
She had built this big flat head on it, with the initial plan being that it would be the front “face” of the hammer. It didn’t really work out that way though. I ended up having to increase the size of the head a bit and change the orientation of the coil. I experimented with different types of foam and you can see in the “making of” video what I finally ended up using. The blue insulation board you see in the pictures melted way too easily.

High voltage Thor’s Hammer: Mjolnir at 80,000 volts

You're All Just Jealous of My Jetpack: a collection of Tom Gauld's brilliant cartoons

Mark Frauenfelder — Wed, 01 May 2013 13:30:30 +0000

My glib description of Tom Gauld's cartoons would be "a science fiction Edward Gorey." It's unfair though, because there's is only a superficial stylistic resemblance between the two writer/illustrators.

To read a Tom Gauld cartoon or illustrated book (see my reviews of The Gigantic Robot and Goliath) is to be entertained, but also to be affected on a deeper level, where timeless truths about the human condition wait for talents such as Gauld to tap a line into them and provide lesser mortals like me with a chance to taste them.

Gauld's new book, You're All Just Jealous of My Jetpack came out yesterday, and it consists of single panels that explore the passage of time, absurdism, and most of the 7 Deadly Sins, all presented with a sense of graceful whimsy that makes his work such a delight to read. Below, a sampling of You're All Just Jealous of My Jetpack.

Feynman graphic-novel biography out in paperback today

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 30 Apr 2013 15:33:24 +0000

Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick's Feynman, a stupendous biography of Richard Feynman in graphic novel form that went to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, is out in paperback as of today! Here's my original review from 2011:

Jim Ottaviani and Leland Myrick's Feynman is an affectionate and inspiring comic biography of the legendary iconoclastic physicist Richard Feynman. I've reviewed Ottaviani before (I really liked T-Minus, a history of the Apollo program, as well as his Dignifying Science: Stories About Women Scientists) and I expected great things from Feynman. I wasn't disappointed.
Feynman is primarily concerned with its subject's life -- his personal relationships, his career triumphs, his mistakes and misgivings. From his work on the Trinity project to the Feynman lectures to his Nobel for his theory of Quantum Electrodynamics, Feynman paints a picture of a caring, driven, intelligent, wildly creative scientist who didn't always think through his actions and sometimes made himself pretty miserable as a result. But the Feynman in this book is resilient and upbeat, and figures out how to bounce back from the worst of life.
Feynman's technical achievements are mighty, but very few people understand them (Feynman claimed that he didn't understand them). But the way he conducted his life was often an inspiration. The authors even manage to wring sweetness from his tragic romance with his first wife, Arline, who contracted terminal tuberculosis before they married, meaning that their marriage was conducted without any intimate physical contact lest he catch her sickness -- but for all that, they clearly loved each other enormously and made one another's lives better.
Feynman is notorious for his irreverent outlook and his willingness to look foolish while he learned new things, an extremely admirable ability I often wish I possessed in greater measure. The bongo-playing, doodling, pranking Feynman who tried to get out of accepting his Nobel prize and drove Freeman Dyson across the country, staying in flophouses and looking for excitement leaps off the page here.
The authors pass lightly over some of Feynman's more problematic shortcomings, such as his inconsistent sexist attitude towards women. They show us Feynman gallantly mentoring his sister in physics while all the authority figures in their lives insisted that this wasn't a fit subject for girls; they show us Feynman working on physics problems five nights a week at a local strip-bar; but they don't dip into his embarrassing writings on convincing women to have sex with him, in which he comes across as a sexist pig. He was surely a product of his times, and he was surely imperfect, and that explains his attitude, but it doesn't excuse it.
But this isn't a whitewash. Imperfect and warty, Feynman is still an inspiration.
The authors don't shy away from technical subjects entirely, either. They make a really good run at depicting Feynman's supposedly lay-oriented lectures on Quantum Electrodynamics. To be honest, I've never really been able to wrap my head around QED, and, having read Feynman, I'm still pretty fuzzy on the subject -- but I feel like I'm a little closer to getting it.
Like all great biography, Feynman is an enticement to read more of his works. I haven't read The Feynman Lectures (an introductory physics course that Feynman wrote and delivered late in his career -- an unheard-of undertaking for a physicist of his stature) in years, but I'm going to start listening to the audio of his lectures. And I'll be shoving Feynman at everyone I can get to read it.

Feynman