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Chicks Don’t Dig It…

How does it make sense for the team’s strongest member to be sidelined to holding up the lantern?

Sweet Transvestite

Supes faces a ‘wardrobe malfunction’ as he auditions for an all-girl super-team!

Junji Ito

Junji Ito is the creator of the best, scariest, most memorable horror tales I have seen in any medium.

I think it’s worth discussing, if only because there seems to be an assumption that Koike & Kojima’s other works are inevitably inferior to their most famous epic, and I honestly think there is far less to choose between them than is generally thought.

Phoenix

Osamu Tezuka’s Phoenix is the greatest unfinished work in comics (and a real contender for comics’ greatest work of any kind). Don’t let the lack of a conclusion put you off – each volume is self-contained, though there are gains to be had from reading them all, in that characters recur, as do the central themes of reincarnation and questing for immortality, all centred on the mythical bird of the title, whose blood allegedly confers immortality.

Nana v5 p81

I’ve already written about this title in this manga series, but I really wanted to talk more about one short sequence, covering two-thirds of page 81 of volume 5 of Ai Yazawa’s Nana. Obviously there are huge problems in talking about four panels over 1,000 pages into a long story, but I love this sequence so much that I can’t resist taking a shot at it.

Adèle Blanc-Sec

Welcome to the first in what I hope will be a series looking at film adaptations of comics. Everyone knows, of course, that comics have been hot properties in Hollywood for a while now, as superhero movie after ill-conceived superhero movie stacks up on every self-respecting nerd’s DVD shelf — but there are all kinds of comics, and all kinds of movies being made out of them, and one of my goals is to use film adaptations as an excuse to get around to reading, or revisiting, some of the world’s greatest (or otherwise; Marmaduke got made too) comics.

Great Teacher Onizuka

Tohru Fujisawa’s series is some of the best entertainment to be had in comics. The story is about a tough but dumb young punk becoming a teacher, sure he will be a great teacher, despite his ignorance and stupidity. And the point is, he is, even if his main motivation is schoolgirl pussy.

A Drifting Life

A huge autobiography covering Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s first decade in manga, in comic form.

Greatest Hits

Sometimes it’s easy to see the pitch: what if the Beatles had been superheroes? A decent idea, and it gives you lots to work with. Trouble is, it rather sets up claims for the story that are not remotely fulfilled.

FA - The Comiczine