Publisher Top Shelf Productions - Review

A Matter of Life

Andrew Moreton looks at the newest entry from an autobio cartoonist who’s changed his perspective… Jeffrey Brown has been detailing his life in scratchy small panels since sometime in 2002. He keeps on plugging away at the autobio stuff and, like a lot of that genre’s more successful practitioners, manages to keep his fans coming back for more despite not very much happening.

Nemo: Heart of Ice

Nemo: Heart of Ice is still an Alan Moore comic, and that’s still pretty good. But it’s not Moore at the absolute top of his game.

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 2009

The conclusion of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume III is a bit of an anticlimax, but still worth reading.

Incredible Change-Bots 2

This is Jeffrey Brown’s idiosyncratic version of, or perhaps love letter to, the Transformers.

The Playwright

This is much closer to being a character sketch than a (graphic) novel – not too much happens, there are no substantial crises, and so on. This is not in any sense a bad thing, since it’s one of the most incisive and profound character portraits I’ve seen in comics.

Moving Pictures

I’m not sure how much I liked this WWII occupied Paris story of a museum curator vying with a German officer over what happens to the works of art.

BB Wolf and the Three LPs

The first name in the title will make you think of two blues giants, and the last term sounds musical too – but you’ll probably have also spotted the fairy tale reading.

Superf*ckers

For me, one of the most consistently and hugely enjoyable comics of recent years, here collected for your convenience. The premise is simple enough: what if a top super-team were all assholes who hated each other?

Finger Prints

This is an absolutely fascinating, compelling and disturbing graphic novel. The sophistication is in the thinking behind the story: this is a rich examination of ideas of beauty and the pressures to maintain it, and especially those on women and how that reflects on their position in the world.

AX: Alternative Manga 1

This 400-page collection is a selection of the best from alternative Japanese anthology AX: outsider material, a lot of it with an approach or attitude that would be unacceptable in the big mainstream publications.