Newsarama has posted a 13-page preview of the third volume of Scott Chantler’s wonderful adventure series, Northwest Passage (Oni). I’ve really enjoyed this series, and I’m happy to see it get some high-traffic attention. (It’s a little cruel to run the preview two months before the book comes out.) NP should also make for a very nice omnibus edition at some point after the individual chapters have all been released. (And it will be sturdier for library shelves, which would seem like one of its natural habitats.)
*
The Pulse has a nice interview with Raina Telgemeier, who has done such good work translating The Baby-Sitters Club into a graphic novel. Telgemeier offers a lot of interesting insights into the adaptation process and her own evolution as a cartoonist.
*
The New York Times takes a look at Superman Returns:
“Jesus of Nazareth spent 40 days in the desert. By comparison, Superman of Hollywood languished almost 20 years in development hell.”
That’s a great opening line, but the review itself is kind of unfocused. Manohla Dargis spends a lot of time evaluating it in comparison to those that starred Christopher Reeve. To be honest, I don’t feel any particular urgency to see it. I’m much more excited about Strangers with Candy and Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada.
*
I’ll have a nice stack of books waiting for me at the comic shop this week.
In all of Digital Manga’s deluge of June titles, La Esperança is one of my favorites. (That’s partly due to a fabulous back-up story in the second volume which has left me with a very lenient attitude towards the rest of Chigusa Kawai’s work. Of course, attention to character development and something resembling a proper story don’t hurt Kawai’s standing any.)
Ted Naifeh’s entirely delightful Polly and the Pirates (Oni) concludes with its sixth issue. This might be one of those extremely rare cases where I buy the floppies and the collected version, just because I want to have it readily accessible on a bookshelf instead of locked away in my arcane floppy filing system. (I probably should have surrounded system with quotation marks, come to think of it.)
It’s slush week from Tokyopop, but the flood includes the third volume of Dragon Head and the eleventh of Sgt. Frog, so it’s all worth it. (Well, I’d imagine that retailers who have to unpack all of that stuff probably have a somewhat less charitable view of the situation.)