The genre of science fiction is, admittedly, not for everyone. It takes a special sort of faith to accept the ‘fantastic’ without question. In some ways, they are the most ‘fun’ stories… lasers, robots, the future… all of it make for great entertainment. Authors find it easy to exploit because just about anything goes. But [...]

Hi! We’ve been offline for about 2 weeks now. Apologies to those of you who came looking in the interim. I was changing over from Blogger to Wordpress and took the opportunity to change the template as well - moving to a more cleaner look. It took a lot longer than I expected, but we’re [...]

Brian Azzarello has long been one of my favourite writers because a lot of his work raises very fundamental issues of human nature. Take the cult ‘100 Bullets’, for example. Before it spun out into the Mafia-Minutemen serial, it addressed a very simple question:what would you do if you were given the means and indemnity [...]

In Gotham Central, Brubaker explored the lives of regular cops in Gotham City and what it was like living under the shadow of Batman. With the Criminal series, he goes one up. First off, there’s no Batman or any other superhero/vigilante. Second, it’s a story about crime from the criminal’s point of view. According to [...]

A few years back, I had picked up a graphic novel because it stood out boldly among others on the display shelf. A bald, cigarette-smoking tattooed man was standing on the edge of the roof of a skyscraper and looking up with a wicked smile. Even odder were the shades he wore: one lens was [...]

If I mentioned the words ‘Gotham City’ to you, what would come to your mind? Batman, for certain. Followed by Joker? And then perhaps Two-Face, Bane, Riddler, Penguin and a slew of other villains? And if you’re not just a ‘pure superhero’ fan, you’ll probably think of Commissioner Gordon and perhaps even Barbara.
But there is [...]

Just about everyone I know has heard of Maus. After all, Art Spiegelman’s biographical depiction of his father’s experiences in the holocaust did win him a Pulitzer and an Eisner among a host of other awards and nominations. For those of you who haven’t actually read it, here’s the story in brief. 
Art begins the story with [...]

One of my friends got back from a vacation some days back and, knowing of my interest in graphic novels, told me of a book that one of her friends back home had gifted her. “It’s called It’s a Bird“, she said. I hadn’t heard of it, but I asked to see it. She brought [...]

 2007 was a good year for the Graphic Novel. First, the success of movies based on them spurred a whole new set of readers to read the original works. Popular movies even used the medium for promotion by launching novels of their own. Then, having established itself as a treasure chest for screenplays (with the [...]

Some months back, a friend referred me to a blog about a new company in Hong Kong called Fluid Friction. They had apparently put together an international team of writers and artists to come out with Hong Kong’s first international graphic novel. Intrigued, I checked it out.  
The blog was a record of artwork [...]