We’ve all heard “You can’t go home again,” but what if you don’t want to? Ben Katchor’s new graphic novel,The Cardboard Valise, explores Emile Delilah’s xenophilia, and the art and delusions of travel. Sara Henkin reviews.

I love controversial books. Banned books, books by authors with pseudonyms and false identities, fictional books that have been passed off as non-fiction, books that take risks, and even books that play with a reader’s mind. I love these types of books because they push the envelope and help to expand our concepts of what makes something worth reading. They are experimental, and just as in the scientific world, these experiments may bring more questions than insights. Jon Paul Fiorentino’s first novel, Stripmalling, is one such book.

At Largehearted Boy, check out Jami Attenberg’s first in a series of interviews with female cartoonists; this one is with Sarah Glidden.
You can preview chapters from Glidden’s book-in-progress on the artist’s website, and if you haven’t yet read Jami Attenberg’s Instant Love (one of my favorite collections of linked stories) or her debut novel, The [...]

If you’ve read Watchmen and haven’t seen this yet, behold.
But if you haven’t read the original yet, abstain from clicking; you’ll meet a host of spoilers dressed as stick figures. Instead, pick up a copy and get ready to argue about the adaptation in March.

Without the need for description, and with the supposed thousand words per illustration, graphic novelists are allowed quiet moments of focus that might be dull or ponderous–or even nigh-impossible–to convey with straight prose. In Bottomless Belly Button, cartoonist Dash Shaw takes this technique to an extreme, decompressing what might typically, in prose form, be material for a short story or a novella into 700 pages of evocative panels: three grown siblings reunite at their childhood home after learning that their elderly parents have decided to split up.