Books

  • Magnetic North’s “We Belong.” My favorite line: “We’re getting tired of proving we belong.” Kate DiCamillio tells an immigrant’s tale in The Tiger Rising. More specifically, it is the story of two immigrant children and the tiger from the title (who could also be considered an immigrant). All three are unwillingly transplanted into a new…

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  • Batman R.I.P. by Grant Morrison My rating: 4 of 5 stars WARNING! Possible Spoilers! Batman RIP though half the size of Batman: The Black Glove packs as powerful a narrative punch. It is a nice culmination of the events in the previous book. With Batman: The Black Glove ending the way it did, I had…

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  • Batman: The Black Glove by Grant Morrison My rating: 4 of 5 stars WARNING: Possible Spoilers. (My cover reads “Batman and Son” but the ISDN I entered pointed to “Black Glove.”) I bought this book because I pre-ordered the movie, Batman and Son, on Amazon. I had enjoyed Justice League: War and Flashpoiint. I will…

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  • The Shunned House by H.P. Lovecraft My rating: 3 of 5 stars I was infatuated with HP Lovecraft for a brief period in my life but mostly because of the drawings he inspired by HR Giger. I had a collection of Lovecraft’s stories that I bought at Tower Books (many, many years ago) but can’t…

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  • Sweet Tooth, Vol. 5: Unnatural Habitats by Jeff Lemire My rating: 4 of 5 stars It was two NY Comic Cons (2012) ago when I heard Jeff Lemire speak about the eventual end of Sweet Tooth. It has been one of my favorite series and though it has been a while since I read Volume…

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  • Batman: Arkham Asylum – A Serious House on Serious Earth by Grant Morrison My rating: 4 of 5 stars I associate Dave McKean’s artwork with chaos and motion and the surreal and the absurd which makes him a perfect choice to illustrate a book called Batman Arkham Asylum. I don’t think it is an accident…

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  • When Curtis Chin (founder of the Asian American Writer’s Workshop) asked me to submit something to an anthology he was putting together about Asian American activism in the 90s, I was very flattered. It had been a while since I’ve attempted to write anything “creatively”. I joke now that the goal was to “sell the…

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  • Tales from Outer Suburbia by Shaun Tan My rating: 5 of 5 stars In terms of format, Tales from Outer Suburbia is the complete opposite of The Arrival (the first Shaun Tan book I read). Where The Arrival is wordless and told exclusively through a series of gray, black, and white illustrations, Tales from Outer…

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