Author: Brad Hawley

Zed: A Cosmic Tale by Michel Gagné

Michael Gagné’s Zed: A Cosmic Tale is an artistic wonder that was over a decade in the making. It’s a fast read, but it’s one you’ll want to look through multiple times because the art is unique and stunning: It doesn’t look anything like what you think of when you hear the words “comic book.” Gagné’s art is extremely stylized with a large number of full-page panels or pages with only a few large panels. Though it’s in black-and-white,

Maggie the Mechanic: The Love & Rockets Library — Locas Book 1 by Jaime Hernandez

Love and Rockets is a series of comics that started in the 1980s. It was written by three brothers: Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario Hernandez, and the brothers each created their own storylines, tracing a set of characters over a period of time, even allowing their characters to age and develop and change appearance, a too-rare technique employed in the world of comics, where most characters are ageless and timeless.

The first run on the series lasted fifty issues and ran from September 1982 to 1996.

Suki: A Like Story by Clamp

Suki: A Like Story is a three-book story by Clamp. Clamp is one of my favorite modern creators of manga, and I’m particularly intrigued by the fact that Clamp is an all-female collective. Though they’ve had in the past a rotating membership, for the most part, Clamp now consists of a fairly stable roster of four women: Nanase Ohkawa, Mokona, Tsubaki Nekoi, and Satsuki Igarashi. They started out in the 1980s as an eleven-member group of amateur, self-published indie writers (known as “dojinshi” in Japan),