What can we say? Here at Indie Comics Roundup there is nothing we love as much as hate, but sometimes, no matter how hard you seek that which is hatable, all you find are good comics. We really tried, we even read an Image book. Perhaps later we can find something from Avatar to make [...]

by Eric Shanower, Image Comics
Age of Bronze, which retells the story of the Trojan War from start to finish, is shaping up to be one of the two or three best comics of the decade, but it’s also a recurring warning of one of the weaknesses of the comic book “pamphlet” form. In this issue, [...]

by Jason, Fantagraphics
Jason is that rarest of birds, an artist with bona fide indie “cred” (for God’s sake, he’s even European) who also has a mainstream-friendly esthetic. His stories revolve around gunfights and zombies and love, which is pretty much what I assume primetime TV looks like nowadays. I Killed Adolf Hitler is about a [...]

by Brian Lee O’Malley
This is not a comic, per se, but a series of notes about Scott Pilgrim, the widely revered but chronically late Oni Press series. References explained, “how I came up with this,” what’s based on reality, etc.: trivia, essentially. Whether you want to read this or not depends on how obsessed you [...]

by Nicolas Mahler, La Pastèque
An art book is not really what you want from Nicolas Mahler. You don’t want it because you know it will be shitty.
Mahler is one of my favorite European cartoonists, but his deliberately artless, subdoodle drawing style is hardly something to seek esthetic value in. In most of his work, [...]

by Gabrielle Bell, Drawn & Quarterly
Lucky #1 is a neat little comic with a unique premise. The first half of the book is a straight autobiographical account of author Gabrielle Bell’s experiences giving slideshow readings of one of her dream comics. The second half is the dream comic. It’s a little like Chester Brown’s “Helder”/”Showing [...]

by Rich Tommaso, Alternative Comics
Standing on its own, Miriam is a nicely designed, engaging comic. But Miriam does not stand on its own. It is a look-and-feel lawsuit waiting to happen. Miriam is what you would produce if you came from a culture that had the last few issues of Eightball and no other comics. [...]

by Hank Ketchum, Fantagraphics
There are plenty of gag panels that garner critical acclaim, and there are plenty of comic strips with recurring characters that are similarly respected, but the combination of the two–a gag panel with recurring characters–is generally the bottom of the barrel of the comics page. This is where Family Circus, Marmaduke, and [...]

by Sara Varon, First Second
Robot Dreams appears at first to be an example of Kochalkaesque whimsy, but, fortunately, it also possesses a deep undercurrent of cynicism that saves it from being cloying. It’s the story of an anthropomorphic dog who builds a robot and then abandons him at the first opportunity. The robot dreams of [...]

by Matt Kindt, Top Shelf

I don’t know how many people habitually peruse the copyright page before plunging into a book, but if you do you’ll find, right above the copyright information in Superspy, the explanation:
“A Note on the Book: The chapters are arranged in a nonlinear format in the order that the author intended that [...]