Non-fiction writing, particularly biographies and coverage of historical events, often tends to be accompanied by pictures: illustrations and photography help to establish events in our minds by showing us what people and places look like. For the same reason, comics can be a great way to immerse the reader in these very real worlds, experiencing these very real events.
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I’ve had my hands full with the new baby, but that doesn’t mean I’m not still eyeing a lot of board games on Kickstarter as always. With Gen Con coming up, there have been a slew of projects launching—so many that with some of the prototype copies I’ve been sent I’ve only been able to play once or twice so far. Here are six board game projects that I’ve actually gotten to try out.
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Here’s some great news to follow up the disappointments that Chuck Lawton and I reported on this weekend. Cryptozoic, the publishers of games like Epic Spell Wars and Food Fight, is going to publish The Doom That Came to Atlantic City!
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So you’d really like to put together that 1,200-piece LEGO Millennium Falcon, but you’re not quite ready to drop $130 on it. Here’s a solution for you: Pleygo: you can rent the set for a fraction of the price, get the satisfaction of putting it all together, and then send it back and try, say, the 3,800-piece Death Star next.
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Today at noon EDT, the final new Harry Potter cover by Kazu Kibuishi was revealed at the Scholastic Store in New York City. Here are all the new covers in one place.
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Ok, that headline isn’t entirely true, but it was already getting too long. My nine-year-old daughter is currently on comics probation: she gets to read comics one day a week (she picked Thursday) but the rest of the week she has to stick to prose.
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With the news last week causing some people to doubt Kickstarter, I wanted to take a little time to reflect on the good—projects that I’m glad I backed. The truth is, there are a lot of people doing really cool things, and one bad apple shouldn’t scare you off. Here are some of my favorite Kickstarter projects that I’ve backed and received.
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Chuck Lawton’s post about how Kickstarter is broken really made me stop to think about the way I, as a blogger, approach Kickstarter projects.
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Guildhall: Job Faire is a stand-alone expansion to AEG’s Guildhall, with six new types of workers that can either be played on their own or mixed in with the original game. Like the original, Job Faire is an engaging and quick card game that offers more depth than you might expect.
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One of the projects I backed on Kickstarter earlier this year was Monster of the Sky, a short puppet film by Sam Koji Hale. Hale was in town this weekend to rehearse with his puppeteers, and I was able to get a brief look at the process.
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Most of the comics I’ve listed in my serious comics posts are ones that I would argue qualify as capital-L Literature. Of course, there are plenty of non-comics books that qualify as Literature already—and some of those have been turned into comics. Here are a handful of literature-based or literature-inspired comics that we think are worth reading. My recommendation: if you like these, then seek out the source texts as well.
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The sixth new Harry Potter cover by Kazu Kibuishi was revealed today at Comic-Con International in San Diego. David Saylor (Vice President, Creative Director, Scholastic) unveiled the cover, which shows Harry and Dumbledore standing on a rock, near the entrance to a particular cave.
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You may have seen Wil Wheaton & Co. playing Smash Up on TableTop last month. The first stand-alone expansion, Awesome Level 9000, adds four more fun factions to the mix.
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This week’s iTunes rental of the week is Morgan Spurlock’s Comic-Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope, a documentary about—you guessed it—Comic-Con International. If you like documentaries about geeky topics, now’s a good time to rent it for a buck!
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Coinciding with Comic-Con International, this week’s We the Geeks hangout focuses on real-life superpowers, including invisibility and super strength. Scientists and engineers will discuss some cool developments in materials science; you can watch live on WhiteHouse.gov and on the White House Google+ page on Friday, July 19, at 12:00 pm EDT.
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“What does it mean to be alive today?” That question can be an excellent inspiration for fiction—and that’s as true now as it has been in the past. Tomely, an online ebookstore platform for indie publishers and authors, currently has a pay-what-you-want deal for their Zeitgeisty Books Bundle.
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Toby Froud is making a live action puppet film in the spirit of The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth. I interviewed him about the project and his parents’ influence on his work.
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Superheroes can be a tricky subject. They’re a staple of the comic book medium, of course, and for many readers (and non-comics-readers) superheroes are pretty much synonymous with comic books. They’re also often two-dimensional and somewhat mindless—but they don’t have to be.
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Yesterday I heard a segment on the radio program Here & Now about a curious project: an interspecies internet. It was following up on a TED Talk given earlier this year by a surprising team of people: Diana Reiss, a cognitive psychologist studying animal intelligence; musician Peter Gabriel; Neil Gershenfeld, the Director of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms; and Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet (currently at Google).
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Romans Go Home is for 2-4 players, ages 13 and up, takes roughly 10-15 minutes to play, and retails for about $10. It may not look like much, but it offers a pretty good bang for your buck.
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There are few things that get people riled up more quickly than politics and religion—but as it turns out there are plenty of comics that deal with the two. They may not be the best topics for dinner conversation, but they have certainly inspired some great comics.
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This week’s Serious Comics is a spotlight on Will Eisner, the father of the graphic novel.
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So while I’ve been attending bits and pieces of LeakyCon in Portland, some other big Harry Potter news happened in Chicago. The new cover of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, illustrated by Kazu Kibuishi, was revealed at the American Library Association convention.
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Codlo is a gadget that will turn your rice cooker or crockpot into a sous vide oven.
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The BabyPing video monitor turns your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch into a monitor. Here are some advantages and disadvantages compared to more traditional video monitors.
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Cheryl Klein, Executive Editor at Scholastic’s Arthur A. Levine imprint, revealed the third new Harry Potter cover at LeakyCon 2013 in Portland, Oregon.
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Attention, Muggles: LeakyCon, a Harry Potter fan convention, starts tomorrow in Portland, Oregon.
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A couple weeks ago I mentioned a few good examples of dads in ads. But apparently not everyone got the memo.
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In Part 1 I listed a few of the “usual suspects” when it comes to serious comics. Here, I address another popular topic: memoirs.
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I’ve always loved stop-motion animation, and I’m also a huge fan of Doug TenNapel. So here’s a Kickstarter project I’m really hoping will succeed: Armikrog.
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