"There's no publishing project this Fall as talked-about as Sammy Harkham's Kramers Ergot Vol 7. The well-regarded anthology series has been one of the more restless titles of this decade in terms of its always ambitious presentation and an expanding contributors list that strikes a body between older, sometimes-neglected masters and younger talent. Its growth has mirrored the career path of editor Sammy Harkham, a talented cartoonist and bookstore retailer based in Los Angeles recently termed a 'genius' by scholar Paul Buhle in Jewcy."
Tom Spurgeon, The Comics Reporter, interviews Sammy Harkham here.

"If there's a future for comics, Kramers Ergot seems to have bottled it. The first really new paradigm for an avant-garde comix anthology since RAW. A lavish package where the whole is even greater than the sum of its parts!"
Art Spiegelman

"Smart, probing, passionate work. A virtue for any incarnation of shuffled current comics."
Jog reviews Mome Vol 12 - Read the full review here.

"Few people keep a diary as consistently and as entertainingly as James Kochalka. [His] tiny strips convey the personalities of him, his family and friends with astounding and impressive ease. Grade: A"
Tom McLean, Variety

"This is an interesting book all around. Not an easy read because of its subject matter, it is nonetheless one of the more interesting examples of recent confessional autobiography. While it doesn't compare to a book like Anders Nilsen's Don't Go Where I Can't Follow (a book I consider to be a minor masterpiece), it is well worth reading and is the type of thing that would've gathered a lot of attention here had it been published in English rather than French."
Bart Beaty at The Comics Reporter - Read the full article here.

"No cartoonist deals with the issue of memory better than Emmanuel Guibert. His soft, rounded lines rise off the page like a morning mist. Backgrounds and extraneous details fade away into nothingness, leaving only a kernel of truth, a fleeting notion, a barely recalled memory. La Guerre d'Alan, two volumes of which have been published to date, breaks from the traditions of French autobiographical comics as Guibert recounts not his own life's story, but that of his friend, Alan Ingram Cope. Cope's recollections of the Second World War, shared with Guibert over a long period of time, form the basis for this fascinating biography. Eschewing Saving Private Ryan-style theatrics, Guibert focuses on the way the war expanded his friend's cultural horizons, instilling in him a deep love for France, and a greater understanding of what it means to be an American."
The 20 Best European Graphic Novel You Probably Haven't Read - Read the full article here.

"Guibert writes and draws for American G.I. Alan Cope in this poignant and frank graphic memoir of young soldier who was told to serve his country in WWII and how it changed him forever. When he first enters Fort Knox at 18, he is young and impressionable, more of a dreamer than the military type. Slowly, Cope grows through his experiences in the war. He forges candid friendships with his fellow soldiers and remains ever insightful in his recollections of the war and his life afterward. Together, Cope and Guibert forge a story that resonates with humanity. Guibert's illustrations capture the time period vividly. While the subject matter is familiar from many wartime memoirs, Guibert's fluid, simple but assured linework captures the personalities of Cope and his friends, elevating the material to a far more affecting level."
Publishers Weekly

"Ile Bourbon 1730 is a long (288-page) comics novel written by Appollo and drawn by Trondheim, one of the rare books that he has illustrated from someone else's script. The story is set on Ile de La Reunion, the small tropical island 700 km east of Madagascar. For several years Trondheim and some of his friends have been visiting this island for a comics festival, and now, working with an author from the island, he has crafted a story set there."
Bart Beaty on Lewis Trondheim & The Fate Of L'Association - Read the full article here.

"Colden originally set out to create a true crime comic, but legal issues prevented him from doing so. Instead, he allowed the characters to turn into fiction-reality hybrids. Fishtown is less about the actual murder act than it is about the kids who committed it, and Colden has forgone adherence to the truth for the ability to shape his complicated protagonists through fictionalized interactions. He makes his interest in the kids' psyches clear from the very first panel, in which Adrian, one of the murderers, looks out at us from the page and asks, “what do you want me to say?” We find out in the next panel that he is actually talking to a psychiatrist, but as Colden puts us in the psychiatrist's seat, he forces us into the role of the concerned party."
The Daily Cross Hatch - Read the full review here.

"Oh, yes. It was a ridiculously tough decision. My biggest fear was that I would seem ungrateful for winning the award. But I would have had to abandon the growing audience and cut off the weekly online presence in order to accept the grant money and I couldn't do that. The Xeric money would have only covered the publication of Part One, which is only 23 pages of a 120-page overall story, so it seemed that the logical decision was to let the money stay with the Foundation and ultimately go to another deserving creator. It's an honor to have been recognized, and the Xeric Foundation is still supporting Fishtown and me as a creator. In the end, the finished book will see print - I promise you that - and it'll be a hell of a ride getting there week by week."
Kevin Colden on declining a Xeric Award - Read the full interview here.

"I don't think Wet Moon could be at any other publisher, except maybe Slave Labor, but I think Oni is a perfect fit. They do a lot of that quasi-not-quite-mainstream-but-not-quite-typical-indie stuff, stuff that kinda straddles the line. Wet Moon is on one hand pretty "indie," but then on another it's not quite that indie because its core is a fairly mainstreamy serial teen drama type set-up, but that drama stuff is presented in a non-mainstream way, and I think that's a lot of what Oni is about. Anyway, while it would be awesome to get to do Wet Moon full-time, I'm happy with it being at Oni and I don't see myself taking it anywhere else. For some reason I can't see any other publisher putting up with Wet Moon's meandering pace for very long, either, heh heh. and yeah, Wet Moon is definitely my most personal thing, another reason why it's great with Oni because I keep all ownership and it would never be tampered with by editors or other company people. I'd get so frustrated otherwise, and I'd be crushed if stuff was edited or messed around with like things were on The Abandoned [published by Tokyopop], say."
Ross Campbell - Read the full interview at InkInkInk.

"He is not only a great visual stylist, but a tremendous storyteller as well... Most of Zezelj's European-published comics have poor distribution in the United States, despite the fact that they are written in English and could easily find an audience. These are gorgeous works, with strong, personal storytelling -- exactly the type of thing that is so rare in the contemporary scene."
Bart Beaty on Danijel Zezelj - Read the full article here.

"Exquisitely written and drawn in a highly detailed unique style with a sophisticated but appropriately simplistic color approach. I loved this. Track it down. You won't be disappointed."
J.H. Williams III

"ANNNND Grampá's Mesmo Delivery is maybe the best single comic I've read since McCarthy's Solo.”
Matt Fraction

"Last summer Casarosa took a trip to Venice, that most magical of Italian cities, and instead of just making travel sketches as most artists might, decided to chronicle his trip in the form of a comics journal. As always, available time became a factor and, while he couldn't document his entire trip during his stay, he decided to continue telling the story after the fact, extending his narrative into the next winter and beyond. The result is a wonderful stream-of-consciousness style story, not only of his stay in Venice and his visit to his childhood home in Genova, but of his attempt to chronicle the story in comics form, artistic blocks and all."
Lines & Colour - Read the full review here.

"Bearing a strong resemblance to Seth's bold, urbane line-work, Mike Cavallaro's visuals alone are stunning. But he's a masterful storyteller as well - and if Parade (With Fireworks) is any indication, he's got a sprawl of tales bubbling on the back burner. Parade's two-issue arc - which made enough of a splash after its initial online publication to bring Image sniffing - is the first installment of Cavallero's family history, and his true-life tale of communism, emigration, and murder in 1920s Italy is achingly resonant. The synergy between Cavallero's heirloom narrative and his fluid, nuanced art is breathtaking; here's hoping the next chapter in the saga is delivered with just as much lavish craft (and perhaps a bit more fanfare). A-"
The Onion - Read the full review here.

"The original thought was to take an old defunct character and give it the 'Sandman' treatment. Meaning, basically steal a name and make up a new book. In this case the character was called Bullet Girl. Ultimately DC pulled the name because they have a character in another book called the Bulleteer or somesuch, who is sometimes referred to by the nickname "Bullet Girl" and the powers that be thought there might be confusion. Which confused me because previously, I wasn't at all confused. So now we have Young Liars, which is okay because the book really developed beyond just plain ol' Bullet Girl--I mean my Bullet Girl not the Bulleteer Bullet Girl in that other book I never heard of. Originally, this was supposed to be my "action book". No thinking, just a crazy girl with lots of bullets flying. Like Amy Racecar but more real world. Of course, since then I've added in midgets and castration, so the book's gotten way more sophisticated."
David Lapham on Young Liars - Read the full interview here.

Where else are you going to go for so much color, glitz, and an almost iridescent sense of human fickleness."
Chris Ware

"Kevin Huizenga is one of comics' most genuine and interesting talents. He stands as good a chance as anyone working today of being the next alternative comics superstar. Even those who believe Huizenga's entire artistic evolution has exuded an air of inevitability must admit the cartoonist's learning curve has accelerated the last two years."
Tom Spurgeon, The Comics Reporter - Read the full interview here.

"The series is fascinating because Nilsen keeps everything on level with the small scale of the birds' world. Anything relating to the bomb is dramatic and exciting, because Nilsen's drawing pulls away from this minuscule world to reveal tantalizing glimpes into a much larger (and more complex) world. Because he so rarely draws the outside world in Big Questions, and glimpes into it is a revelation, as much as a revelation as it is for the birds."
The Comics Journal #266

"Best known for his acclaimed mini-comic series Big Questions, Anders Nilsen's clean drawing style and absorbing sense of narrative has made him one of the most closely watched cartoonists to emerge in the last few years."
The Comics Journal #259

"I was obsessed with teen movies, '80s teen movies. I just loved them to pieces, and I always wondered why there wasn't more stuff like that for people my age. 'Course, now I'm old [laughs], but back then I really wanted to make them for my peers. I loved cartoons as well, and I thought it would be really cool if there was an animated film like that that was done to a '80s soundtrack and all this cool stuff. Obviously, since I didn't become an animator, I couldn't do that, but there's no reason I can't do a comic that's in the same spirit, and I already started anyway with short Blue Monday stories in high school that I ended up trashing. I just thought it would be nice to have that kind of material around. I noticed books like Lum and the pockets of manga that were out there, but people didn't seem to realize that it existed. It was a very small group of people who were actually reading it [here in the U.S.], but Japan had it down. They had the high-school comedies and romances, and many of the qualities I loved in the films I watched. It really baffled me that there wasn't really anything going on like that here, nothing translated into our culture."
Chynna Clugston - Read the Comics Journal interview here.

"It takes place more than a few months after series 1. You're seeing the characters living in the aftermath of what happened. You immediately start seeing the relationship between the characters, and it ends with a very big climax and some violence. I'm really excited about it. Gabriel Bá is drawing not only the interiors but the covers now. In a perfect world, we could have only Gabriel be the artist--I would like him to be the artist from the beginning to the end."
Gerard Way - Read the full interview here.

"Darwyn and I are like twins separated at birth. We dig all the same things and get ridiculously excited about whatever we're working on. We also throw fits whenever we're told 'no' by 'the Man', and, sometimes to our detriment, have a 'burned earth policy' when it comes to doing a project the way we want. Fortunately, we usually get the support needed to build our visions, and Madman Atomic Comics is a prime example of that."
Michael Allred

"Like a Yiddish theater play on the old Jewish Second Avenue, or like a really good comic book, Danny will make you laugh, cry and, best of all, he'll make you think."
Stan Lee