Reviewing Myself (sort of)

While I know that we can all agree that it probably isn’t entirely kosher to pen a review your own product, so let’s not call this a “review” but rather some some soft-sell marketing spin. Last weekend I received my copies of the CAG graphic album Iconic and I just have to tell you how excited I am about the book. Yeah, yeah, admittedly I contributed a story to the project, but mine is only one of the 10 stories that appear in the tome. Having just read the other nine stories I really have to say that I very much enjoyed them as well. (There is one about Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper that offers us a new take on these two characters that is positively chilling.)

Also of note are the John Henry story, plus the “sequel” to A Christmas Carol. As a long-time fan of the legend of Prometheus, I was drawn to the re-telling of that legend in it’s Sci-Fi setting. The re-telling of the story of Robin Hood took me a bit of time to get to patch into the legend on which it was riffing, but again, a fine tale.

Not to go all “Hey this is the best thing since sliced bread” route, I’ll talk a little bit about the parts of the book where I had a (small) issue or two.

On the “less than completely glowing” side, while the most excellent forward by comicbook author and high-school teacher Gary Cohn served as a very fine overview of the genre and hopefully will help “legitimize” the book to our potential audience, it was (for some reason) written in white text on a gray patterned background which made it a tad difficult to read. Then (a personal peeve of mine) due to the square-bound binding, the center of the pages tend to disappear into the interior margins. This is actually a common production error that many production folks fall into when moving from saddle stitched magazines (which can lay flat) to square bound books (which can’t). Thus they need to leave a slightly larger interior margin to allow for the binding. (I recently read a very good — square bound — Graphic Novel which suffered from the same problem.)

Then, of course there is the (slightly smaller) size of the book (9" x 6"), which really isn’t a negative, but given that CAG is targeting young readers with the book is actually a positive thing, as it is CAG’s intention that this more compact format makes the book more accessible and less formidable to this market segment, than would the traditional larger-format GN.


Anyways, if you you want to get a very cool gift for a young reader (or yourself) who wants to learn some history, be entertain, and perhaps explore some classic (dare I say “Iconic”) themes, follow this link and score yourself a copy (or three).

The Perfessor