ALL-NEGRO COMICS: America's First Black Comic Book, wonderful anthology that's a 2025 WINNER OF THE EISNER AWARD

ALL-NEGRO COMICS: America's First Black Comic Book
CHRIS ROBINSON (created by Orrin C. Evans)
Image Comics (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 paperback, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: WINNER OF THE EISNER AWARD • The first comic ever created by African Americans, for African Americans.

Three quarters of a century ago, Orrin C. Evans lead a team of cartoonists to create the first comic book anthology of original Black characters created by Black talent, with the expressed purpose of entertaining while rejecting harmful stereotypes and pushing boundaries in the industry. This was only 8 years after Action Comics #1, 6 years after Captain America #1 and a whole 19 years before Black Panther hit the pages of Fantastic Four.

All-Negro Comics #1 should be among those revered moments in comic book history, but the original print run was quickly removed from newsstands and faded into obscurity, remaining largely unknown for 75 years. . . until now.

All-Negro Comics 75th Anniversary Edition (an Eisner Award-winning collection) preserves that history for generations to come, containing All-Negro Comics #1, in full and digitally remastered for clarity, several essays for historical context and contemporary reflection, as well as new stories by Black writers and artists of today, featuring the original characters.

This award-winning volume includes:

• The complete single issue from 1947, digitally remastered! Consistent colors, crisp text, and no damage! • Contemporary comics and prose stories, featuring the All-Negro Comics characters, written by notable Black creators of today • Essays that provide historical and cultural context to deepen your reading experience • A discussion guide and resource list

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I had no inkling (!) this series of comics ever existed. Which is the point of banning and suppressing books: If you don't see yourself in popular culture, you have no reason to think you belong in it. I myownself, standing on an already enormous mountain of white male privilege, was also given the gift of growing up after Stonewall...I know exactly how important it is to see your Self, your identity and looks, your behavior and thoughts, in the culture around you.

I can't even imagine how much more important it is today, and certainly was in the past, to Black children...adults, too, but comics reach both groups.

The Eisner Award has never been given more thoughtfully and necessarily than to honor these groundbreaking creators, ignored far, far too long:

I liked seeing the cover art, just as art, without the usual impedimenta to get in the way of its kinetic design. It's easier to enjoy as art:

In my defense of personal ignorance about this comic book's existence, I offer the fact I never read a comic book in my life until I was almost ten. I got books whenever I wanted, bought for me or from the library, so I never developed the interest or formed the habit. Of course, no one pitched them to me like Orrin C. Evans pitched these comics:

Silver-tongued devil, no?

So your comics maven will enjoy the Eisener winner part, your Black history maven will enjoy the recovered history and the prescience of Orrin C. Evans in doing it at all, and it looks lovely on the tablet if you've got an ereader! Now, enjoy some of Ace Harlem's adventures:

#ReadingIsResistance

STREET LEVEL JAPAN: Experience the Bustling Streets of Japanese Cities, lovely photo essay on urban Japan

STREET LEVEL JAPAN: Experience the Bustling Streets of Japanese Cities
HIROKI HARADA
Epic Ink (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$35.00 all editions, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Street Level Japan take viewers on a photo journey through the intriguing urban spaces of Japan’s major cities. Embark on a visual tour of urban Japan, captured through Tokyo-native Hiroki Harada’s eyepopping photography.

Street Level Japan immerses you in the unique city streets of Japan. Explore hidden alleys, peruse storefronts, and marvel at cityscapes through over200 stunning photographs that perfectly capture the light, mood, and beauty of Japan’s cities. Each photo is accompanied by a caption that provides background on the location and the inspiration for the photograph. Featured in the Photographize Magazine’s 100 Best in 2023, Harada’s acclaimed images have captured the attention of tens of thousands of followers on social media (@funky_side_of_town). Through a series of photos, Harada guides you through Japan’s most famous cities, including:

Tokyo

Kyoto

Osaka

Nagoya

Yokohama

and more!

Street Level Japan is packed with impressive visuals that will draw you in with their intricate detail and realistic nuance. Whether you’re an armchair explorer or world traveler, prepare to be wowed by these incredible visual narratives.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I think Japan is physically very beautiful. Its cultural milieu is a mixed bag for me, but as expressed in its built environment, it appeals greatly. As a natural world, it's gorgeous indeed. If you're not familiar with its dramatic, majestic landscapes, Google is your friend. (Don't use a chatbot.)

The city photography in this volume appeals to me greatly, because it looks (to my outsider's eye) so intentional, so much a consensus-culture's expression of what's needed and wanted.

I've selected seven of the dozen or so images supplied for publicity. More out of respect for my storage limitations than any other reason. I'd post the whole book if possible but there would be Repercussions I do not want.

I hope it's given you a picture (!) of a good recipient for a modestly-priced luxury item. Who among your giftees loves manga, reads Japanese literature obsessively, and adores anime? Thirty-five bucks ain't a bad price to say "I see you, I love you" to such a one.

Unlike many of the illustrated books I tell y'all about, this one seems designed to be an ideal tablet-reader's art book. It looked fine on my modestly-priced Galaxy S11 tablet. The tree book is, of course *chef's kiss* but it's good to have another arrow in your quiver.

For your consideration. (If it works for getting Academy voters to pay attention to films, why not books too.)

ROBBIE CONAL: STREETWISE: 35 Years of Politically Charged Guerrilla Art, visual proof you are not alone

ROBBIE CONAL: STREETWISE: 35 Years of Politically Charged Guerrilla Art
G. JAMES DAICHENDT (Foreword by Shepard Fairey)
Schiffer Publishing (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$45.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: With a foreword by Shepard Fairey, this is the definitive history of "America's foremost street artist" (Washington Post).

The politically charged art of Robbie Conal is gnarled, gut retching, and emotionally laden. Featuring every image in Robbie Conal’s storied poster campaigns, this is the definitive history of “America’s foremost street artist” (Washington Post). A foreword by Shepard Fairey, American contemporary street artist, graphic designer, and activist, sets the scene. Conal's satirical posters of political figures are given richer context as his life story is insightfully joined with art criticism by expert Daichendt. Today honored by museums and arts organizations around the world, Conal hit high speed during the Reagan administration in 1986, when he began turning his grotesque portraits into street posters. We see Conal's life come together at a critical moment to attack issues of censorship, war, social injustice, and the environment.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Do I need to explain why this book is on my #Booksgiving list? Look at the art.

You tell me why a book like this is a worthy gift item for your lefty giftee in need of heartening proof they are not alone in seeing the world this way.

No one's career starts out in high gear. We're tracing Conal's development in this book.

...but even as an ornamental object, not a subject of art-world interest to the recipient, this will gladden the heart of anyone saddened, enraged, or simply ground down by 2025's world.

"You are not alone" and "It's happened before and we made it through" are empowering and important messages to send, and to receive.

IT CAME FROM THE CLOSET: Queer Reflections on Horror, a genre the community embraces...hard

IT CAME FROM THE CLOSET: Queer Reflections on Horror
JOE VALLESE (Editor)
The Feminist Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$25.95 all editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Through the lens of horror—from Halloween to Hereditary—queer and trans writers consider the films that deepened, amplified, and illuminated their own experiences.

Horror movies hold a complicated space in the hearts of the queer community: historically misogynist, and often homo- and transphobic, the genre has also been inadvertently feminist and open to subversive readings. Common tropes—such as the circumspect and resilient “final girl,” body possession, costumed villains, secret identities, and things that lurk in the closet—spark moments of eerie familiarity and affective connection. Still, viewers often remain tasked with reading themselves into beloved films, seeking out characters and set pieces that speak to, mirror, and parallel the unique ways queerness encounters the world.

It Came from the Closet features twenty-five original essays by writers speaking to this relationship, through connections both empowering and oppressive. From Carmen Maria Machado on "Jennifer’s Body", Jude Ellison S. Doyle on "In My Skin", Addie Tsai on "Dead Ringers", and many more, these conversations convey the rich reciprocity between queerness and horror.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWESS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I'll put it this way: It seemed to me, when I began reading, that queer people are really barkin' up the wrong tree to look to horror, homophobic, transphobic, misogynistic medium it is, for representation. Anti-models, maybe...but representation carries (to me, anyone else?) positive or at the minimum neutral connotations for the represented.

I do not see this in horror stories, where the evil queer has survived long past its rejection in most mainstream media.

"All of us together are smarter than any one of us" has never been more amply and aptly demonstrated than in this collection of essays. It is true that some are hits and others misses; it's in the nature of collections for this to be the case. My miss could easily be your hit. It's the reason that essays are so very valuable collected together, to maximize the reader's exposure to new, different ideas that might resonate...or clang dissonantly. Both, and all the shades of experience between, are valuable for pointing out and pointing up one's blind spots.

I'd never once, when watching Jaws in 1975, considered the homoerotic subtext in the film. (I've never read the novel.) I only watched it the once because, fifty years later, I still won't go into the ocean above my ankles because I'm *still* scared by that buoy scene. (IYKYK) Jen Corrigan saw it. I didn't think she was right at first; then I kept thinking about the points being raised and came to think she was correct. Fifty years later, I'm thinking about a film I saw once, and can't forget for bad reasons, reassessing it in light of a stranger's thoughts and appreciating it more positively for doing that.

Recontextualizing an object of fear, fifty years later, actually reduces the terror I've always felt due to Spielberg's genius-level indirect threat building, not making it grimly obvious therefore dismissable, reducible to whether we think the effect was "good enough" or not. What strikes unseen is always more frightening, look at Alien, look at ICEstapo's masked raids, look at the fear of the unknown everywhere in our culture.

So essays by queer people about the films that scare all of use make the scares, even the ones at our expense like Tucker Lieberman's essay on childhood trauma and A Nightmare on Elm Street, are the best use of our mental energy around these cultural products designed to elicit fear in the viewer. When we, the queers of the world, are targets of evil everywhere in our quotidian lives it pays to forearm yourself with context to battle the inner demons "They" want to feed, to convince you are REAL and YOUR FAULT...which they aren't.

A book to be savored in sips, not down-in-one belted into your eyeholes. Well worth gifting to your horror-obsessed friend of any sexuality, or your queer media-studies nibling/grand, or just some guy who was traumatized by Jaws as a teen.

You never know where healing will come from.

COMICS AND STUFF, subtle work about an unsubtle medium and its message

COMICS AND STUFF
HENRY JENKINS
NYU Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$34.00 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: Considers how comics display our everyday stuff—junk drawers, bookshelves, attics—as a way into understanding how we represent ourselves now

For most of their history, comics were widely understood as disposable—you read them and discarded them, and the pulp paper they were printed on decomposed over time. Today, comic books have been rebranded as graphic novels—clothbound high-gloss volumes that can be purchased in bookstores, checked out of libraries, and displayed proudly on bookshelves. They are reviewed by serious critics and studied in university classrooms. A medium once considered trash has been transformed into a respectable, if not elite, genre.

While the American comics of the past were about hyperbolic battles between good and evil, most of today's graphic novels focus on everyday personal experiences. Contemporary culture is awash with stuff. They give vivid expression to a culture preoccupied with the processes of circulation and appraisal, accumulation and possession. By design, comics encourage the reader to scan the landscape, to pay attention to the physical objects that fill our lives and constitute our familiar surroundings. Because comics take place in a completely fabricated world, everything is there intentionally. Comics are stuff; comics tell stories about stuff; and they display stuff.

When we use the phrase "and stuff" in everyday speech, we often mean something vague, something like "etcetera." In this book, stuff refers not only to physical objects, but also to the emotions, sentimental attachments, and nostalgic longings that we express—or hold at bay—through our relationships with stuff.

In Comics and Stuff, his first solo authored book in over a decade, pioneering media scholar Henry Jenkins moves through anthropology, material culture, literary criticism, and art history to resituate comics in the cultural landscape. Through over one hundred full-color illustrations, using close readings of contemporary graphic novels, Jenkins explores how comics depict stuff and exposes the central role that stuff plays in how we curate our identities, sustain memory, and make meaning. Comics and Stuff presents an innovative new way of thinking about comics and graphic novels that will change how we think about our stuff and ourselves.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Stuff is a nightmare. Stuff is all I got. Stuff...is. Dealing with stuff, yours. mine, or no one we know's, is a full time career.

Comic books are stuff. They're about stuff. They are, in short, great wats to explore stuff and its role in our lives.

A subtle person uses the medium to critique, analyze, and...sometimes...take to task the message and its architects. Henry Jenkins is subtle; he uses the medium to make plain what can easily fall outside the awareness of the consumer: This is a story, an entire social universe, construted around the Love of Stuff.

It seems harmless enough phrased that way. It's hard to see from inside the system what the system's designed to do. Like investigating the many-worlds interpretation of quantum physics, the theory is as close to proof of intent as we'll get...we can't observe what is, by definition, outside the system we're working within to perform the measurement.

In other words, you can't see the nose on your face unless you're looking in a mirror (or its equivalent reflective surface). Henry Jenkins is offering that mirror.

Highly recommended for your graphic-novel readin' sophisticate.

LAW & ORDER SVU: Confidential: Everything We Love about the Show We Can't Stop Watching, a terrific fandom-service gift

LAW & ORDER SVU: Confidential: Everything We Love about the Show We Can't Stop Watching
NEAL E. FISCHER
Epic Ink (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$24.99 all editions, available now

Rating: 4.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Indulge in the nostalgia of one of the most celebrated shows in television history, Law & Order SVU. This enthusiast's SVU handbook is packed with interesting facts covering the creation of the show all the way to the evolution of the cast, delightful insights into years of star-studded guest appearances, reminiscent recaps, and much more.

Step behind the scenes of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit in this unofficial and unauthorized companion for SVU superfans.

Through exclusive photographs, filming locations, and insights from cast and crew interviews, Law & Order SVU: Confidential solves the mystery of what makes Law & Order: SVU one of television’s most enduring series. Open its vibrantly illustrated pages to revisit the characters and cases that have made SVU unforgettable, from powerhouse detective Olivia Benson to quick-witted interrogation expert Fin Tutuola. Alongside pop art illustrations of iconic moments and characters, you’ll find:

A detailed map of SVU filming locations

Everything there is to know about over 450 episodes of this hit crime TV show

Complete character arcs of fan-favorite detectives and recurring figures

A breakdown of the irresistible formula that defines every SVU episode

Deep dives into real-life cases that inspired the show’s storylines

Spotlights on celebrity guest stars and their memorable roles

For fans who can’t get enough of the long-running crime drama, this unofficial and unauthorized edition celebrates the legacy of Law & Order: SVU while offering fresh insights and insider details.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Season 27 is airing now. Yes, that's right, season twenty-seven. If, like me, you watch the occasional episode and think, "good show...I'll forget it tomorrow," you'll wonder at the superfans who keep it on the air for decades now.

We're wrong; they're right. This show's fanbase, after a bit of poking around, is vocal and eloquent about their love for the way this show represents justice for the powerless and hope for victims and families. I suspect the ones who float the idea that true-crime podcasting and its notable successes were in part inspired by the show could very well be correct. It's been around since before podcasting was possible, still less A Thing like it is now.

It tracks with the personality that gets deep into this show.

The actors and their characters all get deep dives:

...there are games and trivia:

...and there are the episode rankings, though how they ever came to any conclusions given how many there are I do not know:

It's a wonderland for the serious fan! I'm sure, given their numbers, we all know one...I don't know any who're out, so to speak, but I bet there's some hiding for fear of being misunderstood.

I'm getting surer we should join them. At the least give them this relatively inexpensive source of joy for Yule.

PEARL JAM LIVE!: 35 Years of Legendary Music and Revolutionary Shows, 90s nostalgia on steroids

PEARL JAM LIVE!: 35 Years of Legendary Music and Revolutionary Shows
SELENA FRAGASSI
publisher (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$35.00 hardcover, available now

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Pearl Jam Live! celebrates the iconic rock band, the fan culture, and the music they created through interviews, photos, and more.

A must-have for every Pearl Jam fan, this beautifully designed volume traces 35 years of the groundbreaking grunge group through photos, interviews, and all the fascinating facts.

Jeff Ament, Stone Gossard, Mike McCready, Eddie Vedder, and Matt Cameron are Seattle’s own alternative rock band that sprang to the top of the charts (and into the angsty hearts of millions of global fans) in the 1990s. Though each of the members and the band itself has faced their ups and downs in the four decades since they came together, they continue to release new music and maintain a loyal fan base.

On July 7, 2025, Matt Cameron made the surprise announcement that he was leaving Pearl Jam after a long 27-year run that began back in 1998. This book celebrates the many years, albums, and tours that Matt was a part of before stepping down.

In Pearl Jam Live! music journalist Selena Fragassi delves into the band’s origins—from their beginning as Green River to their earliest influences—to their biggest successes in the ’90s, to their continued achievements today and the lasting legacy they’ve left in the alt-rock canon. Along the way, readers will also explore:

The creation of Pearl Jam’s biggest hits, such as “Even Flow” and “Last Kiss”

The fan culture that built up around the band, from the small gigs and mall tours of their earliest years to performances at Lollapalooza and their Gigaton tour

Pearl Jam’s influences, from classic rock to pop, and their place in rock history

The lasting legacy of a band proudly celebrating their thirty-fifth anniversary

Step by step, through interviews, photos, and sidebars full of fun facts and trivia, you’ll learn something new about the band on every page. This book is the perfect companion to your lasting reverence for Pearl Jam.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A defining act for much of its history, Pearl Jam's made millions very happy at its shows...more on its radio sides. (Wow, I'm really old.)

bet at least a few of these are familiar

What a zooming sound the past makes as it races past me. I'm glad I've lived long enough to see the culture of my middle age become nostalgia. My ambition is to live long enough to see 2001 Cadillacs on the auction floor at a Mecum antique-car auction.

Imagine if I'd kept that Pearl Jam concert program....

What we all need is a dose of "Alive" blasting on the car radio while cruising across the country in that 2001 Cadillac I mentioned above. Closest thing we're gonna get is a trip down memory lane with Author Fragassi telling us who the people are we've forgotten, where we know 'em from, and what was happening at that time:

Everything in its place. We're going through a lot of territory, there needs to be some razzmatazz to be visually over)stimulating, this is the alt-rock 90s after all!

Pearl Jam...thirty-five years as a touring band...no wonder Matt Cameron retired in July. He's bloody exhausted! Still, there are a lot of wonderful memory holes to fall into in this excitingly designed volume...but choose the tree-book, trust me. Your 90s-nostalgic giftee will love it.