Yayoi Kusama is an artist that I wasn’t aware that I knew, I’d seen pictures of some of her work in the tome-like books that were in the rooms I took GCSE Art & Design, I remember seeing pictures of her mirrored balls, and yet I’d never retained her name. It was only through reading […]
Category: Books
Ten Thousand Light Years From Home – James Triptree Jr
“Ten Thousand Light Years From Home” is a collection of fifteen short stories that take place here on Earth and in outer space. First published in 1973 the stories were collected under a pen name: James Triptree Jr, but were written by a woman: Alice Bradley Sheldon. Sheldon is a fascinating woman, and unlike the […]
My Riot – Rick Spears, Emmett Helen
Young Adult novels, and in this case, comics, tend to follow a similar formula (or at least from my experience they do): Young girl challenges the norms of her society in order to discover herself. My Riot is no different in that respect, however rather than settle for a dystopian future setting, we go way […]
Odessa – Jonathan Hill
Odessa, like last week’s Eden, leaves me in a difficult spot, it’s enjoyable but largely forgettable. It tells the story of an America that’s literally been torn in two by an earthquake, and within that is the story of a family in search of their Mother, though things end in this volume before they find […]
Eden – Tomek Woroniak
What if animals could talk? Would they condone the human’s race position on the food chain? These are the questions Tomek Woroniak addresses in this monochrome graphic novel. Or at least how things begin. In this world an event dubbed “The Eve” has taken place, wherein the animal kingdom suddenly and simultaneously became sentient over […]
Guantanamo Voices: True Accounts from the World’s Most Infamous Prison – Sarah Mirk
Something like Guantanamo Voices is a difficult thing to review, much like Art Spiegelman’s “Maus”, it exists as a documentation of the horrors that humans can carry out on each other, like Maus, it’s not intended to be “enjoyed”, its there to educate, using a medium that many (wrongly) associate with being juvenile, and thus […]
Spy X Family – Tatsuya Endo
Like alot of these recent Manga reviews that I’ve been featuring here on Bar Harukiya, I’ve gone into Spy X Family completely blind, I had no expectations going on and had no idea what I was letting myself in for. So that I’ve come out the otherside feeling really rather confused is, in my opinion, […]
Dreamcast: Year One – Andrew J Dickinson
It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of SEGA’s final home console, in fact, I still have my Dreamcast set up (alongside my PS2, PS3, PS4 and Xbox One), it played a massive part in my teens. I still remember buying it from Gamestation in Nottingham (the one near the old Odeon cinema, that […]
Why are we still talking about comics as a genre?
A few weeks back I happened across a typical lockdown/buzzfeed style article, wherein the author discusses a list of things that popular opinion dictactes you should check out. In this the author lists five Graphic Novels that they believe everyone should read (Watchmen, Maus, Ghost World, Jimmy Corrigan the Smartest Kid in the World, Fun […]
Ping Pong volume 1 – Taiyo Matsumoto
Sports manga is a genre that I’m not sure has developed widespread popularity outside of Japan, there it’s pretty huge, readers love consuming stories portraying a characters rise from nowhere to ultimate glory, especially in a high school setting. Despite knowing this, I’ve never read a sports manga myself, that changed with Ping Pong by […]