Uncharted Territory

This week in "Uncharted Territory," Kristy Valenti reveals the dress code around the Fantagraphics offices and gives a run-down on the best tees she's acquired so far.

This week in Uncharted Territory, Kristy Valenti does the rounds and takes a look at the FCBD offerings of a selection of Seattle-area comic book shops.

The conclusion of Kristy Valenti's latest profile discusses how Aimee Major Steinberger's travel-manga came together and how it differs from a typical travelogue.

This week in Uncharted Territory, Kristy Valenti profiles an otaku's story from Go! Comi.

The title says it all - this week in "Uncharted Territory," Kristy Valenti describes her experience at Seattle's manga con.

In the conclusion of her examination, Kristy Valenti turns her attention to girls, comics, and manga.

This week, Kristy Valenti begins an examination of the implications of gender on sequential-art reading habits by taking a look at the YA market for boys.

In part two of her interview, Kristy Valenti covers Matt Kindt's award-winning contribution to Lost Girls and the development of his storytelling technique in Super Spy and 2 Sisters.

In "Uncharted Territory" this week, Kristy Valenti present the first of a two-part full-length interview with Matt Kindt, creator of the Pistolwhip and Super Spy graphic novels published by Top Shelf.

Part two of Kristy Valenti's profile of Dorothy Gambrell takes a look at how a webcomic creator scrapes together a living while trying to balance multiple projects.

Kristy Valenti profiles Dorothy Gambrell and her hit webcomic Cat and Girl this week and next week in "Uncharted Territory."

In part two of her profile of the minicomic distributor, Kristy Valenti takes a closer look at Bodega's entries as an indie publisher and the company's expanding mission.

In part one of a two-part profile, Kristy Valenti talks to Bodega Distribution's Randy Chang, and reveals what it takes to distribute mini-comics in today's market.

In part two of her profile of Bill Blackbeard, Kristy Valenti relates the history of the landmark book, The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics.

Few in the comics field would disagree that we're living in the Golden Age of Comic-Strip Reprints. But this would not be possible without Bill Blackbeard: his contributions to the medium include his dogged preservation of early 20th century newspapers and his seminal book The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics.

By this point, comics and cinema/television are naturally associated. However, the connection between comics and other art forms such as theater, music and poetry is harder to make. Perhaps because the "superman" meme was circulating long before Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster fastened it to their creation, the Man of Steel is the notable exception to this.

It's been estimated there's something like one comic shop for every 1,000 square miles in the U. S.. As such, L.A. suffers from an embarrassment of riches: it's an epicenter for quality comics retailers.

Warren's deft touch with Thugboy and Emp's warm relationship, which naughtily began while each was thugging and superheroining, respectively, is another ingredient that causes Empowered to gel

Between the last Dirty Pair series and the first volume of Empowered, Warren survived on freelance work such as a comic for a videogame magazine, a Livewires miniseries for Marvel and a run on Gen13 for DC/WildStorm.

Only two columns into Uncharted Territory, and Kristy's already strayed into territory that's charted: Adam Warren's superhero/manga mashup, Empowered Vol. 1.

Even though Esther Pearl Watson's comic Unlovable is exposed to 80,000 readers in the bimonthly feminist magazine Bust, her work is virtually unknown in comic shops, save for her self-published minis and her contributions to The Best American Comics 2006 and Blab! anthologies.

Fleep and Bookhunter, two of Shiga's mystery/thrillers, are arguably his most well-known works to date. Perhaps not coincidentally, Dylan Williams' company Sparkplug has published both of them, lending Shiga's work better productions values (and most likely better distribution than his self-published comics).

Although he sites Malaysian cartoonist Lat as his key influence, Jason Shiga's comics read very much like, and indeed, borrow quite a few tropes from Agatha Christie novels - both artists manage the high-wire act of entertaining their readers without sacrificing the complexity of their mysteries.