Review: Contraband by TJ Behe and Phil Elliott

I received a copy of the graphic novel Contraband from SLG yesterday– which I’d known was coming, but which I had forgotten about– courtesy of the writer, TJ Behe, who I interviewed a while back at comixology. I had previously skimmed about half of the book in a pdf preview, but with the physical book in hand I sat down this evening to give it a more thorough reading. Here then is my attempt at a review.

New blog, opening post

Well, I’ve been thinking about starting up a blog for a while now, just to share some thoughts from time to time. I work at a website called comixology.com, where among other things I seek out great writers and edit their articles for posting, and I conduct a lot of the interviews for our podcast, “It Came Out on Wednesday.” The goal with the interviews is to talk to the creator about their creation, what inspires them, what makes them interesting and unique. Largely as a result of doing those interviews, I’ve started to get really interested in comics.

From that statement you can probably guess that I’m pretty new to the field. Unlike most of the people I know in comics, I didn’t grow up reading them, or have any particular interest in them until quite recently. I still have no use for the mainstream superhero stuff; Marvel and DC hold no interest for me. But lo and behold, there are a hundred other publishers out there, many of them doing all kinds of interesting stuff.

So I’ll be maintaining this blog, maybe frequently, maybe not, to share some of my thoughts on the industry and on specific comics I like (or dislike). Perhaps it will be interesting.