A girl and her bear: Top Shelf announces ‘Kodi’ for summer

Jared Cullum’s gorgeous graphic novel arrives in August.

Top Shelf Comix has announced a new project for August — Kodi, the story of a girl and her Kodiak bear.

It’s by Jared Cullum, whose previous work includes the 35th anniversay Fraggle Rock miniseries fand Jim Henson’s The Storyteller: Giants, both from Archaia. He’s not only an illustrator but also a painter (see his website for some samples), and his work with watercolors is very impressive. In fact, he has several water color tutorials on his YouTube channel, if you’re looking for something new to try during life in quarantine.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Liniers on ‘Good Night, Planet’

The creator of ‘Macanudo’ discusses his latest project from TOON Books, humor and how his daughters influence him

Since 2002, Liniers has been entertaining Argentina with the daily comic strip Macanudo and for English language readers, the fourth collection of translated strips will be published in the spring. He’s also been drawing album covers and New Yorker magazine covers, and even had a recent comic in the pages of The New York Times. Since 2013 he’s made three children’s books, all of which have been published by Toon Books.

His most recent book is Good Night, Planet, which has also been released in a Spanish language edition, Buenas Noches, Planeta. It is funny and sweet with a sense of strangeness and a feeling of adventure. It also feels like autumn in New England. Liniers and his family have been living in Vermont for the past year where Liniers was a fellow at the Center for Cartoon Studies and we spoke recently by phone about the book, the strip, humor, how his daughters influence him, and not being Woody Allen.

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Smash Pages Q&A: Gale Galligan takes on ‘The Baby-Sitters Club’

The artist discusses her work on the popular graphic novel series as well as her recent Garfield fan comic, ‘Jon.’

A lot of comics readers know Gale Galligan for her webcomics and short comics like Patbird and Galesaur, 12 Days in Ireland, and Weeb, but this month her first full length graphic novel comes out from Scholastic’s Graphix imprint, which will likely introduce her to a whole new audience. The Baby-Sitters Club: Dawn and the Impossible Three is the fifth book in the graphic novel series. Galligan is taking the reins adapting and drawing the series from Raina Telgemeier.

Already hard at work on the second book in the series, Galligan isn’t slowing down at all, and showed up to this year’s SPX with a new minicomic, Jon. We talked about writing for kids, finding her own style, and Garfield.

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Comics Lowdown: Trolling the trolls

A cartoonist gets his career back, manga and kids’ comics are booming, and a con veteran offers advice for first-timers

Trolling the Trolls: Your bizarre read for the day is Emma Grey Ellis’s account of the strange career of Ben Garrison, a libertarian political cartoonist who became a sort of real-life Pepe the Frog after alt-right trolls started altering his cartoons to include Nazi imagery and seeded the internet with fake stories:

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