Words-and-pictures maestro Daniel Merlin Goodbrey and his Necessary Monsters are profiled over at The Pulse: "I pretty much grew up watching horror films through the Eighties and early Nineties. What hooked me back then were the crazy, dark elements of fantasy and the often bizarre and surreal nature of the supernatural. That’s the world I’m really trying to draw from here - the cherished memories of my horror-soaked youth.

"And in terms of the spy setting, well, I think at the time I came up with the idea I’d just finished watch all five seasons of Alias. And my brains was going, SPIES! DO SOMETHING WITH SPIES! I usually just tell my brain to shut up when it gets like this, but then the SPIES! shouts got all mixed in with these Horror film characters and something interesting started to come together as a result."

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A nice review of the first volume of Foot Soldiers. I always like current reviews of books we published eight years ago, because it vindicates our backlist worldview: if you haven't read it yet, it's new to you.

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Tom Spurgeon reviews Danny Fingeroth's Rough Guide To Graphic Novels and perhaps unsurprisingly doesn't much dig on Fingeroth's list of the Top 50 Graphic Novels Ever Made in the History of Comics History Making. He did, though, sum up his review thusly: "If all of that sounds snotty and you need to hear it in the form of a tagline: it's hard for me to imagine returning to a book that values Larry Young's fun but lightweight and always-in-print Astronauts in Trouble over Eddie Campbell's ambitious, unforgettable and hard to track down in all of its messy glory Alec."

Which, I suppose, is a fair enough comment, although one could make the argument that a current book aimed at folks who want a "rough guide" to a subject is going to tout available works over unavailable ones, and "fun and lightweight" doesn't necessarily preclude "ambitious and unforgettable," but all that's just sort of quibbling. All I took away from Tom's review was "Astronauts in Trouble is one of the Top 50 Graphic Novels Ever Made in the History of Comics History Making," and I suggest that that's what you take away from the review as well.