I am a team player.

1. The Comics Journal recently held a roundtable discussion of Craig Thompson's Habibi, and I was among the participants. Guaranteed to the be the first comic book review post you'll read this year to reference the 2011 Pankaj Kapoor Hindi movie flop Mausam. I also threw in a mini-review of Frank Miller's Holy Terror; be sure to read the comments for a piece of art reference I totally missed.

2. In conjunction with the October 2011 Horror Manga Moveable Feast, I was invited to submit an essay on Kazuo Umezu's survival horror classic The Drifting Classroom to the Hooded Utilitarian. I decided to massively abridge the series in such a way that virtually everything with the story's perpetually imperiled children is eliminated, nonetheless leaving a potently full work with some surprising similarities to other Umezu works. It was a sensation I picked up on during my very first reading, and I was glad to explore it at fuller length.