Castle

Andrew Wheeler and Paulina Ganucheau’s “Another Castle” # begins with a blast of fairy tale sweetness: a castle, a medieval-inspired font for its narration, birds singing outside in bucolic sunshine. Ganucheau’s linework and pastel candy colors deliberately scream “Disney Princess,” while her scrupulous attention to background details like Princess Misty’s jewelry makes the settings rich. Ganucheau’s successful visual mimicry gives the opening sequence and the resulting skewering of a bird more sharpness and sting. Unfortunately, the parody or satirical element ends with the first scene. The rest of “Another Castle” #1 contains standard fairy tale and fantasy elements like a spyglass, a wicked witch and a dragon, but Wheelers’ usage of genre tropes becomes less thoughtful. The heroine, Princess Mistry, is a specimen belonging to the category of Reluctant or Rebellious Princesses, plentiful throughout 20th and 21st century literature, film and comics. There are several even within th

Linda Medley’s excellent “Castle Waiting: Volume 2” released almost two years ago as a lovely hardcover collection from Fantagraphics. Volume 2, like Volume 1 that preceded it, was incredible, with one small exception: it ended very abruptly. This single issue #18, ties up that volume beautifully and puts the characters exactly where they need to be both for closure purposes and as a set up for future stories to continue at any time. It’s unfortunate that for whatever reason this issue wasn’t included in the hardcover (timing, money, size?), but what’s done is done. This issue on its own reads with all the strength and beauty of every issue that came before it. The idea behind “Castle Waiting” for the uninitiated is simply the setting of a castle (formerly the Sleeping Beauty Castle, now dubbed Castle Waiting) in which fairytale and fable characters without a home have found one — making the strangest of friends into their own new family. The stories follow Medley’s characters almost

I have gone on record before as a staunch proponent of Rick Remender’s world class work on the “Franken-Castle” phase of his Punisher run. While the most vocal of the regular comics reading audience (I like to call them “The Grumpy 160,000”) immediately expressed outrage at such a flagrant upending of the status quo, Remender quietly created some of the most purely entertaining comics ever published. The book is overflowing with imagination and a blatant love for what makes this medium so unique, so seeing it so baselessly maligned is always sad to see. But it’s been a good while now and hopefully people have turned around, accepted this new status quo, and can take this book at face value. Then “Punisher,” now “Franken-Castle” has always been at its best when drawn by Tony Moore and this issue is not only not an exception, but it is easily their best collaboration to date. Handling the inks completely on his own, there is more than one page that, in blistering detail and cartooning