Chris Tamarri reviews Hope Larson’s Gray Horses at Crisis/Boring Change. Tamarri writes for the Village Voice, and you can see the professionalism in his approach. I hope to write graphic novel reviews as well as he does someday.

The thing that really excites me about Gray Horses is that it’s a validation of [Larson's first book] Salamander Dream, and not incidentally, an improvement upon it.

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Lots of Gray Horses love out there this week, actually. The indefatigable Johanna Draper Carlson weighs in over at Comics Worth Reading, and also points to reviews of Larson’s sophomore effort by David Welsh and Mark Fossen. A quick Technorati scan reveals that the book has also been reviewed recently by Dylan Abbot, the SFist, Johnny Bacardi, and Publisher’s Weekly (a starred review).

I’m glad to see Larson getting this kind of attention. No one else out there makes comics quite like hers (except maybe her husband Bryan Lee O’Malley — that their artistic output bears a familial resemblance, while being almost anamolously distinct from that of their peers, is one of the most profound and adorable things I’ve ever noticed about a married couple). Most artists’ first few books scream at you about their influences. Larson seems to have emerged full-blown and original on the graphic novel scene. One minute, we were reading in Scott McCloud’s blog that he had this illustrator friend whom he wished would make a comic or two. The next minute, she’s a superstar. If you’re curious about the artist after reading these reviews, or even before reading them, you should check out her website, or even read Salamander Dream, her first book, online, in its entirety, for free.

For good measure, Fossen also posted a write-up of O’Malley’s Lost At Sea yesterday.

More info about Gray Horses at Amazon

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