Comics criticism magazine PanelXPanel is going on hiatus after its April issue
After 70 monthly issues, the award-winning comics criticism magazine is ending (temporarily)
PanelXPanel, the Eisner Award-winning digital magazine of comics criticism launched by summer 2017 by writer, editor, and comic book letterer Hassan Otsmane-Elhaou, is ending its current run with its April issue, Popverse can exclusively reveal.
After almost six years of continuous publication on a monthly basis, PanelxPanel will go on hiatus with its 70th issue, with current plans seeing it return later in 2023 with a modified release schedule.
In a statement about the hiatus, Otsmane-Elhaou says, “After nearly six years of monthly issues, it feels right to take a break and have a look at the format and the future of the magazine. For the past six years, the highlight of my month has been getting to read the exquisite essays and analysis from the critics that we’ve been lucky enough to publish, and it’s been a ton of fun getting to work with those writers in bringing their words to life.”
Since its launch, each issue of PanelXPanel has featured focused in-depth comics criticism exploring either a specific comic book title or theme, alongside creator-on-creator interviews, general criticism, and essays on comics craft. Regular writers for the magazine include Tom Shapira, Avery Kaplan, Sara Century, Sean Dillon, and Popverse’s own Tiffany Babb, who became co-editor of the magazine in 2021 alongside Otsmane-Elhaou.
Outside of the monthly publication schedule, PanelXPanel published four monographs of extended comics criticism in 2020, including Excess, Giants in the Shadows, The Lawman, and Style and Substance; the magazine also won the Will Eisner Comic Industry Award for Best Comics-Related Periodical/Journalism in 2019, sharing the award with Back Issue magazine.
Subscribers to PanelXPanel will be contacted for refunds in the coming weeks, according to Otmane-Elhaou, while back issues will remain available at PanelXPanel.com during its hiatus. Details on the magazine’s revival later in the year will be released in the coming months.
Revisit this roundtable with 2022’s Eisner nominees for Best Comics-Related Periodical/Journalism from last summer.
