Congratulations to Nicolas Winding Refn for winning best director at Cannes. Well done, I’m looking forward to Drive, just as I hope to catch Terence Malick’s Palm-winner Tree of Life. I did however find shameful Refn’s callous disavowal — he was “repulsed” — of his mentor Lars von Trier’s extremely ill-advised, but ultimately harmless comments…
This is part of a Metabunker series celebrating a great decade in comics with Rackham by reprinting select reviews of the decades’ best comics from the Rackham archive, along with a number of new pieces. Dominique Goblet depicts her father as a late medieval Madonna, nurturing his child, right hand in blessing. Drawn on disparate,…
Apart from hopefully lining his wallet a bit, Dan Clowes isn’t doing himself any favors by repackaging this story. His most lightweight effort in more than a decade, it was a pandering trifle to begin with and it only suffers from being given the book treatment. Originally published in the New York Times Magazine in…
The melodic voice of the G-Funk era, Nate Dogg, alias Nathaniel D. Hale, died on Tuesday. He had been suffering from strokes, apparently, but I haven’t seen any report on the cause of death. Nate Dogg, best known for his classic duet with Warren G “Regulate” (1994), on which the two of them put words…
Throughout his life, Paul Cézanne nurtured an ambition to paint figure compositions in the renaissance tradition. At various points in his career he thus attempted to populate his otherwise open landscapes with anonymous, lumpy nudes, often bathing. There is something uncomfortable, something unresolved, about these paintings — they seem an intellectual aspiration toward a pastoral…
Might the Egyptian Book of the Dead show at the British Museum be the best comics exhibition ever? It certainly contains some of the greatest comics I’ve ever read. It’s good sometimes just to forget about the historically determined understanding of comics as a modern art form and remember that humans have told stories in…
The week before last, I went to the grand Moebius retrospective at the Fondation Cartier in Paris. I’ve written a review of the exhibition for The Comics Journal. Check it out.
Sadly, this is a familiar story. Another American cultural legend finds himself in ill health with no health coverage. Kool DJ Herc, the creator of the breakbeat and one of the godfathers of hip hop culture has come down with a bad case of gallstone and urgently needs help paying for treatment. His sister Cindy…
This is part of a Metabunker series celebrating a great decade in comics with Rackham by reprinting select reviews of the decades’ best comics from the Rackham archive, along with a number of new pieces. It has now been over a decade since Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan : The Smartest Kid on Earth was published…
Once again, international gentleman Paul Gravett has asked a bunch of international critics and writers about comics to talk a little about the comics of the year from their respective countries. I participated along with representatives from Austria, Germany, Italy, Russia, Spain, and Sweden, offering a selection of what I think are the best Danish…
While my attempts to reach the involved parties hasn’t met with much success, a little more information on the Association strike has trickled onto the web, including a press release by the staff, stating in a little more detail their motivations and grievances. It was sent out on 14 January week ago and runs like…
This is part of a Metabunker series celebrating a great decade in comics with Rackham by reprinting select reviews of the decades’ best comics from the Rackham archive, along with a number of new pieces. By Andreas Gregersen Daniel Clowes hardly needs introduction. Best known for the comic and film Ghost World (1997 and 2000)…
Since I’ve been fairly engaged in the sad fortune of the Disney comics of Carl Barks (1901-2000) in reprint, I figured I would comment briefly on the recent announcement by Fantagraphics that they will be helming a complete edition, starting this fall. Already publishing the reprint editions of The Complete Peanuts, Krazy & Ignatz, Popeye,…
It seems sadly serendipitous, if not actually ominous, that a year that started with a depressing but thankfully failed cartoon-related terrorist attack here in Denmark, ends with another one. Five people, one Iraqi asylum seeker and four Swedes/Swedish residents, were arrested yesterday on charges of planning a terrorist attack on the headquarters of Jyllands-Posten, the…
Went down to London to check out the sales today. Lots of good stuff at Christie’s — kind of sad to see the Rutland Poussin Ordination up for sale (I hope an accessible collection secures it for the public), but it was in fine company: a terrific El Greco St. Francis estimated at what seemed…