Boston Bound

Time to head to Boston! Looking forward to seeing the city again — it’s always a pleasure! Looking forward to trekking along Beacon Street, basking in Brookline and trawling the Harvard Square area, and dropping in at one of my favourite comics stores, Million Year Picnic. Looking forward to seeing Europa at the Isabella Stewart…

Lost Girl

Saw Inland Empire by David Lynch yesterday. I loved it. Probably my favourite since Blue Velvet (no shit). A sprawling spectacle stretching over three hours, and not letting up for a second, it is so loaded with bewildering imagery and ambiguous motifs that one might initially feel distracted from its deceptive simplicity. In a way,…

In the World

I hope you are reading Lewis Trondheim’s comics blog “Les Petits riens” – while at first sight perhaps seeming slight, it marks an exhilarating departure for his drawing and, by extension, his taking in of the world around him. As always laconic, he says he started the daily strip journal to teach himself watercolour, and…

Prototype or Parallel?

One of the discontents of art historical connoisseurship is how we, the practitioners, have been trained to hunt for the prototype of any given invention. We are so used to seeing precedents everywhere, even when dealing with some of the most original and inventive artists ever, that we sometimes forget how unpredictable art, and creativity,…

Arnold Drake RIP

One of the great originals of the American Silver Age, Arnold Drake, has passed away. Mark Evanier provides a both informative and touching obituary. To me, Drake is significant for the creation of a number of characters and stories that showed the obverse of the four-color universes of other superhero comics of his time. “The…