I recently received the following correspondence from cartoonist David Mazzucchelli, re: my old article on his “Big Man” and its similarities with Bill DuBay and Alex Toth’s “Daddy and the Pie” (above): “Dear Matthias, I came across your essay, “The Child and the Giant,” several years ago, and would like to thank you for your…
I now have a review of Judith Forest’s remarkable autobiographical comic 1h25 up over at TCJ.
Wow, it’s been three weeks. They just disappeared. But yeah, I did want to make a few points related to this year’s Roskilde Festival, before the subject gets way too old. It was a great time as usual, but rather poignantly for the year in which it celebrated its 40th anniversary, the festival seemed to…
One of the most positive musical surprises this year for yours truly has been the recently released Distant Relatives, which sees reggae scion Damian “Jr. Gong” Marley and hip hop veteran Nas teaming up for an Afrocentric album on the theme of our common heritage. Far from an assured success, the collaboration and the thematic…
In the second edition of his great collection of artists’ biographies, Le vite dei piu eccelenti pitturi, scultori ed architettori (1568), the Tuscan painter and architect Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574) wrote the following about the significance of drawing: “Seeing that Design, the parent of our three arts, Architecture, Sculpture, and Painting, having its origin in the…
Robert Venditti Interviewed Andrew Firestone talks to the author of The Surrogates
The inimitable ‘Li Se’, in whose “extended network” I find myself, has finally opened the floodgates and is committing to writing the kind of intellectual effluvium that people in said network have come to appreciate in conversation over the years. Written on the principle, appropriated from Charles Bukowski, of ‘not trying’, it is blogging as…
The picks of the week from around the web. The Guardian: “The Unwanted”. Joe Sacco on African refugees in Malta in the first installment of a 48-page reportage that originally ran in the Virginia Quarterly Review. Harvey Pekar. The death of the pioneering comics writer this week elicited some fine journalism around the web: Tom…
The passing of pioneer comics writer Harvey Pekar yesterday made me go back and reread some of his earliest collaborations with R. Crumb, published in his self-published American Splendor #1-4 in 1976-79. The beginnings of a remarkable body of work, they are emblematic of Pekar’s originality and importance as a writer, and as good a…
Meanwhile over at TCJ main, I have a review up of David Prudhomme’s critically acclaimed musical romance Rébétiko.
For this month’s column over at the Hooded Utilitarian, I’ve dug into the Rackham archive to re-present in English a piece I wrote on Quino’s comic strip masterpiece Mafalda back in 2005.
The picks of the week from around the web. The New Yorker: “The Mark of a Masterpiece”. David Grann talks to and examines the colourful career of Peter Paul Biro, the art forensics man who has participated in the authentication of the pretty, so-called Leonardo drawing that surfaced out of nowhere last year. Pretty amazing…
Ovre på det nye danske tegneseriesite nummer9.dk har vi netop postet en rundbordsdiskussion om de tre første bind i tegneserien Valhalla, i anledning af den nye samleudgivelse fra Carlsen. Udover undertegnede deltager chefredaktør Erik Barkman og Aben Malers Steffen P. Maarup. Check hele herligheden her.
Last week, another of the pioneers of early hip hop culture, Rammellzee, passed away. A versatile multimedia artist and cultural theorist, he remained at the margins of hip hop culture as it evolved into a worldwide, commercially successful phenomenon, marching to the beat of his own drum. From hitting the A train in 1974 and…