The week in review So, the Raphael drawing I mentioned back in September was sold at Sotheby’s London this week for a whopping £29.7 million, breaking even the astonishing record set by the previous Raphael drawing sold at auction, back in 2009. This is the highest sum ever paid at auction for a work on…
It’s been several years coming, it has taken a lot of hard work, but now it is here: the first professional educational track for comics creators in Denmark. Today, The Animation Workshop in Viborg, Denmark, announced their new four-year bachelor in graphic storytelling. And thus, a new chapter in Danish comics history seems to begin.…
Gl. Holtegaard, a quality-oriented small museum north of Copenhagen introduces its most recent innovation, Cool Comics, today. Conceived as an annual mini-festival it encompasses an exhibition of comics and animation art to which I’ve acted as a consultant/curator on the comics section, as well as a series of workshops and talks over the next month.…
This weekend sees the Copenhagen Book Fair, or Bogforum — the book event of the year in Denmark. This year, the fair has moved to Bella Center in Amager to accommodate the crowds. Let’s hope people who have gotten used to the proximity afforded by the traditional venue, Forum, at border of Frederiksberg. Comics have…
The Nordic Network for Comics Studies (NNCORE) has been going strong for a year now. The inaugural conference in Odense last year brought lots of promise, bringing together dozens of scholars with an interest in comics. Many of these are now working in individual groups, some of which have held smaller seminar and colloquia over…
This interview with Gary Panter was conducted over a crackling phone line in New York in the spring of 2004. Panter had recently released his magnum opus Jimbo in Purgatory, a reading via comics of the middle part of Dante’s Divine Comedy, the Purgatorio , via Boccaccio and a host of other classics of European…
The week in review This week I have a Danish-context comics-related grievance I want to address, so please excuse the shift in language here. International links below! Bogtillægget til denne uges Weekendavis skæmmes af et fejlinformeret og tendentiøst opslag. En ærgerlig plet på en ellers som regel velredigeret og seriøs publikation. Kan det overraske, at…
Today sees the publication of the inaugural article in my regular column on European comics for The Comics Journal, entitled Common Currency. It focuses on Fabrice Neaud’s recent turn toward genre comics, with the series Nu-Men, after two decades of uncompromising autobiography had brought him to an impasse. Go check it out here.
The week in review Hip hop’s making bullshit headlines again. This time over the reaction to the murder, last month, of Chicago MC Lil Jojo. After news hit that the 18-year old had been shot in a drive-by, his rival Chief Keef — with whom he had been beefing, seemingly in a grab for quick…
Over at Hooded Utilitarian I’ve joined their fifth anniversary hatefest with an extended piece on the cartoons of the New Yorker Magazine. I’ve long wanted to write about what I regard as a bafflingly revered and rather depressing institution in American cartooning, so I was happy finally to get my act together on it. Go…
Yesterday, one of the few strips that should give Petey comfort ended. The circumstances of cartoonist Richard Thompson’s decision to do so — health reasons — are heartbreaking. We wish Thompson the best of health and fortune in his future endeavours.
The week in review Another great drawing by Raphael is coming up for sale. Like the Female Head, which broke all records when it sold for £29 million in 2009, it’s a so-called auxiliary cartoon for his last great, large-scale work, the Transfiguration (begun 1516, finished after the master’s death in 1520) now in the…
The week in review Not much to report from this angle this week, apart from the fact that the Jewish new year reminds me that I’ve been back in the ole home country for over a year now. Last year’s Rosh Hashannah kind of marked a fresh return to new beginnings here and it’s been…
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. Thus the unfacts, did we posses them, are too imprecisely few to warrant our certitude. : James Joyce In the…
“The Supreme Court is saying that campaign spending is a matter of free speech, but it has set up a situation where the more money you have the more speech you can buy. That’s a threatening concept for democracy. If your party serves the powerful and well-funded interests, and there’s no limit to what you…