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…
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…
“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…
The week in review I’ve always had a feeling I witnessed the Lunar landing and the now sadly passed Neil Armstrong’s Moon walk live as it happened. So vivid are my memories of my dad opening his box of clippings and laying them out on our large dinner table when I was a kid. His…
On Friday, The Animation Workshop in Viborg opened an exhibition on one of the greatest comics artists ever, the Japanese ‘God of Manga’ Tezuka Osamu. If you’re in the area, I urge you to go see it. And if you read Danish, here’s Thomas Stærmose’s newly-penned introduction to Tezuka’s work and career. Oh, and here’s…
The week in review The outrageous sentence of two years in labour camp for the members of the punk/art collective Pussy Riot in Moscow the day before yesterday is the most high-profile recent example of the fragility and corruption of the Russian judicial system. Without knowing much of anything about the subject, I think that…
On the Danish comics site Nummer9.dk I’ve written a bunch of notes on two of Hergé’s earliest Tintin stories, the notorious Tintin in the Congo and the criminally overlooked Tintin in America as they were originally published in the early thirties. I touch upon everything from racism to humanism, from gag construction to panel composition.…
The week in review The Olympics ended today. Besides offering plenty of amazing performances, the event for me was interesting in that it something as rare as an (almost) uniformly positive display of national pride by the customarily self-loathing Britons. Lame and messy as it was in parts, it was great to see an opening…
I know, it’s been ages, but I’ve finally written a new installment of my column DWYCK over at The Hooded Utilitarian. This time, I draw upon the great Degas exhibition at the Royal Academy last year to discuss the artist’s inquiry into time, space, and movement and its relation to comics. Go, read. Above: Edgar…
The week in review James Holmes who killed 12 people and wounded 58 last Friday at the midnight screening of The Dark Knight Rises in Aurora, Colorado was quickly christened the ‘Batman Killer’ in Danish media. Just one of those shortcuts the tabloids trade in, I suppose — it’s far from clear whether the gunman…
The week in review The drive for new Caravaggios continues unabated, it seems, with the hard to believe recent attribution of about a 100 drawings and ten oil paintings from the Castello Sforza in Milan that once belonged to Caravaggio’s master Simone Peterzano. They were just published on the web by Art historians Maurizio Bernardelli…