Helsinki. The comics festival here is just starting up and it’s looking good. In addition to the full program of events, signings and parties, the festival sees the European release tomorrow of KOLOR KLIMAX — Nordic Comics Now, an anthology of Nordic comics edited by me and designed by Frederik Storm with invaluable assistance from…
The Syrian regime’s disgraceful behavior is current headline news and the brutal beating by Syrian forces of treasured cartoonist Ali Ferzat the week before last is but one of many horrific examples of its efforts to contain the rebellion there. In support of Ferzat and his beleaguered profession, as well as freedom of expression everywhere,…
The picks of the week from around the web. 9/11: The Winners. The Village Voice‘s muck-raking isn’t always that credible, but this panorama of hucksterism and profiteering off the national tragedy makes for compelling if disconcerting reading. Kirby’s 70th. Jack Kirby interviewed on the radio in 1987, with Stan Lee calling in! Great listening for…
[Bendik Kaltenborn: The Great Underneath]
My contribution to the Hooded Utilitarian’s International Best Comics Poll is now online in the very last post in the two-week marathon poor Robert Stanley Martin has been conducting over there (ah, the never-ending joy of being last in the alphabet). It has been an interesting project, conducted by Robert with composure and diligence, so…
“…when faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze. Instead of indicting the people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, he put them in charge of…
Since the ruling in the Kirby vs. Marvel case last week, there’s been a fair amount of discussion in the comics blogosphere as to whether we, the readers, can take positive action to help get Marvel finally to start addressing its shameful history of exploitation, of Kirby, Ditko and the other founding fathers, but also…
I visited the small Will Eisner retrospective over at MoCCA on Saturday. It’s a good show, with sections devoted to The Spirit (including all the originals to the classic “Gerhard Shnobble” story from 1948), A Contract with God, Dropsie Avenue, plus a generous selection of other material, primarily from the eighties. Well worth a visit,…
By now, most of you interested in such things will have seen that the heirs of Jack Kirby have had their lawsuit against Marvel rejected in a summary judgment by the federal court in New York. A sad, if predictable setback for the Kirby heirs, but also for anyone hoping for official recognition and substantial…
The picks of the week from around the web. ‘New’ old masters. This seems to be the season of sensational (and ‘sensational’) discoveries. Headlining is the long-lost Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci, which has turned up in an American collection and will be exhibited publicly for the first time at the sure-to-be-unmissable National Gallery…
I have a piece up on Chester Brown’s much talked-about new book Paying for It up at Hooded Utilitarian today. Go check it out.
“I heard something recently by Richard Feynman, and he said that understanding the way the universe works is like extrapolating a huge checkers game from a regular game of checkers. Checkers is an easy game to play, but if the board were huge and you had many, many checkers, it wouldn’t be easy to play…
Today I received Favorites, the zine Craig Fischer has put together to benefit Team Cul de Sac’s fundraising to support research into Parkinson’s disease. It’s a great little thing I encourage you to buy and read, and not — really! — just because I have a piece in it on Carl Barks. You see, Team…
I was sad to learn on Friday that the great silver-age cartoonist Gene Colan, known primarily for late 60s and 70s Marvel Comics like Iron Man, Howard the Duck, and above all Tomb of Dracula, passed away after several years of battling liver disease and cancer. He was one of the great stylists of his…
The cartooning duo Florent Ruppert and Jérôme Mulot are amongst the most remarkable emerging talents on the Francophone comics scene. A two-headed cartoon beast, theirs is an organic collaboration, melding writing and drawing. Their comics are possessed of a strong experimental formalism — elaborate analytical constructions, in which characters move and interact for our entertainment,…