Reporting live from the Angoulême festival: The rain didn’t keep people away. Friday has been fairly busy, with the exhibition areas and tents filled as usual with a broad, heterogenous audience. I spent the day taking in various exhibitions and browsing the exhibitors’ tables in the alternative tent, ending my day of programming by attending…
One of the grand old men of Franco-Belgian comics, Jacques Martin just died at age 88. One of Hergé’s most important assistants through the 1950s and 60s (notably on the South Sea Sharks and Tintin in Tibet) and one of the pillars of Tintin Magazine, he acrimoniously struck out on his own in 1972 to…
As the more assiduous comics internauts will already have noticed, I took part in the recent selection of the year’s best comics criticism hosted at The Hooded Utilitarian. Run by Ng Suat Tong, it was put together by a panel that also included head utilitarian Noah Berlatsky, cartoonist and commentator Frank Santoro, and the critic…
Just like Yale University Press’ disgraceful censorship of Jytte Klausen’s book on the Muhammed cartoons, it seems the august Metropolitan Museum in New York is set to muddy the waters of history by pulling from their display ancient images of the prophet, made by Muslims and considering not putting them back on display once the…
For this year’s wrap-up season, Paul Gravett repeats last year’s great idea of asking comics connoisseurs and professionals all over the world to write a few words on the year’s most notable comics from their respective country. He graciously asked me to talk about the best in Danish comics, so my selections appear in part…
I just briefly wanted to pay homage to the recently passed master cartoonist. Possibly the most recognisable caricaturist of the past 40 years, Levine has come almost to incarnate the discipline, especially with his withering cartoons of the main players in the Nixon administration and of other unsavoury world leaders of that era. Contrary to…
I didn’t take long for the New Year’s first piece of crap news to arrive here. Some idiot broke into the home of Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard wielding an axe, evidently in “retaliation” for the latter’s cartoon of the prophet Muhammed. The cartoonist saved himself by fleeing to the house’s panic room. His grandchild was…
A short note on the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man. It seems to me that this incisive fable about one man’s search for answers is the equivalent of the filmmakers handing us the keys to their art. Only now, after 25 years of making movies, have they created an overtly Jewish film. Characters such as…
Things remain busy here — still working on that diss. Have just finished the introduction, so I’m getting there. But now it’s Christmas, with all that entails, so the blogging here will remain rather perfunctory, but I wanted to at least get something up here and since I was just in Paris for a day…
While I remember, there’s this little curiosity. At the Christie’s preview I went to the week before last, there was this astonishing intarsiaed Louis XIV tortoise shell/pietra dura cabinet, which went on to sell for a good £4.5 million. Anyway, what leaped out at me immediately, being mired fatally in Titian’s prints at the moment,…
Jeez, that Raphael drawing I posted about a couple weeks ago sold for over £29 million! That’s a whopping £13 million above the highest official estimate! And the Rembrandt offered at the same sale went for £20.2 million. Paul Raison of Christie’s notes the obvious: the recession certainly hasn’t affected interest in, and the prices…
As those of you interested in such matters surely know by now, Christie’s London sale of Old Masters and 19th Century Art, December 8, will feature the drawing by Raphael excerpted above. Estimated to fetch £12-16, it will easily break the record for most expensive drawing ever, jointly held by pieces from Michelangelo and Leonardo,…
Today’s arrest of two men suspected of planning to kill cartoonist Kurt Westergaard and Jyllands-Posten editor Flemming Rose, and to bomb the newspaper’s headquarters — apparently dubbed the ‘Mickey Mouse plot’ by their peers — all for the publication of those twelve dumb cartoons is a disquieting reminder that the madness continues. It is also…
This past Sunday saw a conference on Women in Comics at Murray Edwards College here in Cambridge. Organised jointly by the college and the particularly strong contingent of comics scholars at the University of Glasgow, it presented a full day’s programming of papers and artists’ talks to go along with an already planned exhibition by…
The great American journeyman comic book artist George Tuska has passed away at the age of 93. Tom Spurgeon’s obit is your one-stop for info (update: Mark Evanier now has a fine piece up too), but I just wanted to pay my respects here. I always associated Tuska’s style with toughness. There was a visceral…