Today sees the release of a major new Danish graphic novel — Rikke Bakman’s autobiographical Glimt (“Shimmer” or ‘”Flashes”), an account of a childhood summer at the Danish west coast. Both funny, touching and slightly disturbing, it evokes childhood experience better than just about anything I’ve read in recent memory, and it’s beautifully rendered in…
It seems sadly serendipitous, if not actually ominous, that a year that started with a depressing but thankfully failed cartoon-related terrorist attack here in Denmark, ends with another one. Five people, one Iraqi asylum seeker and four Swedes/Swedish residents, were arrested yesterday on charges of planning a terrorist attack on the headquarters of Jyllands-Posten, the…
The picks of the week from around the web. It’s been a busy few weeks here, plus we’ve been on a short holiday, so I ain’t got much, except for this clip above, of Danish Minister for Health, Bertel Haarder, losing it Thick of It-style on a journalist Friday night (full interview here). It’s a…
I just wanted to take the time slight belatedly to acknowledge the 40th anniversary of Garry Trudeau’s now classic newspaper strip. I don’t see any need to list Trudeau’s accomplishments (Gary Willis provides a fine overview at the NYRB), nor to add much to the accolades that it has received, but merely wanted to emphasise…
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. By Julie Paludan-Müller Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis is one of the most touching pieces of exile literature in recent memory, and…
“You’ve heard of Too Big to Fail — the foreclosure crisis is Too Big for Fraud. Think of the Bernie Madoff scam, only replicated tens of thousands of times over, infecting every corner of the financial universe. The underlying crime is so pervasive, we simply can’t admit to it — and so we are working…
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. Kramers Ergot #4, edited by the cartoonist Sammy Harkham, is an artistic and stylistic statement of a kind rarely seen…
The picks of the week from around the web. Rowan Williams and Terry Eagleton on “The New Atheism”. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the distinguished cultural critic met on Friday night here in Cambridge to discuss the resurgent, anti-religious strand of atheism (Dawkins, Hitchins, Harris, Dennet, etc.) so prevalent these days. Unsurprisingly it was an…
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. By Thomas Thorhauge “Striking terror. Best part of the job”, says Batman somewhere in the first chapter of Frank Miller’s…
Over at The Comics Journal, I now have a report from last weekend’s Helsinki Book Fair online, in which I do some half-baked theorising about the artistic successes of Finland’s comics scene. Hop to it! More photos from the fair and around Helsinki, including the show of contemporary Sotuh African art (featuring Bitterkomix) currently running…
The picks of the week from around the web. Transatlantica on comics. The latest issue of this online academic journal features a selection of articles on comics, many of them of high quality. Fabrice Neaud at the Beaux-Arts in Lyon, 2009. Great video in which the emperor of autobiographical cartooning talks about his work. Fine…
This week and next, we have a roundtable discussion on Charles Hatfield’s 2005 book Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature going over at Hooded Utilitarian. My post just went up and is the fifth in the series, following Noah Berlatsky, Robert Stanley Martin, Caroline Small, and Derik Badman (plus an interlude by Ng Suat Tong). Charles…
As mentioned earlier on this blog, the Danish Comics Council organised a panel discussion on transgressive cartooning at the University of Copenhagen this past Tuesday, focusing in equal measures on the recent debate about legislation against drawn and animated child pornography and the Mohammad cartoons. It was a lively and well-attended event, despite the regrettable…
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. Between April and May 1993 the UN Security Council decided to establish a number of so-called “Safe Areas” in war-torn…
Så er det i aften at den store paneldebat om grænseoverskridende tegninger, arrangeret af Dansk Tegneserieråd, finder sted på Københavns Universitet. Tag derud eller følg det pr. livestream her. Det starter kl. 19.00. Derudover snakker Dansk Tegneserieråds formand, og ordstyrer ved debatten, Thomas Thorhauge, om emnet på P1 her til morgen kl. 6.40. Tegning af…