The sun came out today. Angoulême looks great, and this year’s festival is a great pre-spring distraction in this time of recession. The crowds are moderate today, making perambulation pleasant and breezy with sufficient bustle to make you buzz with excitement about comics and their culture. It’s not like everything’s great in French-language comics or…
La Maison close is Florent Ruppert and Jerome Mulot’s latest concept comic, and it’s about the most impressive cartoonist’s jam I have ever seen, at least in terms of inventiveness and resonant coherence. Also, it’s pretty hilarious at times. It’s made especially for the Angoulême festival and can be read on the festival site. It…
When I heard that archivist Philippe Goddin was writing a biography about Georges Remi, aka. Hergé, my first thought was: What can he possibly add to the story that has not already been covered in the previous biographies? Hergé is probably the most extensively covered comics artist, both in terms of scholarly and popular publications.…
I hear the argument that demanding of Israel a sense of proportion in its handling of the conflict with Hamas is unreasonable, in that war is always disproportional. It has been most succintly put by André Glucksman. There is truth to this, but that does not make the current invasion of Gaza — it’s a…
I never thought it would happen, but lately I’ve developed a certain appreciation for the widely-derided art and general sensibility of the Image artists. No, really. Yeah, Even Rob Liefeld… No shit. The eye-opener, so to speak, is a German graffiti artist, KACAO77, whose art book Universes was published earlier this year and has since…
In alternately, at times simultaneously, entertaining and disquieting ways Frank Miller has been losing it in slow motion over the last ten years or so. Despite its qualities, Sin City was one slow degeneration of the storytelling instincts of one of the truly great writers in mainstream comics of the last 25 years. An ongoing…
For lovers of Italian Renaissance art, this has been a pretty stellar year in terms of exhibitions. Amongst the major ones, the Rome/Berlin Sebastiano del Piombo show over the summer was an eye-opener, and this autumn’s double whammy of Andrea Mantegna in Paris and Giovanni Bellini in Rome offered strong contributions to this museum-goer’s sweet…
If anything, this has been a year of top name releases in mainstream hip hop, with one heavyweight after the other dropping marquee-style albums they all seem to hope will be game changers for them. Earlier in the year, we had Lil Wayne making his superstar status official (pity he hasn’t been up to much…
I know it’s been everywhere today, but I just can’t resist posting it. There’s something fitting to the fact that presumably one of the last memorable images of the lame duck president is him having a pair of shoes thrown at him in a small room. I mean, what could be more pathetic? Well, I…
Når tegneserierne i disse år også herhjemme så småt er ved at finde fodfæste på parnasset, skyldes det i ikke ringe grad den massive indflydelse, som japansk kultur i almindelighed : og japanske tegneserier og :film i særdeleshed : har haft på de seneste årtiers kulturelle output i Vesten. Mangaens egenartede æstetik og emblematiske dynamik…
I remember a film critic who once compared Robert Altman’s Gosford Park to Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (Regle du jeu). The critic found each film more or less equal in terms of ambition, craftsmanship and themes, but nevertheless argued that one was clearly superior to the other. To that particular critic, the…
My pet theory about Q-Tip’s solo career for a long time has been that something went awry when his house burned down back in 1998. The trauma of losing his entire record collection to the flames purged the glory that was A Tribe Called Quest from his system and begat the abomination that was Amplified…
I was waiting for this video to drop to hype one of the albums that’s been in heavy rotation here for the last couple months — Young Jeezy’s The Recession. Releasing the album earlier this year, Jeezy smartly picked up on the coming recession as the underlying theme for the everyman-as-a-drug-dealer thematics that he has…
The latest ACME Novelty Library (#19), which is the latest instalment in the greater story of Rusty Brown, is a somewhat frustrating experience. It combines two stories that reflect on one another. An science fiction piece detailing the colonisation of Mars by four people and two dogs, and a flashback to the youth of what…
“The ‘Oratorio’ is nothing less than the Shazam!, the Kimota! for Western Culture and we would do well to remember it in our currently trying times.” — Grant Morrison, on Pico della Mirandola’s Oratory on the Dignity of Man In the marathon Newsarama interview with Grant Morrison on his and Frank Quitely’s newly-finished All-Star Superman…