Just read Joe Sacco’s “Down! Up!” from the latest Harper’s. A new strip from Sacco is a relatively rare thing, and 16 new pages is certainly a welcome event, especially when they’re this good. Reporting from Iraq, Sacco has sat in on a couple of American officers training a group of Iraqis to be soldiers…
Just read Christophe Blain’s latest comic, the western romance Gus. Beautifully drawn, well-told, cool 70s-style colouring, nice poetic mood, utterly unambitious. Blain is one of the most naturally graceful draughtsmen of current French-language comics and amongst the prime movers in what has been regarded as the revitalisation of the traditional album format over the last…
Saw Inland Empire by David Lynch yesterday. I loved it. Probably my favourite since Blue Velvet (no shit). A sprawling spectacle stretching over three hours, and not letting up for a second, it is so loaded with bewildering imagery and ambiguous motifs that one might initially feel distracted from its deceptive simplicity. In a way,…
My first exposure to the work of Mizuki Shigeru was indirect, in the form of Miike Takashi’s wonderful 2005 film Yôkai daisensô (eng. The Great Yôkai War), which I saw last year. Amongst the most impressive aspects of that thoroughly enjoyable movie was the often iconically simple and inventive character designs given to the host…
The most consistently readable, if also frustrating, new writer at the Comics Journal the last couple of years, Noah Berlatsky, has just put his first and best piece for the magazine, on the reception of Peanuts by today’s alt-cartoonists, online at the blog he contributes to. I often find myself disagreeing with Berlatsky, as will…
By Emma Firestone Samuel Beckett’s austere existential vision of the loneliness of the individual facing the inevitable—death—has become familiar. Not cosy, exactly, but familiar. For revivals of the best-known plays (Endgame, Happy Days, Krapp’s Last Tape ), I reckon, the consequences of this familiarity have mostly been positive: conceived for an audience not just prepared…
Attended a talk by Tony Blair’s former Press Director, the Alastair Campbell, at Pembroke College tonight. It was, unsurprisingly, a bravura performance – one of the most impressive displays of seamless rhetoric I have witnessed in a long time. Possibly best known, at least abroad, for his involvement in selling the Iraq War to the…
Yesterday, the police vacated one of Copenhagen’s most significant bastions of alternative culture of the last two decades, Ungdomshuset (the “Youth House”) in the borough of Nørrebro. While the community of Ungdomshuset has not always behaved in ways that helped their cause, or just plain made any social sense, this is nevertheless emblematic of certain…
Got my first Žižek experience yesterday. I was simultaneously impressed and underwhelmed. My only exposure to his work until today had been through the plethora of other authors citing him these days, and through a friend who enthusiastically appreciates his iconoclasm and originality, and also does a killer impression of the man. I have been…
Contrary to large parts of the comics intelligentsia who dismiss it by default, and the masochistic fans who dis it but keep coming back for more, I do not want to dump unreservedly on Marvel’s Civil War. Sure, it is easy to make fun of, what with its ineptly handled attempts at political allegory and…
For the past weeks, our very own cartoon crisis, here in the academic bubble of Cambridge, has been rolling. In the first week of February, the Clare College newspaper Clarefication put out a special satirical issue entitled “Crucification” that amongst other things printed one of the Danish Muhammed cartoons, which last year had people going…
Eddie Campbell is totally on point in a couple of posts (here and here) concerning Roy Lichtenstein’s use of comics imagery in his paintings, and does his best to rub out the old bugbear, fueled by the inferiority complex comics fans often habour on the behalf of their preferred medium, that Lichtenstein was a plagiarist.…
Yesterday, it was 13 years ago that Jack Kirby died. Always stirring to be reminded of an oeuvre as unique as his. I just read his swan song, The Eternals, in its entirety and though it is widely considered to be a flawed effort, it is simply astonishing work. The first half a dozen issues…
I efteråret stod der et mægtigt slag i den danske tegneserieverden. Slaget var både af principiel og ganske konkret karakter: Ivar Gjørup, der i over 20 år har tegnet striben Egoland, var nonchalant blevet tilbudt en alvorlig forringelse af sin placering i den avis der har været stribens hjem i næsten ligeså lang tid, Politiken.…
På et netbaseret dansk tegneseriefanzine er min gennemgang af det seneste Strip! blevet diskuteret. Reaktionerne var bekræftende forudsigelige: de to tegneserietegnere Frank Madsen og Henrik Rehr reagerede med institutionel harme og hovedrysten (begge har jo aktier i at danske tegneseriekultur forbliver kedelig og uengageret), hvorimod de øvrige debattører (med en enkelt hardcore-buff som undtagelse) lå…