Tegneseriemarkedet: Enter Rosinante

comics and cartooning, interviews, letters

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Rosinante har netop søsat en ambitiøs tegneserielinie, med speciale i graphic novels, på det danske marked. De to første udgivelser er danske Thomas Thorhauges Kom hjem og engelske Posy Simmonds’ Gemma Bovery. Med denne satsning på dette særlige tegneserieformat, er Rosinante det første danske mainstreamforlag der følger i sporet efter amerikanske bogforlag som Pantheon og Houghton Mifflin og franske som Le Seuil, Gallimard og Hachette, der alle med succes har publiceret tegneserier de sidste 5-10 års tid og dermed har været med til at styrke det iøjnefaldende fænomen tegneserien efterhånden er blevet på det internationale bogmarked.

Metabunkeren har taget sig en snak med Rosinantes ansvarlige redaktør Julie Paludan-Müller som i forvejen har udmærket sig i dansk tegneseriesammenhæng ved bl.a. at oversætte og bringe Marjane Satrapis Persepolis, og dermed hele graphic novel-fænomenet, til landet.

Picks of the Week

current affairs, hype & linkage, music, pictorial arts

The picks of the week from around the web.

A short, late one this week:

  • GQ: “And He Shall Be Judged”. A fascinatingly horrifying article by Robert Draper on Donald Rumsfeld and his disastrous time as Defense Secretary, sourced from a large number of Bush government insiders. Try and read it without wincing.
  • Southern Mothers: “Olafur Eliasson (A Milli Remix)”. This is old, back from when those waterfalls were installed around the Southern tip of Manhattan. Kind of a pity that it is not bona fide old school hip hopper Eliasson himself rapping here, but these guys are actually pretty funny. Consider this a much belated supplement to my linkage to “A Milli” dubplates from last year.

    • While we wait, let’s look at these Tintin pages

    comics and cartooning, commentary and criticism, journal

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    OK, so there isn’t much happening here, I know. I have a couple things brewing, but have simply been too busy on dissertation work to do much in here. Hopefully I’ll be able to post a few juicy things over the next weeks though. In the meantime, here’s an awesome set of preparatory Tintin pages — full inks, and a page of sketches — from Hergé’s swan song, The Castafiore Emralds (1961-63).

    These were just sold for some astronomical sum at an auction in Namur, held on the occasion of a small festival celebrating Hergé. Check out how Hergé plays with the sequence on the sketch page, trying to find the right arrangement, repeating certain scenes and sticking others in, out of chronology, while still maintaining the overall integrity of the page as a unit in his narrative. By this point he had surely worked out what needed to be accomplished on each page in the album, but still needed to fine-tune the breakdown and arrangement of panels.

    It’s interesting to see that he ended up playing down the emotional scene of the Roma child being reunited with his mother — a scene he seems to have agonised over before deciding to leave it out. The portrayal of the Roma in the story is a little on the romantic side as is, and here Hergé gives us a live act of walking the tightrope of sentimentality. I dig the marginal character sketches too!

    A few more original pages, amongst them a fairly finished sketch for The Calculus Affair, were sold at the auction, check them out here. Seriejournalen provided the tip.

    Picks of the Week

    comics and cartooning, culture, film, tv, video, hype & linkage, music, pictorial arts

    The picks of the week from around the web.

  • Frank Rich: “The American Press on Suicide Watch”. Rich cuts to the chase in this piece on what seems increasingly to be imminent demise of print journalism.
  • Donald Richie on Japanese cinema. Great on-stage interview with the gaijin dean of Japanese cultural studies, with special focus on his main area of interest: cinema. Unfiltered opinion and insight from a great critic. (Thanks, Dirk!)
  • Steven M. Johnson. This blog entry by Allison Arieff brought my attention to the deliciously ludicrous and quirkily inventive work of this cartoonist/inventor/author/urban planner. Check it out!
  • Thru You. The wonders of web creativity brings you Kutiman, who creates YouTube mashup videos for a bunch of great funk, soul and dub tunes in the style of the classic video to DJ Shadow’s “Midnight in a Perfect World”. (Thanks, Loka?!)
  • The Walrus: “Back in Palookaville” Sean Rogers writes about the role of design in the current revival of comic strip history and features the consummate if problematic work of Seth. Interesting perspectives are sketched out. Supplement it with this nice multimedia presentation from Seth’s home.

    • Kom hjem — First look

    comics and cartooning, hype & linkage


    Yeah, it’s him again. Thomas Thorhauge has been working on this thing for almost as long as we can remember, so we’re cutting him some slack here. It’s fresh off the press and it looks spectacular. Thorhauge himself evidently also thinks so, because he’s done this Flickr-stream showcasing his baby. Enjoy, and let’s hope for an English-language edition of Kom hjem (‘Come Home’) soon!