Plug into the Comicfeed!
There’s a new online resource for comics fans – www.comic-feed.net, an aggregator assembling select, quality-controlled blogs for your one-click reading pleasure. Go check it out, and keep an eye on it.
Matthias Wivel is the administrator of the Metabunker. He is Head of Research at Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen and a co-founder and the current chairman of the Danish Comics Council.
Grant Morrison’s ‘Signature Weakness’
Taking his cue from the recent postings on Douglas Wolk’s fine chapters, from his new book Reading Comics, on Grant Morrison (parts I, II, III, IV) Noah Berlatsky comments on what he sees as Morrison’s ‘signature weakness’, namely his failure to think visually and to truly collaborate with the artists he works with. While I…
Allan Haverholm Is Blogging!
Danish cartoonist Allan Haverholm, who last year released his grand graphic novel Sortmund (“Blackmouth”) – Richard Dawkins meets Hellboy! – has just refurbished his internet presence at www.haverholm.com, and is now blogging. Check in with him for his interesting and often contentious thoughts on comics.
Blade Runner FC at Venice
Aintitcool has reports from the screening of Blade Runner – the Final Cut at the Venice Film Festival (for those who have no clue what I’m talking about – check out my earlier piece on the film). I ain’t trusting these people to quite know what they’re talking about; I can’t believe that almost every…
Christian Skovgaard’s “Owl”
As a special treat here in the Bunker, we present Danish cartoonist Christian Skovgaard’s latest comic, “Owl,” for your reading/ogling pleasure! Christian Skovgaard Petersen is one of the Danish scene’s most promising graphic talents, with a sly sense of the weird in the world. He was in BLÆK, he published the strip “Hotellto,” amongst other…
Notes on the ongoing Cartoon Controversies
In what is a rather depressing turn of events, news came earlier today that cartoonist Guillermo Torres and writer Manuel Fontdevila have been fined €2.500 each for their cartoon, on the cover of satirical weekly El Jueves, back in July, of the Spanish Crown Prince and his wife in doggy-style position. “Insulting the Crown” is…
Tour de France 2007: The Collected Metabunker Coverage
As this year’s Tour de France rolled around, the Metabunker’s own T. Thorhauge was as usual parked in front of the TV, but contrary to previous years, he this time around went in the footsteps of his avowed mentor Jørgen Leth (pictured) and provided commentary! For your convenience, here’s the collected linkage: July 10: Fausto…
Immersion and Alienation
On Thomas’ recommendation, I went and saw The Bourne Ultimatum last night. I now understand there’s been a lot of discussion of it online, with David Bordwell providing a great analysis of especially its “run-and-gun” visual style, as well as commenting further on the claim made by some that it is particularly innovative in this…
How Hard Can It Be? II
Inspired by this blog post, courtesy Con C de Arte, exemplifying Andy Kubert’s consistently unimaginative and chronically lazy approach to grounding his work in any kind of believable reality, I thought I’d supply my own example, from Batman #665, written by Grant Morrison. Just as is the case with his depiction, in Batman #658, of…
Who Drew the Original Spider-Man?
By Morten Søndergård [To mark what would have been Jack Kirby’s 90th birthday yesterday, we re-present this piece on the first Spider-Man stories, written for Rackham back in 2002 by Danish Marvel editor, translator, retailer and all-round specialist Morten Søndergård. Enjoy!] Who drew the original Spider-Man? There is of course only one answer, right? Steve…
Yellow Scholarship II
Tom Spurgeon has responded to my rodomontade on the Yellow Kid from yesterday. He writes: “I’m not all that convinced by Wivel’s restatement, and I find a lot of his rhetoric slippery. For one, I very obviously didn’t show in my original argument that Gary Groth is ignorant of 19th Century comics-making in favor of…
Jack Kirby at 90
Jack Kirby (1917-1994) would have been 90 today. Tom Spurgeon has laid out the smorgasboard. To us, his face has long been on Mars. Splash from “The Face on Mars”, Race for the Moon #2, Harvey Publications 1958. By Jack Kirby and Reed Crandall. Cribbed from the Kirby Museum.
Yellow Scholarship
Yesterday, Tom Spurgeon commented briefly on the statement in the opening paragraph of my review of David Kunzle’s Töpffer monograph that the latter “deserves a large part of the credit for debunking the myth of the Yellow Kid as the point of origin, and bringing the history of modern comics before Hogan’s Alley to light…
Töpffer in Zigzag
David Kunzle deserves a large part of the credit for debunking the myth of the Yellow Kid as the point of origin, and bringing the history of modern comics before Hogan’s Alley to light in a fledgling academic field, dominated for years by collective denial. A substantial part of that effort has been the reintroduction…
Comic Transformations РȚpffer and the Reinvention of Comics in the First Half of the 19th Century
To mark the recent release of David Kunzle’s long-awaited collection of Swiss comics pioneer Rodolphe Töpffer’s comics work, as well as his monograph on Töpffer the cartoonist (read our review here), the Metabunker hereby presents the following introduction to the comics of Töpffer. It should be noted that the text is a slightly edited version…