It never seems quiet on the cartoon front these years. Today cartoonist Guillermo and writer Manel FontdeVila are to appear in court for having depicted Spanish royals, the Prince and Princess of Asturias, fornicating on the cover of last week’s edition of prime satirical magazine El Jueves. Not content to have forced its retraction by…
Despite my initial scepticism, I am now quite convinced that the possible Titian sold for a song at Gilding’s, Leics. last week (pictured, above left), is the genuine article (as convinced as is possible without having actually seen the painting firsthand, that is). I’ve now had the opportunity to examine the enlargable lot image at…
Selections from the graff at Roskilde this year, executed by the cream of the international scene:
Amongst the handful of significant cartoonists that worked for Warren Publishing during the 70s, Alex Toth stands out. He created some of his best comics for the publisher, despite often working from mediocre scripts. As a rule, the best of them are the ones he did in collaboration with Archie Goodwin, but there are other…
Back from Roskilde, feeling elatedly exhausted as always. It was the wettest festival on record, which was quite an experience. I’ve never seen anything like Thursday. People were wading in mud halfway up their hips, and the 20 hours of relentless precipitation was prodigious. It was pandemonium. Fortunately music makes such problems moot (for much…
The Raphael portrait of Lorenzo de’Medici that I recently examined at Christie’s and wrote about here, has now been sold for £18 million to an anonymous ‘private European collector.’ Pity it did not end up in a public collection, but the combination of disputed authorship, bad state and high price probably dissuaded any institutions that…
It’s been a while ‘cos I’ve been busy. Still am, but I still wanted to check in here with some notes on this week’s musical happenings in Copenhagen and environs. I’m back in Denmark for a little while here, and started out my stay with a session featuring Beenie Man (pictured above) who, amongst other…
This is so sad. I can’t really bring myself to write about anything else at the moment. It is, however, some solace that so many people have been showing their love these last days. And there are also some news about what happens now. People interested in helping Natasja’s mother and family give her a…
Today brought incredibly sad news. Danish dancehall queen Natasja Saad has died in a car crash in Jamaica. A fixture in Danish hip hop, reggae and dancehall since the late eighties, when she performed on stage for the first time, she had both an astonishing talent and true star quality. I first saw her on…
On Seriejournalen’s message board, Carlsen editor Carsten Søndergaard notes that the negotiations at Aschehoug/Egmont after their acquisition of Bonnier Forlagene have resulted in the publishing house Carlsen, previously owned by Bonnier, remains its own publisher, while Egmont Serieforlaget continues to function as is. Effectively that means the new media group has two distinct comics publishing…
This coming weekend, June 23-24, will once again see the MoCCA ArtFest in the Puck Building in SoHo, New York. Always an event well worth attending, there will be extra reason to do so this year for people interested in Scandinavian comics. The Danish, Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish consulates have collaborated on a joint manifestation…
Hergé 100 9 Danish cartoonists remember Hergé on the occasion of the great comics artist’s centenary.
The portrait of Lorenzo de’Medici, Duke of Urbino (1492-1519), coming up for sale at Christie’s on the 5th of July is an interesting case study in the perpetual problem in art history of reconciling visual and textual evidence. I have just visited Christie’s in London and examined the painting. It is obviously a severely damaged,…
Not wanting to feel left out, I’m adding my 2 cents on Damien Hirst’s new skull. It is a platinum cast of a human skull, with real teeth, studded with 8.601 diamonds, the forehead set with a 50-karat stone. At a reported production cost of £8-10 million and a sales price around £50 million, the…
It seems almost auspicious that American cartoonists Tom Hart (Hutch Owen) and Matt Madden (99 Ways to Tell a Story) decided to do a comics version of Jørgen Leth and Lars von Trier’s film The Five Obstructions just as the former was turning 70. Go check out their little game of constraint – it’s both…