I’ve only just now been made aware that the great Renaissance scholar Konrad Oberhuber passed away on September 12, aged 72. I never had the pleasure of meeting the by all accounts charismatic and gregarious scholar, but have found great inspiration — and also at times frustration — in his work. It’s sad to see…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
Danmarks ældste og bedste filmtidsskrift Kosmorama er ude NU, med et stort temanummer om animationsfilm. Bladet – eller retteligt: bogen – er spækket med spændende og indsigtsfulde artikler om det gamle og det nye, om det kendte og det obskøne, det fede og det, der bare er forgæves. Sidstnævnte tager denne skribent sig bramfrit af…
All right, so I finally read Joann Sfar’s latest sketchbook comic, Greffier, which collects his comics form transcripts of the Charlie Hebdo trial at the Parisian Correctional Court earlier in the year (February 7-8, to be exact). This was the trial in which three Muslim organizations, the French Union of Islamic Organisations (UOIF), the International…
Det følgende er ikke en formfuldendt artikel, men en let redigeret tekst hentet ud af en debat i Rackhams nu lukkede forum fra december 2002. Den omhandler det kronisk genkommende og ganske umulige problem at definere hvad en tegneserie er. Der tages forbehold for uklarhed, uvished og umulighed… og groteske mængder tankestreger.
Last week, I finally got the time to check the Hogarth show at the Tate. A very egalitarian and attractive retrospective of his career and oeuvre with equal attention paid to the bourgeois and the burlesque, the benevolent and the biting. Almost all of his most important work is assembled there, and it is a…
One of the discontents of art historical connoisseurship is how we, the practitioners, have been trained to hunt for the prototype of any given invention. We are so used to seeing precedents everywhere, even when dealing with some of the most original and inventive artists ever, that we sometimes forget how unpredictable art, and creativity,…
I forbindelse med mine undersøgelser af danske udgivelser af Carl Barks’ Anders And, dengang bølgerne gik højt i forhold til den stadigvæk skandaløst ringe tilrettelagte Carl Barks Samlede Værker (CBSV) fra Egmont, fik jeg bekræftet hvad jeg havde hørt: at de danske oversættelser af historierne fra førsteudgaverne i Anders And-bladet mellem 1946 og sen-60erne, udført…
I recently read two very moving books, both classics of World War II-literature. One was Italian chemist Primo Levi’s relentlessly frank first-person account of life in the camps, If This Is A Man (aka. Survival in Auschwitz, 1947), the other was the collected letters and diary entries of young Danish seaman and resistance fighter Kim…