Paying for It at Hooded U
I have a piece up on Chester Brown’s much talked-about new book Paying for It up at Hooded Utilitarian today. Go check it out.
Picks of the Week
“I heard something recently by Richard Feynman, and he said that understanding the way the universe works is like extrapolating a huge checkers game from a regular game of checkers. Checkers is an easy game to play, but if the board were huge and you had many, many checkers, it wouldn’t be easy to play…
Get yer Faves!
Today I received Favorites, the zine Craig Fischer has put together to benefit Team Cul de Sac’s fundraising to support research into Parkinson’s disease. It’s a great little thing I encourage you to buy and read, and not — really! — just because I have a piece in it on Carl Barks. You see, Team…
Gene Colan RIP
I was sad to learn on Friday that the great silver-age cartoonist Gene Colan, known primarily for late 60s and 70s Marvel Comics like Iron Man, Howard the Duck, and above all Tomb of Dracula, passed away after several years of battling liver disease and cancer. He was one of the great stylists of his…
Take Two — An Interview with Ruppert/Mulot
The cartooning duo Florent Ruppert and Jérôme Mulot are amongst the most remarkable emerging talents on the Francophone comics scene. A two-headed cartoon beast, theirs is an organic collaboration, melding writing and drawing. Their comics are possessed of a strong experimental formalism — elaborate analytical constructions, in which characters move and interact for our entertainment,…
On the Real — An Interview with Chester Brown
This interview with Chester Brown, who is currently garnering much attention for his extraordinary new book Paying for It, was conducted at the 2004 MoCCA Arts Fest in a small storage room where they kept the boxed-up Harvey Awards, a couple of hours before the ceremony was to start. Brown had recently released the collected…
Picks of the Week
The picks of the week from around the web. This is a well-written piece on the sometimes hermetic and puzzling vagaries of art world authentication. It doesn’t change, however, that there is no way the Buffalo Pietà at its center was painted by Michelangelo. Look at it. The provenance may be compelling, though the argument…
Comics of the Decade: Chester Brown’s Louis Riel
This is part of a Metabunker series celebrating a great decade in comics with Rackham by reprinting select reviews of the decades’ best comics from the Rackham archive, along with a number of new pieces. I There is an extraordinary moment near the beginning of Chester Brown’s historical reconstruction, Louis Riel: the newly, ad hoc-elected…
Picks of the Week
The picks of the week from around the web. The Daily Show on the “Common Controversy,” parts one and two. Wednesday, Jon Stewart performed an epic takedown of the ridiculous hype machine that is Fox News. Extra hilarity ensured by the fact that the source of it all is one of the most anodyne rappers…
Comics of the Decade: Dominique Goblet’s Faire semblant c’est mentir
This is part of a Metabunker series celebrating a great decade in comics with Rackham by reprinting select reviews of the decades’ best comics from the Rackham archive, along with a number of new pieces. Dominique Goblet depicts her father as a late medieval Madonna, nurturing his child, right hand in blessing. Drawn on disparate,…
Reads: Mister Wonderful
Apart from hopefully lining his wallet a bit, Dan Clowes isn’t doing himself any favors by repackaging this story. His most lightweight effort in more than a decade, it was a pandering trifle to begin with and it only suffers from being given the book treatment. Originally published in the New York Times Magazine in…
In the Mix (MoCCA 2011)
So, still reeling a bit from the move and all the new stuff that’s happening elsewhere, but I did get the time to drop in for the MoCCA Arts Festival at the Armory last Saturday. I particularly enjoyed it as an opportunity immediately to get acquainted with the New York comics scene and meet in…
Fabrice Neaud interview at The Comics Journal
I conducted an interview with the great Fabrice Neaud back in 2009, on the occasion of the publication of his ‘augmented’ version of his masterpiece Journal III. A candid conversation on art, life and the risks incurred in their intersection. It’s now up over at The Comics Journal.
Picks of the Week
The picks of the week from around the web. A bunch of quick comics links this week. Tom Spurgeon on Chester Brown’s Paying for It. D&Q only brought 25 copies of Brown’s long-awaited new book to MoCCA, so it was sold out before I arrived, but I got a chance to leaf through. Looks amazing.…
Eddie Campbell Speaks!
Last week the Hooded Utilitarian ran a roundtable discussion on Eddie Campbell’s Alec comics. Plenty of good stuff on there, though my favourite was definitely Caroline Small’s discussion of Campbell’s prose (go read it; as a critique it goes well beyond Campbell). Anyway, as part of the roundtable I conducted an in-depth interview with Cambell,…