If you’re in Copenhagen, I urge you to visit the grand retrospective on William Skotte Olsen opening today at Kastrupgårdsamlingen and running till 2 January. Skotte Olsen (1945-2005) is one of the great painters of his generation in Denmark, and anywhere really. While his oeuvre was plagued somewhat by overproduction, especially in the later years,…
The great Anke Feuchtenberger once again returns to Danmark for two related exhibitions. She will be present at the Scandianavian art fair Art Copenhagen in Forum, Copenhagen, 17-19 September, where she is part of a group show organised by Charlotte Fogh Contemporary (booth no. 5) that also includes the artists Ragnar Persson (S), Sam Kiyoumarsi…
My DWYCK column this month is a slightly edited, English translation of a 2004 essay I wrote on the great Yoshiharu Tsuge for the Danish comics magazine Strip! and which also appeared on Rackham. Ng Suat Tong today supplements my piece with a very fine close reading of Tsuge’s story “Red Flowers”, which he compares…
“…hopefully the Steranko-crit drought will end soon, as more and more writers-about-comics get interested in the pure-visual dimension of things. Here’s a Steranko theme for yuh, though: nihilism. And not the limp, black cardigan, Gauloise cigs kind — rage and hate and total dessicated emptiness. Steranko — everywhere, but in Outland more than lots of…
Ansporet af Nanna Gouls kærkomne debatindspark/anmeldelse af Charles Burns’ Sort Hul i Weekendavisen for en måneds tid siden, har Goul, Thorhauge og jeg selv ovre på Nummer9 taget os en samtale om tegneseriekritik set primært fra et dansk perspektiv. Der bliver uddelt fygende håndmadder, så check det ud. Relateret: Marianne Eskebæk Larsen og undertegnede skrev…
The picks of the week from around the web. Jane Meyer, “Covert Operations”. New Yorker piece on the oil billionaires Charles and David Koch and their bankrolling of the libertarian cause, and currently the Tea Party movement. Fascinating reading on the workings of private enterprise in American politics. The Imp. All four issue of Daniel…
The picks of the week from around the web. Li Se on the proposed South African media bill. As good a critical overview as any I’ve read on the ANC’s latest media clampdown in disguise. Sam Lipsyte on Wilson. A fine review of Dan Clowes’ latest comic. One of the few I’ve read that seems…
Over at The Comics Journal I now have a review of the book-of-the-year candidate by Nadia Raviscioni up. Go, read.
For those in the Copenhagen-Malmö region, I recommend checking out the exhibition Mutant Pop, now open at the Loyal Gallery in Saltimporten, Malmö. It is curated by Joe Grillo (it’s his work above) and Laura Grant of Dearraindrop and includes work by a host of talented artists, amongst them Mat Brinkman, Brian Chippendale, Ron Regé…
“Think, for example, of Northrop Frye. Frye’s is now a name that you never hear mentioned but which was then everywhere. CS Lewis, who is now famous for fairy stories, was then famous for being a scholar. Tolkien too was famous for being a scholar, not for elves and so on. There is no prestige…
Over at Hooded Utilitarian, my monthly column this time is an extended piece on the art historical antecedents of cartooning, with special focus on Robert Crumb’s adaptation of Genesis, and with reference to Bruegel and Rembrandt, plus a bonus discussion on the different meaning-making properties of text and image. I hope you’ll check it out,…
“I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for…
The picks of the week from around the web. RSA Animate: David Harvey breaks down in simple terms the financial crisis from his perspective, accompanied by some great instructional white-board cartooning (above). Amoeblog: Billyjam interviews hip hop legend Krs-One in depth, on the occasion of the release of his new book The Gospel of Hip…
I now have a review of Judith Forest’s remarkable autobiographical comic 1h25 up over at TCJ.
The inimitable ‘Li Se’, in whose “extended network” I find myself, has finally opened the floodgates and is committing to writing the kind of intellectual effluvium that people in said network have come to appreciate in conversation over the years. Written on the principle, appropriated from Charles Bukowski, of ‘not trying’, it is blogging as…