Just thought I’d hype this — the latest issue of The Comics Journal (#294) contains a career-spanning interview with Norwegian star cartoonist Jason, conducted by yours truly. An excerpt is available at the TCJ site, with the entirety of the magazine available to subscribers, and hardcopies will be available in stores in a fortnight’s time. Do check for it.
Den danske tegneseriefestival Komiks.dk blev som bekendt afholdt for tredje gang i sommers. Arrangementet var en succes på snart sagt alle planer og det virkede derfor på mange som om festivalen var kommet for at blive. Det håber vi alle fortsat, men arrangørerne har meddelt, at de har behov for flere hænder hvis det skal lade sig gøre igen at holde festival i 2010 som det er planen. Derfor har de indkaldt til generalforsamling søndag d. 23 november kl. 14.00. Her kan alle interesserede komme og give deres besyv med, og forhåbentlig også melde sig til en eller flere af de arbejdsgrupper festivalarbejdet er organiseret omkring. Mere information kan fås her, og på festivalens Facebook-profil.
I anledning af dette tog jeg mig en kort snak med festivalens formand Mads Bluhm om situationen som den ser ud nu, de umiddelbare planer for den næste festival og den desværre stadig overhængende risiko for, at der ikke bliver en festival.
The latest ACME Novelty Library (#19), which is the latest instalment in the greater story of Rusty Brown, is a somewhat frustrating experience. It combines two stories that reflect on one another. An science fiction piece detailing the colonisation of Mars by four people and two dogs, and a flashback to the youth of what turns out to be its author, Rusty Brown’s father, who once had ambitions of becoming a ‘serious’ SF writer. The first part — the Mars story — is fantastic, but the second is a real disappointment.
“Chocolate City is no dream, it’s my part of the rock, and I dig ya CC.”
— George Clinton, “Chocolate City”
The picks of the week from around the web.
“The ‘Oratorio’ is nothing less than the Shazam!, the Kimota! for Western Culture and we would do well to remember it in our currently trying times.”
— Grant Morrison, on Pico della Mirandola’s Oratory on the Dignity of Man
In the marathon Newsarama interview with Grant Morrison on his and Frank Quitely’s newly-finished All-Star Superman series the writer mentions the Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola’s famous Oratio de hominis dignitate, or Oratory on the Dignity of Man (1486) as central to his take on Krypton’s famous son (go read the interview: parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10). He also mentions Leonardo’s even more famous ‘Vitruvian Man’ (c. 1487, detail above) as important to his interpretation of the Superman myth, and as the direct inspiration for this interpretation by Quitely of the character, keeping us all alive by labouring in the heart of the Sun:
Currently on display at the art dealer Pietro Scarpa in Venice, there’s a reclining nude by the Venetian painter Giacomo ‘Palma’ Vecchio (c. 1480-1528), which is worth a second look for anyone interested in the practice of replication in the Italian Renaissance workshop. It repeats with slight variations the figure of Venus in a canvas in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Both pictures are datable to the 1520s, with the latter falling late, left as it was unfinished in the master’s studio at his death.
Michael Chabon frustrates me. He’s obviously talented, smart and knows how to tell a good story in the old school way. Even if he suffers from the classic problem of providing his stories with endings as memorable as what went before. (I remember a lot of cool things about Kavalier and Clay, but how did it end, again?). What I have a problem with, however, are certain mannerisms in his fluid, elegant language that have always been there, but which one hoped would dissipate, rather than consolidate themselves, with experience.
As so many before me, I recently took umbrage at some of Domingos Isabelinho’s rather categorical views on comics, as expressed on his new blog The Crib Sheet. This time it was a curt dismissal of the majority of Hugo Pratt’s work as being superficial and hollow that got me out of my chair. For the record, here’s my short, rather extemporal take on what makes the best Corto Maltese stories great, formulated in response to his assertion that Corto is an unknowable, romantic stereotype, a ‘sailor who doesn’t sail’:
Corto is not meant to be a realistic character — he’s an engine for our imagination. Pratt’s genius in those stories, and I mean right up to the very end — or at least until the penultimate Corto book, Elvetiche (the last, MU, is coasting a bit) — is to engage our taste for adventure in unexpected, almost dreamlike ways.
