Sidste år kritiserede jeg Ivar Gjørups Egoland for at have gennemgået en kreativ afmatning de senere år. Den opfattelse har jeg fortsat, men striben er jo ikke Danmarks bedste tegneserie uden grund, og ind i mellem brænder Gjørups vid og satiriske talent stadig klart igennem.

Mark Evanier long-time friend and collaborator of the late Jack Kirby, and the world’s foremost authority of the man and his work, has been working on a comprehensive biography for years. Recognising that this book will be huge, as well as expensive and perhaps hard to market to a broader audience, he has put out an abbreviated, coffee-table version, Kirby — King of Comics, which is to serve simultaneously as a primer on Kirby to a general audience and and lavishly-produced art book showcasing a representative selection of the best of Kirby’s vast oeuvre.

This is a good idea. Kirby’s work is not only experiencing something of a popular renaissance by proxy through the newly-minted, goldlined silverscreen incarnations of his creations, but seems entirely ripe for a broader reassessment as a major artist of the 20th Century. This is a well-timed book, but how well does it succeed? Less well than one would have hoped, unfortunately.

By Matthias Wivel, Henry Sørensen & T. Thorhauge
As per our Modus Operandi, we hereby bring you the Bunker’s selections of the best comics of 2007, more than four months into the new year, after everyone else has moved on. But we wouldn’t bother if we didn’t think our recommendations might be useful to comics readers out there. So here we go!

2007 was another great year for comics, although one could perhaps argue that the publication of new, truly groundbreaking or just plain amazing comics has been slightly on the wane the past couple of years, after the consummation of the work of so many great talents, both in North America and the Francophone countries, in the years around the turn of the new century. This may just be the way the chips have fallen, but could also be a symptom of the generational shift taking place within comics. The great works published by now established, middle-age cartoonists in previous years are a hard act to follow to say the least, but a generation of younger artists are increasingly delivering the goods and we can only hope they will continue to grow.