Steve Gerber 1947-2008

comics and cartooning, journal

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Mainstream comics auteur Steve Gerber, creator of Howard the Duck and Omega the Unknown, passed away Sunday night. Tom Spurgeon has as fine an obituary as you’re going to find up, providing an appreciation of key works and a career overview. Mark Evanier delivers the more personal perspective and friends and fans congregate at Gerber’s site. Also, this essay on his genre-challenging run on Marvel’s The Defenders is worth reading.

Rest in Peace.

Image from Omega the Unknown by Gerber, Mary Skrenes and Jim Mooney.

A Cornucopia of Cliché

comics and cartooning, commentary and criticism

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The Arrival by Shaun Tan is the most overrated comic of the past year. Published more or less simultaneously in several languages, it seems to have received unanimously positive, bordering on rave, criticism since it came out — from the mainstream press as well as the comics cognoscenti. To cap things off, it was awarded the Book of the Year-award at Angoulême. Yet, it is little more than a big fat sap sandwich.

Its shortcomings are nothing new. Rather, they seem almost endemic to the modernist tradition of the socially engaged, silent picture-narrative that it naturally fits into. The mostly woodcut stories of artists like Lynd Ward, Otto Nückel and Eric Drooker that with a few outstanding exceptions — Frans Masereel, Palle Nielsen — equate the stark contrast of their graphic medium with their ethos and thrive on the bathetic.

Picks of the Week

current affairs, film, tv, video, hype & linkage, music

The picks of the week from around the web.

  • Frank Rich: “The Billary Road to Republican Victory”. The New York Times‘ great op-ed columnist looks ahead at what a Hillary Clinton ticket for the presidency might mean for the presidential elections. An interesting corrective to the otherwise commonplace view that Hillary is the stronger candidate for the Democratic party.
  • Rolling Stone: “The Death of High Fidelity”. Great article about the challenges posed to high-fidelity sound recording by the new digital formats.
  • That insane Tom Cruise indoctrination video. If you haven’t yet seen this thing, hop to it! Tom Cruise in all his glory. A great character study.

    • A Healthy Serving of Comics History

    comics and cartooning, hype & linkage

    eccoci.jpgComics writer and historian Alfredo Castelli has a late Christmas present for us all — the entirety (704 pages!) of his annotated bibliography on the early American newspaper strip, Eccoci ancora qui (“Here We Are Again”) is now available online in PDF format! Meticulously researched and chock-full of rarely-seen images, this is a must for everyone interested in the period, even if you don’t read Italian.
     
     
     

    Manga på Louisiana til efteråret

    comics and cartooning, film, tv, video, journal, pictorial arts

    manga_louisiana.jpg
    Fra Louisiana’s hjemmeside:

    Manga
    8. oktober 2008 – 8. februar 2009
    Det var den berømte japanske maler Hokusai, der kaldte sine tegnede portrætskitser for manga, som bragte navnet til Vesten. Manga er et særlig japansk tegneserie-fænomen, der historisk rækker 200 år tilbage, og som i dag har international kultstatus med millioner af hæfter solgt hver måned, talløse filmatiseringer og som over de sidste 25 år har sat sig dybe spor i den japanske samtidskunst.