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Tag: charles burns

Alan Moore: The Believer Interview

At The Believer magazine, Peter Bebergal, author of Too Much to Dream: A Psychedelic American Boyhoodtalks to Alan Moore about his epic work-in-progress Jerusalem, magic, art, gods, and demons:

Magic and art tend to share a lot of the same language. They both talk about evocation, invocation, and conjuring. If you’re trying to conjure a character, then maybe you should treat that with the respect that you would if you were trying to conjure a demon. Because if an image of a god is a god, then in some sense the image of a demon is a demon. I’m thinking of people like Malcolm Lowry, the exquisite author of Under the Volcano.There are kabbalistic demons that are lurking all the way through Under the Volcano, and I assume they were probably similar forces to the ones that eventually overwhelmed Lowry’s life, such as the drinking and the madness. When I hear alcoholics talk about having their demons, I think that they’re probably absolutely literally correct.

Thankfully, they also talk a little bit about comics as well:

Superheroes are the copyrighted property of big corporations. They are purely commercial entities; they are purely about making a buck. That’s not to say that there haven’t been some wonderful creations in the course of the history of the superhero comic, but to compare them with gods is fairly pointless. Yes, you can make obvious comparisons by saying the golden-age Flash looks a bit like Hermes, as he’s got wings on his helmet, or the golden-age Hawkman looks a bit like Horus because he’s got a hawk head. But this is just to say that comics creators through the decades have taken their inspiration where they can find it.

The accompanying illustration of Moore is, of course, by American cartoonist Charles Burns (Black Hole / X’ed Out / The Hive ).

An exhibition of Burns‘ portraits for The Believer is running at the Adam Baumgold Gallery in New York until July 26, 2013.

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Charles Burns on Bookworm

Cartoonist Charles Burns discusses his new book The Hive with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW show Bookworm:

KCRW Bookworm: Charles Burns THE HIVE mp3

 

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Something for the Weekend

Blinders — Charles Burns, author of Black Hole and X’ed Out, interviewed at Full Stop:

I’ve never really – and this sounds stupid because I’m working in a commercial medium – but I’ve never thought about an audience, or written for a specific audience, per se. I’m just trying to pull together my ideas in the best possible way, and I’ve never tailored those ideas for a particular audience. I bet I could do a pretty good teenage vampire story, for example. It would have plenty of romance, and just the right amount of titillating sex, but I think I’d wind up out on the Ben Franklin Bridge looking down at that water and thinking it looked pretty good down there [laughs]. I’ve really tried to put blinders on and just tell my stories the best way I can.

Book designer Stefanie Posavec at 10 Answers.

And thanks to MobyLives for pointing me to this 2008 article from The FontFeed: Top Ten Typefaces Used by Book Design Winners.

A Step Behind Where They Needed To Be — Peter Osnos on what went wrong at Borders for The Atlantic:

Borders stores took on a generic quality as executives and investors lacked the knowledge and patience to address the chains’ mounting problems. I’m sure there is more to this story (especially in the financial and real estate areas) than I know, but what really hurt Borders from the perspective of a book person like me was that the chain was no longer in the hands of true book retailers… Whatever else Borders does in the months ahead, it needs to recover its belief that real book-selling is an art (with all the peculiarities that entails), as well as a viable business.

And finally…

A look inside Seasons, the new book by the amazing French illustrator Blexbolex, published by Enchanted Lion Books:

(via Printeresting)

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Midweek Miscellany

Little Nemo meets David Lynch — Mark Medley interviews Charles Burns, author of Black Hole and X’ed Out , for The National Post:

Whereas Black Hole, which takes place in the early 1970s, examines the dread and confusion of adolescence using the tropes of a horror film, X’ed Out, which is set in the late 1970s at the height of punk music, is an exploration of young adulthood and the anger, uncertainty and experimentation that comes with aging.

“I definitely started out wanting to do my punk story,” says Burns, 55. “As typically happens, you start with one idea and it spreads.”

A House Full of BooksThe LA Times book critic David L. Ulin on the gift of books:

We have a rule in our house: My wife and I will always pony up for books. It’s not even a subject of discussion — if either of our kids wants a book, we will buy it, no questions asked. This is equally true of the books we have at home, which are equally available to everyone, regardless of subject matter or degree of difficulty. Whatever else they are, after all, books are gifts (for the mind, the eye, the hand), which makes it downright uncharitable to deny them to anyone.

This, I should say, is how I was raised too, in a house full of books, by parents who put a premium on the written word. I was allowed to pick up everything — and often did. When I was in third grade, I checked out “War and Peace” from the school library (I was looking for the longest book in the world), and although I never actually opened it, I remain thrilled by the idea that no one told me not to try.

Don’t Know What They’re MissingThe Economist profiles type designer Matthew Carter:

Mr Carter doesn’t own an iPad, Kindle, or other reading device, as he is waiting for them to mature. (He does own an iPhone.) He frets that, as things stand, reading devices and programs homogenise all the tangible aspects of a book, like size or shape, as well as font. They are also poor at hyphenation and justification: breaking words at lexically appropriate locations, and varying the spacing between letters and between words. This may sound recondite but it is a visual imprint of principles established over the entire written history of a language. “Maybe people who grow up reading online, where every book is identical, don’t know what they’re missing.”

On a sort of related note… Mashable talks to designer Susan Kare about her icon designs for the original Apple Macs.

And finally (as we’re talking about typography)…

Jean-Luc — A free display typeface in two styles designed by Atelier Carvalho Bernau to celebrate Jean-Luc Godard’s 80th birthday.

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Midweek Miscellany

Bespoke — Richard Weston, AKA Ace Jet 170, on the book designs for the soon-to-be-launched Bespoke Editions:

Bespoke Editions is a one-off edition press; offering beautiful custom-made classic books, printed on demand and hand-finished to order. Personalised and unique, each edition will be made using specially selected cover papers and finishes… The editions will be in a Demy format and the page layouts will be based on the Van de Graaf Canon. After a set of tests, we’ve settled on the beautiful Hoefler Text for the typesetting and each title page will feature a carefully chosen typographic ornament that has some relevance to the particular book.

All Programs Considered — Bill McKibben on the new public radio for The New York Review of Books (via the always astute Edward Nawotka at Publishing Perspectives):

[I]n one sense this is the perfect moment to be a young radiohead. It’s like 1960s and 1970s cinema, with auteurs rewriting the rules. New technology lets you make radio programs cheaply: Pro Tools sound-editing software has now replaced much of the equipment used in big, expensive studios. Listening is even cheaper: the iTunes store has thousands of podcasts… available for free download in a matter of seconds. “It’s a transformative and exciting moment, a huge revolution,” says Sue Schardt, executive director of the Association of Independents in Radio.

But there’s one problem, and that’s the economics of this new world. Radio is now cheap to make, true, but the people who make it still need to live. And it’s very hard to get paid anything at all…

Sounds awfully familiar…

The beautiful Ligature Loop and Stem poster at For Print Only:

Aside from being a purely creative outlet devoid of typical restrictions… one of the goals for anything produced under the Ligature, Loop & Stem moniker is that it educates as well as inspires. This piece scratched an itch for us in wanting to have a quick reference for letterform characteristics — in essence, so we can all speak the same language when talking about type.

A Pointy Tool — David Carr  talks to the founders of The Awl for The New York Times (via Kottke):

“My friends keep talking to me about how they want to start a Web site, but they need to get some backing, and I look at them and ask them what they are waiting for,” Mr. Sicha said. “All it takes is some WordPress and a lot of typing. Sure, I went broke trying to start it, it trashed my life and I work all the time, but other than that, it wasn’t that hard to figure out.”

And finally…

Tintin Gets Scalped — An annotated page from Charles Burn’s new graphic novel X’ed Out at New York Magazine (via Bookslut):

Nitnit’s name—and shock of hair—betray his origins. “Golden Books put out six of the Tintin books in English. This was before I could read, but I was looking at them very carefully. The books’ endpapers were filled with images from other Tintin stories that hadn’t been translated. I studied these endlessly. There was a little sentence on the back of each book that said, ‘Look for future titles.’ I kept looking but they never came.”

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