Chip Kidd, designer, writer, and art director at Knopf, talks about his childhood love of comic books with The Comics Archive:
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Published May 5, 2011
Category: Comics
Published April 29, 2011
Pencil It In
In this really nice short video for The Toronto Comics Art Festival, local cartoonists talk about their tools of choice:
(via Drawn!)
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Published March 29, 2011
Akira Revisited
New York Times movie critic A. O. Scott discusses Katsuhiro Otomo’s 1988 anime classic Akira and Japan’s pop culture obsession with apocalyptic disaster:
The film was based on Otomo’s original six-volume, 2182-page epic, which is thought to be one of the first works of manga to be translated into English in its entirety.
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Published March 17, 2011
Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, by Ivan Brunetti
Yale University Press recently posted a neat animated trailer for Ivan Brunetti’s new book Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice:
(via Fantagraphics)
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Published March 11, 2011
Aaron Renier’s Mathilda
Based on Roald Dahl’s Matilda and Quentin Blake’s illustrations, cartoonist Aaron Renier has created a wonderful comic about the joy of books and libraries. Read the whole strip at Unshelved.
(via Drawn | The Ephemerist)
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Published February 23, 2011
Edward Gorey
Alexander Theroux, author of The Strange Case of Edward Gorey (recently revised and republished by Fantagraphics), talks to NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday about the writer and illustrator Edward Gorey, who would have been 86 years old today:
Violence is the essential Gorey ingredient. It is used in his books with such off-hand wit and inevitability that, having become his signature, if it were suddenly missing, you would begin to worry or at least feel you are being fobbed off by work not of the master’s hand.
NPR THE WEEKEND EDITION: THE LIFE OF EDWARD GOREY
Theroux also talks about his peculiar friend with Tom Spurgeon at The Comics Reporter:
Comments closedI was telling someone the other day, there a division in the 20s and post WWI era, especially growing up in England. I think Gorey inherited this. There were the athletes, the muscular types — on one side of the tennis court, as it were. Then there were these kind of fey, bright young things on the other side of the tennis court. There has always been a kind of mocking, derisive look that they took regarding each other. I think Gorey grew out of that kind of gay interest, that fascination with ’20s movies, ’20s styles; there’s a tradition, I think. He was unhappy in the military and when he was at Harvard he was always in an artsy world. He went to the ballet every night in New York. He was almost a caricature of that Ronald Firbank type of character. He was very fey. He didn’t hide any of that.
Published January 31, 2011
Monday Miscellany
These are mostly links I was going to post on Friday, but with a long post on Mendelsund and a last minute WordPress fail (to add to all the usual pressures of part-time blogging) I thought I might as well hold them over until today. Think of it less as a bad end to last week, and a great start to this one (or something like that)…
Designer Eric Skillman on Adrian Tomine’s illustrations for the Criterion boxed set of Yasujiro Ozu’s The Only Son/There Was a Father.
And on the subject of Adrian Tomine, David L. Ulin reviews his new book Scenes From an Impending Marriage for The LA Times:
Tomine has always been a master of the small gesture, as anyone familiar with his work knows. Such encounters motivate the deceptively informal stories in his series “Optic Nerve,” as well as his graphic novel “Shortcomings,” which explores the limits of identity and intimacy. With “Scenes from an Impending Marriage,” though, he seems almost willfully understated, tracing, in a series of offhand comics, the peculiar rigors of the wedding dance, from guest lists to seating charts to invitations and beyond.
(For the record: several of Adrian’s books, including the new one, are distributed in Canada by my employer, Raincoast Books).
The Impulse to Write — Patti Smith talks about her writing and music in The Guardian:
“More than anything that’s been the thread through my life – the desire to write, the impulse to write. I mean, it’s taken me other places, but it was the impulse to write that led me to singing. I’m not a musician. I never thought of performing in a rock’n’roll band. I was just drawn in. It was like being called to duty – I was called to duty, and I did my duty as best as I could.”
And finally…
London Intrusion — China Miéville, author most recently of The City and The City and Kraken, is posting a webcomic on Tumblr (via Robot 6).
(And speaking of Tumblr… Posts from here and The Accidental Optimist are now also available on Tumblr if that’s your thing.)
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Published January 17, 2011
There’s More to Life Than Reading…
With library closures threatening in the UK, here’s Tom Gauld’s comic ‘Withdrawn‘ for The Guardian‘s Saturday Review:
Published November 3, 2010
His Face All Red
A bit late in the day on this — it would have been a perfect post for Halloween — but Emily Carroll’s chilling short-story comic His Face All Red is still pretty darn great.
(via The Ephemerist)
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Published October 27, 2010
Don’t Go To The Castle
Published October 5, 2010
Chris Ware, The New Yorker
Another heart-rending, all too relatable, illustration by Chris Ware for the October 11th issue of The New Yorker:
After last year’s killer Halloween cover, Ware is fast becoming one of the most incisive commentators on modern parenting.
Acme Novelty Library #20 by Chris Ware is available from Drawn & Quarterly next month. (Full disclosure: D+Q are distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books)
(via The Ephemerist)
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Published September 9, 2010
Spirit City Toronto
Combining illustration and photography to depict homeless nature spirits who inhabit the forgotten corners of the city, there are shades of Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli in freelance illustrator Aaron Leighton’s lovely debut book Spirit City Toronto:
Spirit City Toronto is published by Koyama Press, and Books@Torontoist have just posted a two part interview with Aaron about the book.
(via Drawn!)
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