Tom Gauld has drawn a new cartoon for the New York Times Books section.
This is probably my favourite panel…
Published August 13, 2020
Attempts to Create a Robotic Novelist
Category: Comics
Published May 7, 2020
Chris Ware’s “Still Life”
“Having lived in Chicago for thirty years, I’ve only ever been a visitor to New York, but I love it like no other city. Teeming with unpredictable people and unimaginable places and unforeseeable moments, life there is measured not in hours but in densely packed minutes that can fill up a day with a year’s worth of life. Lately, however, closed up in our homes against a worldwide terror, time everywhere has seemed to slur, to become almost Groundhog Day-ish, forced into a sort of present-perfect tense—or, as my fellow New Yorker contributor Masha Gessen more precisely put it, ‘loopy, dotted, and sometimes perpendicular to itself.’ But disaster can also have a recalibrating quality. It reminds us that the real things of life (breakfast, grass, spouse) can, in normal times, become clotted over by anxieties and nonsense.”
Chris Ware has created another brilliant cover for The New Yorker to illustrate April 15th, 2020, “a kaleidoscopic account of a single day in New York” during the pandemic.
Its densely packed grid and the juxtaposition of mundane, ‘snapshots’ reminds me — perhaps more than some of his other covers for the magazine — of Ware’s comics.
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Published May 4, 2020
Reasonable Goals…
Published April 30, 2020
A Slight Change in Emphasis
Published April 15, 2020
Tom Gauld’s Department of Mind-Blowing Theories
The New York Times interviews cartoonist Tom Gauld:
An inspiration for my drawing is my dad, who was an architect. As a kid, there was always paper around. I’d go and visit him in his office and see him drawing on the drawing board with a ruler and a pen. I think my cartooning is kind of like, I saw him drawing all day and thought, “That looks lovely,” and then I saw him go into a building site and arguing with a builder, and I thought, “That looks awful.” I basically wanted to find a job where I could do the drawing without having to shout at anybody.
Tom’s new book Department of Mind-Blowing Theories, which collects his cartoons for New Scientist magazine is available now.
Published April 1, 2020
Chris Ware’s “Bedtime”
“As a procrastination tactic, I sometimes ask my fifteen-year-old daughter what the comic strip or drawing I’m working on should be about—not only because it gets me away from my drawing table but because, like most kids of her generation, she pays attention to the world. So, while sketching the cover of this Health Issue, I asked her.
“ ‘Make sure it’s about how most doctors have children and families of their own,’ she said.
Chris Ware’s heartbreaking cover for the New Yorker‘s Health Issue arrives in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic.
I was reminded of his 2009(!) cover for the New Yorker‘s from Halloween edition in which parents all look at their phones while their kids trick-or-treat. It’s an interesting contrast…
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Published February 21, 2020
Department of Mind-Blowing Theories
The previous post about the latest cover of the NYT Magazine reminded me that Tom Gauld‘s cartoons for New Scientist magazine (like the one above, although maybe not actually the one above because it’s new!) are going to be available in book form. Department of Mind-Blowing Theories will be available in April!
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Published October 23, 2019
I Love Autumn
Published October 19, 2019
Work in Progress
Published October 1, 2019
Golden Section Roller Coaster
Published September 27, 2019
Darkseid Is…
Mister Miracle by Tom King and Mitch Gerads was unexpectedly one of my favourite comics this year. I hadn’t previously read any books set in the ‘Fourth World’ despite it’s massive influence on comics and films. I’ve always found Jack Kirby’s grandiose, dialed up to 11, vision of the New Gods to be a little too much, even for Jack Kirby.1 But the constant overwhelming ridiculousness of it all is one of the themes of Mister Miracle. How do you stay sane, let alone have a normal life with a family, when you are constantly ground down by the world you find yourself in, and confronted daily with situations that are tragic, absurd, and just so much bigger than you?
At the Daily Beast, Entertainment Editor Melissa Leon talks to author Tom King about how his experiences as a CIA counterintelligence officer and his personal struggles with stress and anxiety shaped the book.
“The book started when I had one of those first-episode-of-the-Sopranos panic attacks and I ended up in the hospital,” he says. “It was one of those things where you ask the doctor, ‘Am I dying or am I crazy?’ And they tell you you’re crazy and you’re like, woo-hoo! Oh, wait a second.” He laughs. “I thought I was a pretty tough guy. I’d been to war twice, I’d had three kids. In my own little nerdy corner of the world I was pretty successful. But there was something brittle inside of me.”
Mister Miracle was his chance to write about those brittle parts—and about the creeping suspicion in the age of Trump that reality is fundamentally, metaphysically even, coming undone… Unremarkable events [unfold] in heightened, surreal circumstances; sometimes touching, funny, or grim. The juxtapositions are essential to King, who likens the scenes to the memory of debriefing a source in Iraq in 120-degree weather. “We were both sweating and talking about a guy getting his head chopped off. It was horrible,” he remembers. “But it was my wife’s birthday.” He recalls shuffling into a corner, calling his wife, and singing “Happy Birthday” in half-hushed tones. “That’s what life is, right? The mundane lives right next to the crazy.” …
It sounds all very grim, but somehow it isn’t. At least not completely. There is a lot of humour and affection in it too, which is why I think it works. Somehow King finds a way to be (just about) life-affirming in the end.
Gerads layered artwork is also extraordinary and, at times, beautiful. Laid out on the page in a metronomic 9 panel grid, the glitches, blurs, and repetition add to the sense of dislocation and detachment from reality, like life is being filtered and replayed through a screen.
2 CommentsPart of Mister Miracle’s ambition is to capture a feeling many know intimately, but which can be hard to put into words. King and Gerads articulate that dread succinctly, often with a single phrase: “Darkseid Is.” Panels black out without warning, flashing the phrase in typewriter lettering. It interrupts moments of loneliness or disassociation. But it can also be a punchline, or a shrug: When Big Barda says it, for example, she could just as well say “shit happens.”
Published September 3, 2019
