Books, Design and Culture
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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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!)
Comments closedA great new Wondermark comic by David Malki. You really need to see it full size to appreciate the horror…
A few years ago when I still worked at Pages, one of the creative/media executives who frequented the bookstore sent his assistant to exchange a copy of comic book by award-winning Norwegian cartoonist Jason that he’d bought from us earlier that day. The book, she said, was faulty. Apparently there were pages missing so the story didn’t make sense and her boss wanted a new copy. She had a receipt so I swapped the book without much thought. It wasn’t until after she’d left and I looked through the returned book that I realised there was nothing wrong with it. The pages were all there, her boss just hadn’t got it. She would be back later for a refund.
In a sense, the confusion was understandable: Jason’s anthropomorphic comics are surreal and require concentration to follow.
In another sense, the dude was simply an idiot because Jason is awesome.
Jason is perhaps the most unique visual stylists working in comics today. Each individual panel is a work of ligne claire pop art: flat, beautifully coloured and amplified for effect.
The deceptively simple stories — often thrillers and off-beat romances — feature anti-heroes, guns, girls, historical figures, b-movie monsters, robots, and aliens. They’re a brilliant mix of silent pictures, film noir, La Nouvelle Vague, classic literature, crime fiction, sci-fi and pulp magazines. There are obvious elements of Hergé, but strange, deadpan, and imbued with ennui and loneliness, Jason’s comics also evoke Hitchcock, Godard, Jarmusch, and Lynch.
In I Killed Adolf Hitler a hit man goes back in time to assassinate Adolf Hitler with unexpected personal consequences. In The Left Bank Gang Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Pound, and Joyce are graphic novelists planning a heist in 1920’s Paris. In Why Are You Doing This? Alex is framed for the murder of his best-friend.
Published in North America by Fantagraphics, Jason’s most recent book, Werewolves of Montpellier, features a thief who disguises himself as a werewolf. A 6 page preview is available on the Fantagraphics blog. If you haven’t checked out Jason’s work already, now’s a great time…
More of Jason’s artwork can be seen on the Fantagraphics’ on Flickr photostream.
6 CommentsTime & Again is a melancholy short film by Jacques Khouri about a man’s repetitive daily life. It is beautifully done with animated Chris Ware-like sequential panels:
Kate Beaton takes on The Great Gatsby:
More, oh, so much more, at the wonderful Hark! A Vagrant.
(Thanks Siobhan!)
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‘The 100 Best Comic Book Covers’ Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4 at Kelly Thompson’s 1979 Semi-Finalist blog. I am not a comics nerd (believe that if you will), but there’s some great stuff (new and old) in this epic list…
Open to Question — The New York Times reports on Sony’s decision adopt the “open standard” ePub format for all their digital books. This means that “books bought from Sony’s online store will be readable not just on its own device but on the growing constellation of other readers that support ePub”. Progress of sorts I would say, but before you break out the bunting, David Rothman questions how “open” this format actually is at TeleRead.
Book Design on Twitter — Ben at the Book Cover Archive has posted a list of book designers who Tweet.
Ben’s list was also a nice reminder to mention Jennifer Tribe‘s amazing directory of book industry people on Twitter.
Book Worship — Shawn Hazen’s blog cataloging “graphically interesting, but otherwise uncollectible, books that entered and exited bookstores quietly in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.” Lovely (via Book Cover Archive blog).
Penguin Symbols — I know I just mentioned designer David Pearson’s Flickr the other day, but how fantastic is this? “An investigation by Production Manager Hans Schmoller into the origins and usage of Penguin devices”
And speaking of Penguin…
Covers And That — Jim Stoddart, Art Director of Penguin Press, discusses their book cover process and looks at some of the new covers for book released this month:
Each cover may face a wide range of hurdles and conflicting opinions, this is the very nature of book covers. Good designers tend to be very focussed and resiliant, and the value of a good sense of humour cannot be underestimated. As with most design jobs there is a balance of concept, craftsmanship and time dexterity required. Any number of changes to the brief may occur even once the design is finished. But in Penguin Press it is widely appreciated that the more a cover is ‘tweaked’ by a committee the less chance there is of retaining that original spark that we all know helps a book stand out in a world where thousands of books are vying for attention.
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Darwyn Cooke (author of one of my favourite superhero comics of recent years, the award-winning The New Frontier) talks about his comic book adaptation of The Hunter by Richard Stark (AKA Donald E. Westlake) — also the inspiration for John Boorman’s film Point Blank starring Lee Marvin — with Tom Spurgeon and writer Ed Brubaker at The Comics Reporter:
The first chapter of that book is so well written it makes me want to puke, but it was like there’s nothing visual left if you put the prose down. It’s all there. It’s an external description, people’s reaction to the guy. So it’s like, “You know what? Let’s take a good chunk of space here and see if we can achieve the feeling of that chapter purely through the visuals that he’s directing. Right down to the holes in his shoe.
Publisher IDW has a preview of the first chapter here.
Am I excited? Yes. Yes, I am.
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