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Category: Comics

Your House is Overloaded With Books…

Tom Gauld celebrates Independent Bookshop Week (which was last week, but isn’t every week independent bookshop week when you think about it?)

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R. Kikuo Johnson’s “Delayed”

R. Kikuo Johnson’s latest cover for The New Yorker is remarkable.

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Bedtime Reading Routine

This is a tragically accurate portrayal of how it has been going during the pandemic.

(Tom Gauld for The Guardian of course)

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Attempts to Create a Robotic Novelist

Tom Gauld has drawn a new cartoon for the New York Times Books section.

This is probably my favourite panel…

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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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Reasonable Goals…

Or maybe just go back to bed…?

(From The New Yorker, of course…)

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A Slight Change in Emphasis

A publisher’s helpful ‘suggestions’… A recent Tom Gauld cartoon for The Guardian.

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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.

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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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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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I Love Autumn

Tom Gauld for The Guardian. (I feel… attacked?)1

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Work in Progress

Lucy Knisley for the New York Times Book Review.

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