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Tag: Comics

Published November 16, 2012

Something for the Weekend

In Search of Lost Time — Jimmy Stamp on Chris Ware’s Building Stories, at Design Decoded:

If there’s a central theme to Building Stories, it is the passing of time – and our futile struggle against it. The comic book is the perfect medium to explore this idea. After all, what is a comic but sequential, narrative art? Unlike a photograph, a comic panel does not typically show a single moment in time but is, rather, a visual representation of duration. That duration might be the time it takes Superman to punch out a giant robot, the seconds that pass while a failed artist chops a carrot, or the years it takes for a single seed to travel around the world. In every comic book, time passes within the panel. More noticeably though, time passes between the panels. This is where the art of storytelling comes in. There are no rules in comics that standardize the duration of a panel or a sequence of panels. In Building Stories, sometimes milliseconds pass between panels, sometimes entire seasons, and sometimes even centuries can expire with the turn of the page.

See also: Mike Doherty interviews Chris Ware for the National Post.

Nuts — Jon Ronson, author of The Psychopath Test, interviewed at The Awl:

the stuff I was gravitating towards at the beginning was people who lived on the fringes of society and funny, absurd stories about the kind of crazy things that see us through. You know, belief systems that seemed kind of completely irrational to me. And I’ve got to admit, at the time, in my early 20s, I probably thought I was better than them. They were kind of nuts and I was, you know, sane and rational. But the older I get, the less I feel that. Now I feel completely on a par of irrationality with them.

And finally…

Cents — Damon Krukowski of Galaxie 500 and Damon & Naomi on musicians and streaming music services, at Pitchfork:

the sale of recorded music has become irrelevant to the dominant business models I have to contend with as a working musician. Indeed, music itself seems to be irrelevant to these businesses– it is just another form of information, the same as any other that might entice us to click a link or a buy button on a stock exchange.

As businesses, Pandora and Spotify are divorced from music. To me, it’s a short logical step to observe that they are doing nothing for the business of music — except undermining the simple cottage industry of pressing ideas onto vinyl, and selling them for more than they cost to manufacture.

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Published November 14, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

Look Closer — Adrian Tomine talks about moving to New York, and his new book of drawings with The New Yorker:

I’m not one of those artists with an incredible imagination who can just make things up out of nothing, and I’m not the kind of person who would throw himself into some exciting or dangerous situation just to get material. So I tend to go about my normal, boring life, and just try to look at things a little more closely. And even though I’ve lived in New York for eight years now, I still feel like a recent transplant, and I think that’s a big influence on how I see and draw the city.

Invisible — Jeanette Winterson on Tove Jansson and the Moomins, for The Telegraph:

I keep the Moomin books in my study and if I am tinkering about preparing for work I will often open one at random and read a page – they are funny and subversive, (Hemulens of either gender only wear dresses). And playful. Whatever happened to playfulness? Why, as adults, is serious/superficial the boring binary of our lives?… Tove Jansson believed in happy endings… Not the Disney kind but more solid and ambiguous, which is a paradox, but more truthful than black-and-white solutions. Ever-after is what is invisible on the next page.

Approaching Zero — Michael Faber reviews How Music Works by David Byrne, for The Guardian:

Everyone knows that the music industry is in terminal decline. Unlike many doomsayers, however, Byrne feels the changed landscape is good for musicians. Even 20 years ago, any artist wishing to make a record needed a huge sum of money to pay for studio time (and thus needed a large corporation to loan it to him). A lucky few shifted the millions of units necessary to repay the industry’s investment, but the majority got hopelessly into debt. Nowadays, recording costs are “approaching zero”. Distribution costs in the digital era are also negligible compared to the days of physical warehousing. As long as artists can find ways of holding on to a fair percentage of their income (an impossible challenge in the heyday of the record companies), even modest sales can sustain a career. Indeed, says Byrne, “there have never been more opportunities for a musician to reach an audience.”

And finally…

A Short Lesson in Perspective — A fantastic essay by Linds Redding. First published in March of this year, this seems to have taken on a life of its own. If you work in a ‘creative industry’ and haven’t read it yet, make sure you read the whole thing:

The compulsion to create is unstoppable. It’s a need that has to be filled. I’ve barely ‘worked’ in any meaningful way for half a year, but every day I find myself driven to ‘make’ something. Take photographs. Draw. Write. Make bad music. It’s just an itch than needs to be scratched. Apart from the occasional severed ear or descent into fecal-eating dementia the creative impulse is mostly little more than a quaint eccentricity. But introduce this mostly benign neurosis into a commercial context.. well that way, my friends lies misery and madness.

 

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Published November 9, 2012

Something for the Weekend

Comics Without Borders — a long interview with cartoonist Joost Swarte at The Comics Journal:

In the graphic field of comics I was inspired by Will Eisner’s Spirit. If I see these title pages, the constructions in his title pages, and what he does with the lettering, that was very interesting. And then another thing is, I love the older comics like Little Nemo and Lyonel Feininger. And I was interested also, because I studied industrial design… about the Dada people in Holland and Germany, and Bauhaus architecture and design world, in which there are almost no borders. I mean, people do whatever they like. Then you have the older artists like Tatlin. They designed their own clothes, they do architecture, they do flying machines, they do painting, they do everything. I mean, it was always nice to know that if you want to do different things, that you’re not standing alone. That somebody else did it, and they survived.

Losing Their Grip — Peter Aspen reviews three new books on cinema — The Big Screen by David Thomson, Do the Movies Have a Future? by David Denby, and Film After Film by J Hoberman — for the FT:

It is one of the most famous one-liners in the history of cinema, which also turned out to be an inadvertent prophecy. “I am big,” says the slighted Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950). “It’s the pictures that got small.”

She had no idea. The past half-century has seen the pictures get smaller and smaller, to the point that we wonder if they can ever be big again. From television screen, to laptop, to smartphone, the ever-shrinking movies reach a greater part of the world than ever before. But what have we lost along the way?

Holberman’s book is given more in-depth consideration at the LA Review of Books.

And finally…

In the shit — book shopping with Michael Dirda at The Paris Review:

So this is how a man acquires 10,000-odd books, more than he could ever display or read. It’s a combination of maniacal persistence and utter nostalgic whimsy. You have to be willing to search high and low for a potential beauty, but most of the time you’ll take a Book Club hardcover of a book you don’t like if it reminds you of something from your past.

As if to illustrate the point, Dirda found a mass-market paperback of Black Alice, by Thomas Disch and John Sladek. Dirda was a friend of Disch until the sci-fi author killed himself in 2008. “He was a wonderfully cynical man,” Dirda said. “I have a first edition of this but I’ll get it anyway.”

 

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Published November 5, 2012

Jamie Hewlett

A beautifully shot interview with British illustrator Jamie Hewlett:

It would be lovely to see Hewlett — co-creator of Tank Girl and Gorillaz (if you must) — draw some new full-length comics again.

(via Coudal)

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Published September 12, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

Purple Haze — A typically tangential literary collage about Conrad’s Heart of Darkness by Geoff Dyer:

The actual book is far stranger than accounts of it sometimes suggest. It’s a shame in a way that the book has become so famous as to dull our sense of this pervasive strangeness. Re-reading it now I find it scarcely less bizarre than when I plodded through it as a mystified seventeen-year-old (we were doing The Secret Agent for A-Level). What H. G. Wells wrote of Conrad’s earlier book, An Outcast of the Islands, also holds good for Heart of Darkness: “his story is not so much told as seen intermittently through a haze of sentences.”

Read the whole thing. Trapped on a boat, Dyer apparently wrote the piece in one night. You can almost hear him losing his mind.

Etiquette — Caleb Crain on criticism and the role of critics, at The Paris Review:

A non-question has recently preoccupied the literary corners of the Internet: How rude should a book critic be? I call it a non-question because its non-answer is the same as for people in social situations generally: it depends. It’s impossible to find a universal rule that licenses rudeness. There’s always going to be at least one observer who feels that a conflict could and should be handled politely. (And who knows? Insofar as politeness is a skill, maybe there’s always room for improvement.) Also, there’s always going to be at least one observer who describes as honest what others call rude… Only the particular questions are worth debating, and no matter how many questions like them you answer, you never reach a rule that has the purity of math. The most you can hope for is etiquette.

Hackery — Simon Kuper on the fantasy of being an artist, for the Financial Times:

Even if you are sure that it’s your vocation to make art, you are most likely wrong. For a start, if it was your vocation, you would probably have embarked on it aged 18 instead of making a living first. And even people who do devote their lives to their supposed vocation often discover that they aren’t good at it after all. As Nick Hornby writes in his memoir Fever Pitch, in a riff on the failed Arsenal footballer Gus Caesar: Gus must have known he was good, just as any pop band who has ever played the Marquee know they are destined for Madison Square Garden … and just as any writer who has sent off a completed manuscript to Faber and Faber knows that he is two years away from the Booker. You trust that feeling with your life … and it doesn’t mean anything at all.

The Sadness at the Heart of Dredd — A headline as brilliant as it is unlikely… Antonia Quirke reviews Dredd, also for the Financial Times:

Dredd has something absent from all recent action and science fiction films: sadness. How desperately The Dark Knight craved sadness!… The slow-mo moments in Dredd – imagined by the screenwriter Alex Garland and realised by cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle – aspire to the bluesy melancholy of the sequence when Joanna Cassidy as the doomed replicant Zhora goes crashing through the glass in Blade Runner: a moment that set the tone for all our hopes for science fiction on screen.

See also: Writer John Wagner talks to the Daily Record about his creation Judge Dredd.

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Published September 7, 2012

Something for the Weekend

For the launch of his new book Building Stories, Chris Ware has two exhibitions opening this weekend. The first opens tonight at the Carl Hammer Gallery in Chicago. The second opens on Saturday at the Adam Baumgold Gallery in New York. Both shows will display original art from the new book.

The Snail — The ‘accidental’ history of the @ symbol at the Smithsonian Magazine:

Called the “snail” by Italians and the “monkey tail” by the Dutch, @ is the sine qua non of electronic communication, thanks to e-mail addresses and Twitter handles. @ has even been inducted into the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, which cited its modern use as an example of “elegance, economy, intellectual transparency, and a sense of the possible future directions that are embedded in the arts of our time.”

A short profile of artist and designer Ray Eames at Dwell:

According to Beatriz Colomina, in her essay “With, or Without You: The Ghosts of Modern Architecture,” even though Charles and Ray Eames were revolutionary by including her name in the brand as an equal partner, Ray didn’t always receive her fair share of credit. An editor from the New York Times once erased Ray’s name from an article on the Eameses, despite protests from the writer, Esther McCoy. McCoy was outraged, and wrote Ray an apology letter outlining her frustrations over the omission (and the editor’s insistence on calling the Eames lounge a casting couch), “This is sheer nonsense; the broad audience isn’t titillated by the phrase casting couch nor does it object to a woman being credited for work,” she wrote.

And finally…

ShortList on Mary Harron’s movie adaptation of American Pyscho:

If there’s one moment in American Psycho that sums up the film’s utter greatness, it’s the business card scene. On the one hand, parodying the narcissism of Eighties yuppies, on the other, lending an insight into the warped psyche of the film’s protagonist… And 10 years after the film was first released, it’s certainly one of the reasons why this darkly hilarious Wall Street satire, based on the Bret Easton Ellis novel, is considered a cult classic and one of the greatest films of the past decade.

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Published August 30, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

Drowning Not Waving — A short profile of Toronto-based cartoonist Jeff Lemire, creator of Essex County and The Underwater Welder, for The Globe and Mail:

Lemire, who profited from art classes in high school but is otherwise self-taught as a graphic artist, first heard about the profession of underwater welder from a colleague at one of the restaurants where he worked before comics started paying the bills three years ago. The father of a three-year-old boy, also named Gus, Lemire felt that underwater welding seemed like a good metaphor for parenthood.

Burdened with Cinema — Clive James reviews The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael, for The Atlantic:

She could talk well about popular art because she had not only seen all the movies that there were, she would have gone to all the opera performances that there were if she had not been so burdened with tickets to the cinema. When she talked about Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly, her remarks were up there with the professional dance critic Arlene Croce’s because she, Kael, had been a connoisseur of dance all her life. She knew her way around a jazz band. Apart from mental equipment like that, her reading was prodigious in its volume, and fully serious in its content. Her house had all the Oz books in first editions—I saw them, and marveled; they looked as beautiful as her Tiffany lamps—but she was by no means restricted just to film-linked popular literature. When she reviewed a Russian movie based on a Dostoyevsky story, she could refer with daunting ease to anything by Dostoyevsky, including all the major novels chapter by chapter.

And finally…

An interview with film director David Fincher at Art of the Title:

I was eight years old and I saw a documentary on the making of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. It had never occurred to me that movies didn’t take place in real time. I knew that they were fake, I knew that the people were acting, but it had never occurred to me that it could take, good God, four months to make a movie! It showed the entire company with all these rental horses and moving trailers to shoot a scene on top of a train. They would hire somebody who looked like Robert Redford to jump onto the train. It never occurred to me that there were hours between each of these shots. The actual circus of it was invisible, as it should be, but in seeing that I became obsessed with the idea of “How?” It was the ultimate magic trick.

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Published August 23, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

The Creative Review previews an exhibition of the graphic design of the Eames opening at the PM Gallery in London next month.

Gravity — A profile of playwright Tom Stoppard, at Intelligent Life:

He gets the old books he needs from the London Library, the open-stack treasure-house in St James’s Square. It was founded by Thomas Carlyle and others in 1841, and Stoppard has been its energetic president since 2005. “I get a big kick out of the very existence of the London Library. I’d say it was an ornament to society, only it is more than an ornament. The centre of gravity of our morality is our literary culture.”

Special — China Miéville’s keynote speech at the 2012 Edinburgh World Writers’ conference on the future of the novel:

The blurring of boundaries between writers, books, and readers, self-publishing, the fanfication of fiction, doesn’t mean some people won’t be better than others at the whole writing thing, or unable to pay their rent that way – it should, though, undermine that patina of specialness. Most of us aren’t that special, and the underlining of that is a good thing, the start of a great future. In which we can maybe focus more on the books. Which might even rarely be special.

And finally…

Girls — Writing at CNN’s Geek Out! blog, Danica Davidson looks at manga’s popularity with women:

“I honestly believe women are just as interested in the comic format as men no matter the country of origin,” said Robin Brenner… author of Understanding Manga and Anime.

“Women are just are more likely to pick up titles that acknowledge or seek them as an audience,” she said.  Japan has been pursuing women and girls as an audience in earnest since the 1970s, whereas we here in the States left that audience behind in the 1970s”

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Published August 15, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

Drawing for a Living — A 1994 interview with the late, great Joe Kubert, who died earlier this week aged 85, at The Comics Journal:

Doing comics was usually not a matter of choice, for most artists. I guess they felt the real brunt of the Depression a lot more than I did. The Depression hit in ’32 and we were slowly climbing out of it through the ’30s and into the early ’40s. It was actually World War II in ’41 that generated work and jobs. Especially when everyone else was starting to be drafted. Most working cartoonists came from extensive art backgrounds… It was a way to make some money, that’s all: pure and simple. Nobody considered it an art form. Nobody was proud of being a comic-book artist. Matter of fact, it was a couple of steps below digging ditches. Syndication was recognized success. If you could get to do a syndicated strip, my God, that was the answer. But comic books were considered for many, many years to be a shameful occupation. Most of the guys in the business, if you asked them what they did, would never admit that they were comic-book artists. “I do commercial artwork,” or “I just draw for a living.”

See also: Obituaries at TCJ, New York Times and the Los Angeles Times.

Penis Rays and Self-Loathing — Kim O’Connor on the truth or otherwise of autobiographical cartoonists, at The Awl:

[The] one place where fact and fiction fraternize… freely is in the graphic novels section, which is located, in most bookstores, between sci-fi and fantasy in what champion of popular fiction Michael Chabon has called the genre slums. In libraries, too, most graphic novels are grouped together regardless of content, so that autobiographical and semi-autobiographical comics share the shelf with fiction that ranges from one-dimensional superhero stuff to literary stories like Neil Gaiman’s Sandman. The line between fantasy and reality—and high and low culture—is blurred in a way that makes everything that exists within this milieu more rich and resonant.

And finally…

Tim Parks asks “Does Copyright Matter?” at the NYRB blog:

Officially the idea is that the writer, artist, or musician should be allowed to reap the just rewards for his effort. This is quaint. There is very little justice in the returns artists receive. Works of equal value and quality produce quite different incomes or no income at all. Somebody becomes a millionaire overnight and someone else cannot even publish. It is perfectly possible that the quality of work of these two writers is very similar. The same book may have a quite different fate in different countries. Any notion of justice in the incomes of artists is naive.

What we are talking about, more brutally, is preventing other people from making money from my work without paying me a tribute, because my work belongs to me. It’s mine. What we are talking about is ownership and control.

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Published August 10, 2012

Something for the Weekend

No Idea What I’m Doing — Keith Ridgway, author most recently of Hawthorn & Child, on writing fiction:

I have no idea what I’m doing. All the decisions I appear to have made—about plots and characters and where to start and when to stop—are not decisions at all. They are compromises. A book is whittled down from hope, and when I start to cut my fingers I push it away from me to see what others make of it. And I wait in terror for the judgements of those others—judgements that seem, whether positive or negative, unjust, because they are about something that I didn’t really do. They are about something that happened to me. It’s a little like crawling from a car crash to be greeted by a panel of strangers holding up score cards.

A Dog’s Cock — The history of the exclamation mark:

no one really knows the history of the punctuation mark. The current running theory is that it comes from Latin. In Latin, the exclamation of joy was io, where the i was written above the o. And, since all their letters were written as capitals, an I with an o below it looks a lot like an exclamation point.

But it wasn’t until 1970 that the exclamation point had its own key on the keyboard. Before that, you had to type a period, and then use the backspace to go back and stick an apostrophe above it. When people dictated things to secretaries they would say “bang” to mark the exclamation point. Hence the interobang (?!) – a combination of a question (?) and an exclamation point (!). In the printing world, the exclamation point is called “a screamer, a gasper, a startler or a dog’s cock.”

One more on the late Robert Hughes at The Economist:

As our lives grow increasingly distracted and overstimulated, the critic has become both more and less relevant in the service of cultural sieve, filtering out the good from the bad. Mr Hughes didn’t subscribe to such categorical certainties. In turn he placed as much emphasis on the context of a work as he did on its content. To Mr Hughes, experiencing art wasn’t about passing a few hours in some museum, but what made those few hours meaningful to be alive.

And finally…

Larry Tye talks about his new book Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero, on CBC Radio’s The Current:

CBC RADIO THE CURRENT: Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero mp3

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Published August 3, 2012

Something for the Weekend

Somehow I missed that the second volume of Baltimore came out in June. It will soon be on the ‘to read’ pile along with the new Darwyn Cooke ‘Parker’ book The Score.

And just so you have ample advance warning: The Golden Age of DC Comics: 1935-1956 by Paul Levitz will be published by Taschen early next year:

See also: Sean T. Collins list of the 15 Essential Batman Graphic Novels at Rolling Stone.

Changing tack completely…

How it Felt to be There — Neal Ascherson reviews Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life by Artur Domosławski  (translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones), for the LRB:

Domosławski has written a book which is three sorts of cautionary tale: about journalism engaged or disengaged, about the political maze through which intelligent Poles made their way in the later 20th century, about the endless capacity of human beings to believe their own fictions and keep secrets from themselves. He ends up still confident about Kapuściński’s stature as a writer, still attracted to the memory of him as a friend, but amazed at what he has found out. As one of Kapuściński’s former lovers said, ‘he was a complex man living in tangled times, in several eras, in various worlds.’

The brilliant Isaac Tobin, senior designer at University of Chicago Press, interviewed at From the Desk of…

Almost all book covers I design are secretly collaborations with Lauren [Nassef], especially the successful ones. She’s often both the source of the initial idea, and an invaluable editor and critic — she always sees the dozens of variations I go through before settling on a final design, and tells me what’s working and what isn’t.

My 2009 interview with Isaac is here.

The folks behind Designers and Books have announced Designers & Books Fair 2012 to be held  Saturday October 27, and Sunday October 28 at the F.I.T Conference Center in New York.

See also: nominations for the new 50 Books / 50 Covers, co-sponsored by Designers and Books, Design Observer and AIGA. There are some astonishingly good entries. My list for 2011 looks meagre by comparison.

Have a great weekend.

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Published August 1, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

Paul Gravett on piecing together the early history of comics:

You’d think by now that the history of a medium as global and influential as comics would be fully researched and written, but this is not the case. In contrast to the more varied and international perspectives available on film or literature, the majority of English-language reference books on comics plough through the well-worn furrows of the 20th century American newspaper strip and comic book, re-affirming old “truths” and historical “facts”. Objectivity and lack of bias are practically impossible, because by putting into print your history, your version of the “facts,” your inclusions and omissions determine who and what are significant. In the process, almost inevitably, supposedly “minor” or “peripheral” figures and events can be overlooked.

Wading Through the Rubbish — Boyd Tonkin, literary editor for The Independent, on the need for taste-makers:

a healthy publishing landscape… should still leave room for strong-minded indies who publish a few books a year simply because a couple of committed individuals love them. Whether one mind or many makes the choice, what matters is that they pick the brightest and boldest in their field rather than drift with the current and follow the herd. This isn’t “elitism” but exactly the contrary: a respect for your readers, and a determination that they should not have to waste time by wading through industrial volumes of rubbish.

And finally…

Dead Oxonians — Adrian Wooldridge on the posthumous publishing careers of political philosopher Isaiah Berlin and historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, for Intelligent Life:

[The] mix of worldliness and unworldliness—familiarity with affairs of state coupled with philosophical detachment—holds the key to the continued appeal of both men. They chose to address big subjects rather than solve academic crossword puzzles. They wrote for the educated public, not just cloistered scholars. Berlin produced a stream of essays on great political thinkers ranging from German nationalists to Russian novelists. Trevor-Roper roamed across the centuries: though his first love was the 17th century, he also wrote about Hitler’s Germany, the rise of medieval Europe, and, in one of his liveliest books, an Edwardian fantasist, forger and sex maniac, Sir Edmund Backhouse.

 

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