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Tag: Comics

Published October 26, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

An Expressionist Newsreel of a Bad Dream — Guardian film critic Peter Bradshaw on the classic Martin Scorsese movie Raging Bull:

The effect is to combine stunning scenes of brutality and self-destruction with a lethal, even outrageous sentimentalism and self-pity. It’s all captured in dreamlike, pin-sharp monochrome cinematography, stark images reproduced like a Weegee crime scene. The result is operatic and mad and compelling.

The fight sequences themselves, with the camera swirling and swooping around the ring, and the soundtrack sometimes gulping out into silence and sometimes moaning with weird half-heard animal noises, are unforgettable: an inspired reportage recreation in the manner of a Life magazine shoot, which also looks like expressionist newsreel footage of a bad dream.

Also at The Guardian, Justin McGuirk reviews Gary Hustwit’s new documentary Urbanized:

Urbanized is a brave and timely movie that manages to strike almost exactly the right tone. For a sense of the scale of the urban problem, simply look at Mumbai, a city of 12 million people that is set to be the world’s biggest by 2050. Already, 60% of its population lives in slums with such poor sanitation that there is only one toilet seat for every 600 people. The municipality is reluctant to build toilets for fear that it will encourage more migrants to come. “As if people come to shit,” retorts the activist Sheela Patel in the movie. Quite.

The 10% — CNN looks at the business of women in comics and Womanthology, a comics anthology funded by Kickstarter:

“Think about it from the publisher’s point of view,” [former DC associate editor] Asselin said. “Say you sell 90% of your comics to men between 18 and 35, and 10% of your comics to women in the same age group.  Are you going to a) try to grow that 90% of your audience because you feel you already have the hook they want and you just need to get word out about it, or b) are you going to try to figure out what women want in their comics and do that to grow your line?”

(My advice: go with “b”)

And on the subject of comics… Art Spiegelman talks about MetaMaus (what else?) with The Observer:

In his ramshackle SoHo studio – a sort of comics library with a membership of just one, it consists of a dingy bathroom, a kitchenette, a drawing board, the odd dusty plant and about eight million quietly groaning books – Spiegelman lights yet another cigarette… He then gives himself over to crowing delightedly. “I’ve met a number of editors over the years,” he says, eyes rolling. “And all of them claim to have discovered Maus, when all they really have the right to claim is that they rejected it.”

And finally… While Toronto is busy drawing Tintin, Simon Kuper looks back at the life and work of Hergé for the Financial Times:

The war seems to have forced Hergé inward into his own imagination, and Haddock is one of the best things he found there. The captain’s alcoholism and swearing would be staple jokes of all subsequent Tintin books. Pretty much all writers on Tintin note that the main character is a cipher, a humourless two-dimensional boy scout. “A blank domino,” Hergé’s friend, the philosopher Michel Serres, called him. Tintin therefore requires company. Prewar, he only had his dog, Snowy. Haddock… was much more interesting. Even Hergé seems to have come to prefer him to Tintin.

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Published October 21, 2011

Something for the Weekend

Words and Pictures — An interview with cartoonist Tom Gauld at The Rumpus:

Format, words and pictures all work together to make a good comic. I started at college doing pure illustration and only gradually got into making stories and using words. I’m still more comfortable with pictures than words: I’m happy doodling away on drawings for hours, but putting words together is always more of a struggle. I  usually like to keep things as simple as I can so it’s interesting seeing what I can remove and still keep the story: you don’t want to say something in words which is better said in the pictures (and vice versa).

There is also a preview of Tom’s new book, Goliath, on the D+Q blog and you can read my interview with Tom here.*

A General Contempt for Small Talk — Edward Docx, author most recently of The Devil’s Garden, on Tolstoy, Russia, and literary prizes. So much good stuff here:

[I]f there’s one thing that novelists love to talk about, it’s how to make things real when, obviously, they are not. This in turn leads naturally into something novelists like to talk about even more: the terrible struggle of writing itself. (My favourite line about writers: “Writers are people who find writing more difficult than other people.”)… Metaphors rise from the table like disturbed lepidoptera. Writing a novel is like attempting to solve an extremely complicated maths equation, which seeks to represent reality, and through which you are trying to lead the public without them ever getting wind that said equation is, in fact, impossible to solve or that, actually, it might not represent reality at all. We are getting carried away. Deciding to write a novel is like visiting an obscure, half-forgotten and slowly-evaporating planet entirely comprised of swimming pools and deciding that what is needed is… yes, another swimming pool! But, for obscure reasons, a swimming pool that must be built single-handedly from scratch and then filled using only a syringe.

And finally…

Critical Authority — New York Times film critics A. O. Scott and Manohla Dargis discuss Brian Kellow’s new book Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark and the ongoing legacy of the (in)famous New Yorker film critic. Here’s A.O. Scott:

[T]he idea of critical authority has always struck me as slippery, even chimerical. Authority over whom? Power to do what? The importance of particular critics can’t be quantified in lumens of fame, circulation numbers or box office returns, though by all of these measures Kael, in her heyday, certainly enjoyed unusual prominence. But like every other critic, she was above all a writer, and a writer only really ever has — or cares about — one kind of power, which is the power to engage readers.

I think Kael is remembered not for her particular judgments or ideas, but rather for her voice, for an outsized literary personality that could be enthralling and infuriating, often both. A lot of people read her for the pleasure of disagreement, and the resentment she was able to provoke — in critical targets and rival critics — is surely evidence of power. An awful lot of our colleagues are still, in both senses, mad about her. To reread her is to understand why.

*Just so you know: D+Q are distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books.

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Published October 19, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Buzzwords of the Incurious — Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom, delivers a searing review of Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live by Jeff Jarvis.  A must-read:

The ubiquitous references to Gutenberg are designed to lend some historical gravitas to wildly ahistorical notions. The failure of Internet intellectuals actually to grapple with the intervening centuries of momentous technological, social, and cultural development is glaring. For all their grandiosity about technology as the key to all of life’s riddles, they cannot see further than their iPads. And even their iPad is of interest to them only as a “platform”—another buzzword of the incurious—and not as an artifact that is assembled in dubious conditions somewhere in East Asian workshops so as to produce cultic devotion in its more fortunate owners. This lack of elementary intellectual curiosity is the defining feature of the Internet intellectual. History, after all, is about details, but no Internet intellectual wants to be accused of thinking small. And so they think big—sloppily, ignorantly, pretentiously, and without the slightest appreciation of the difference between critical thought and market propaganda.

Swimming Out of Guilt — David Ulin talks to Art Spiegelman about MetaMaus at the LA Times:

“I didn’t predict this for myself,” Spiegelman admits, firing up another cigarette. “I thought ‘Maus’ was going to take two years and I’d move on with my life. But it’s an ongoing wrestling match. Basically ‘Breakdowns’ ” — the 2008 collection that recontextualized his early work, including the first three-page “Maus” strip, from 1972 — “and ‘MetaMaus’ are the great retrospections, the period of my life I’m still swimming out of. Then I get to find out if there’s any other stuff in my pockets to make bets with.”

The World We Live In — Author William Gibson interviewed at the A.V. Club:

I don’t actually think of science fiction as primarily a predictive form. That’s its cultural reputation and that’s what lots of people believe it is, but my approach has always been that it’s invariably about the day it was written in. Regardless of what the author tells us, it can’t really be anything else. There’s no way it can be about the future, except it pretends to be the future. It’s like reading 1984. What it’s actually about is 1948, the year it was written. You see Orwell responding to various aspects of the world he lived in, which was changing, since the world always is.

See also: Margaret Atwood talks about speculative fiction and her new collection of essays Other Worlds with CBC Radio (audio) and The Globe and Mail.

And finally…

Trash — Nathan Heller on film critic Pauline Kael, a new collection of her work, The Age of Movies: Selected Writings of Pauline Kael, and Brian Kellow’s new biography Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark:

Kael realized that the pictures had a chance to succeed where classic books, painting, and art music had been shunted from the mainstream; she thought a tolerance for “trash” was key to maintaining this openness and innovation. Still, she was no fugitive from the old arts. Kael once said that she’d rather live in a world without movies than in a world without books, and she resented the decline of public literary dialogue. She saw the movies as American art’s second chance.

Also at The New Yorker, Richard Brody looks back Kael’s book 5001 Nights at the Movies.

 

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Published October 14, 2011

Something for the Weekend

The Dark Room — Filmmaker Grant Gee talks to BookForum about his new film Patience, which explores the work of author W.G. Sebald and his book Rings of Saturn:

There is one reference in an essay he wrote about Kings of the Road by Wim Wenders. He opens the essay with an interesting recollection of watching the film. He’s that generation; he’s absolutely of Wenders’ generation. Once you know that, you can feel the similarities between Wenders and Sebald, but Sebald willfully took himself away from that culture. I think of Sebald more as a photographer. There’s a quote I read somewhere where says he wasn’t very interested in school and he spent most of his time in the darkroom of the school’s photography lab. And there is something—I’m not sure if I’ve made this up or imagined it—about the way images work in his book: it feels to me like a black-and-white print developed under a red light, like it comes up out of whiteness, and if you leave it there it will black out in the tray.

Baggage — David Cronenberg talks to FilmComment  about A Dangerous Method, his film on Freud, Jung and Sabina Spielrein:

I don’t care what baggage people think I will bring to the movie. I don’t have that baggage. Once I decide on a project, I am honorable about how I treat it. I am not trying to put some false Cronenbergian imprint on it. Let’s just do the movie. Part of the project was the resurrection of the people and the era. That means it has to be as accurate as possible. I want the people to be as alive as they can be. I want to be able to smell them and hear them in a way that we can’t. It’s a matter of affection. I would like to have known them. That’s the only agenda I have—to honor the accuracy of these people and what they said.

And on the subject of Freud… Comic book creators discuss how mainstream comics portray women and how things can be improved at Comics Alliance. An interesting read.

And finally…

SUPERTYPE! — A collection of vintage comic book mastheads from the man who brought you 4CP and Comic Book Cartography (via Subtraction).

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Published October 12, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Art or Death — Art Spiegelman on books, comics and technology at Publishers Weekly:

I would say that, in the future, the book will be reserved for things that function best as a book. So, if I need a textbook that’s going to be out of date because of new technological inventions, you’re better off having it where you can download the supplements or the update. If you’re going to read a quick mystery novel to keep you amused while you’re traveling, it’s fine.
None of this is about the business model. It has to do with the boutique nature of a book, the idea that, as McLuhan put it, when a technology is replaced by another technology, the previous technology either becomes art or it dies.

See also: Jeet Heer reviews MetaMaus for the Globe and Mail:

One way to explain the achievement of MetaMaus is to imagine a great architect like Frank Gehry offering a guided tour to one of his classic buildings, opening up the original plans, explaining the solutions he came up with for each problem. Such an act of self-exegesis is immensely rewarding, even if the creator’s genius is as enigmatic as ever.

And, on the subject of comics… A short interview with Alan Moore in Metro:

At the moment I feel an awful lot of my comic career is behind me, particularly all of the superhero stuff – the stuff that’s owned by American corporations. I want to distance myself from that, so the stuff I’m proudest of is what I own: From Hell, Lost Girls, The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I don’t read my earlier work because there are too many unpleasant associations with it. I don’t have a copy of Watchmen in the house. I’m glad the work is out there in the world, having an effect, but it’s like I’ve gone through a messy divorce.

Immersion — Author Neal Stephenson talks about writing and his new novel REAMDE at Full Stop:

I would say that people who like to engage with the details of the historical era or the technical concepts might find [my] books especially rewarding to read. For me it’s a pretty straightforward thing—you know, what readers are paying for, what they’re buying and what I’m selling is a particular kind of experience: essentially one of getting immersed in another world. And it could be a very different world (as in a science fiction book), it could be the history of our world, or it could just be a story that takes place today, like Reamde. And a way to do that — a way to create that feeling of immersion and get the reader feeling like they’re really there — is to supply a lot of details that convey a feeling of immediacy.

See also: REAMDE reviewed by Laura Miller for The Guardian.

And finally…

Filmmaker Gary Hustwit talks about his latest design documentary, Urbanized, with Print Magazine:

I love all the interviews in all the films, that’s why they are in the film. But there are definitely some that people respond to when they watch the film. Most of all Enrique Peñalosa, who is the former mayor of Bogota. He’s got some great lines in the film, like “There’s no constitutional right to parking.” He’s really charismatic and has some really common sense ideas about using the city as a tool to create equality, democracy and social equity. I also got to interview Oscar Niemeyer, the legendary Brazilian modernist architect. He’s about to turn 104 and is the oldest living architect in the world. He’s got his grandchildren working in his office. That was a big honor for sure.

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Published October 7, 2011

Something for the Weekend

Innovation Starvation— SF author Neal Stephenson at World Policy Journal on why the big stuff doesn’t get done:

SF has changed… from the 1950s (the era of the development of nuclear power, jet airplanes, the space race, and the computer) to now. Speaking broadly, the techno-optimism of the Golden Age of SF has given way to fiction written in a generally darker, more skeptical and ambiguous tone. I myself have tended to write a lot about hackers—trickster archetypes who exploit the arcane capabilities of complex systems devised by faceless others.

Believing we have all the technology we’ll ever need, we seek to draw attention to its destructive side effects. This seems foolish now that we find ourselves saddled with technologies like Japan’s ramshackle 1960’s-vintage reactors at Fukushima when we have the possibility of clean nuclear fusion on the horizon. The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rules. It’s the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments. Too bad we’ve forgotten how to do it.

See also:  Stephenson’s new book REAMDE reviewed by The A.V. Club and the NY Times.

Stealing from Dr. Strange — Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians and The Magician King, talks to Graphic Novel Reporter about comics:

Watchmen (and, just as much, Miracleman) changed everything for me. [Alan] Moore attacked and undermined everything that was sacred about the superhero story, and in the process he wrote the greatest superhero story that had ever been written. I never forgot that. A lot of those lessons show up in The Magicians: When you question the basic assumptions of a genre, you make that genre stronger, not weaker.

Also, I steal a lot from Dr. Strange.

And on the subject of comics… Ruth Franklin reviews MetaMaus by Art Spiegelman for The New Republic:

This writer is not Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi, though his work, like theirs, is based in testimony. He is not Piotr Rawicz or H.G. Adler, though he shares their interest in viewing real events through a filter of surrealism. He is not Thomas Keneally, though his work has a quality of the “nonfiction novel” about it; nor is he W.G. Sebald, though his books, like Sebald’s, have been described as a mix of fiction, documentary, and memoir. He is Art Spiegelman, and he has done more than any other writer of the last few decades to change our understanding of the way stories about the Holocaust can be written.

Edges — Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, on what remains of books:

One of the essential characteristics of the printed book, as of the scribal codex that preceded it, is its edges. Those edges, as John Updike pointed out not long before he died, manifest themselves in the physical form of bound books – “some are rough-cut, some are smooth-cut, and a few, at least at my extravagant publishing house, are even top-stained” — but they are also there aesthetically and even metaphysically, giving each book integrity as a work in itself. That doesn’t mean that a book exists in isolation — its words, as written and as read, form rich connections with other books as well as with the worlds of nature and of men — but rather that a book offers a self-contained experience. The sense of self-containment is what makes a good book so satisfying to its readers, and the requirement of self-containment is what spurs the writer to the highest levels of literary achievement. The book must feel complete between its edges.

And finally…

In The Wall Street Journal, Lee Marshall looks for Fellini’s Rome:

Sometimes Fellini’s Rome and Felliniesque Rome live in close proximity. The apartment that Federico and Giulietta shared (Via Margutta, 110) is on a small, charming street where Truman Capote once lived and Puccini composed. There’s not much to see except a plaque on the building with caricatures of the pair and a commemorative poem in Roman dialect. But notice the number on the door of the palazzo: above the 110, it says “Già 113″—formerly 113—a very Felliniesque address.

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Published October 5, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Comic Book Commodities — Cartoonist and illustrator Dave Gibbons, best known for his work on Watchmen with Alan Moore, interviewed at The Huffington Post:

[E]conomically comics are in a really difficult place because the monthly American comic books which are maybe 22 pages of story, now can cost $4, which is £3, and that is a lot of money for really such a small amount of entertainment when you think what you can get on the app store or you know the several hours of entertainment you can get at the movies or whatever for not dissimilar sums of money.

So, I think what happens nowadays is actually people ‘as they say,’ wait for the trade collection. But the way I can see it polarising even more is that you’ll then want is something that is more than just the reading experience, you’ll want something that is a beautiful object in it’s own right that has extras, that has maybe artist notes or writers’ notes, backup material, is really nicely bound, is beautifully printed, so you know I can see those two kind of commodities diverging even further in the future.

Gibbons discusses his contribution to Watchmen in the nicely bound, beautifully printed book Watching the Watchmen.

Let the Medium Do the Work — Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich) on storytelling:

[I]t’s very important that what you do is specific to the medium in which you’re doing it, and that you utilise what is specific about that medium to do the work. And if you can’t think about why it should be done this way, then it doesn’t need to be done.

CRAZY – A wonderful interview with Maurice Sendak, author of Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen, in The Guardian:

“I’m totally crazy, I know that. I don’t say that to be a smartass, but I know that that’s the very essence of what makes my work good. And I know my work is good. Not everybody likes it, that’s fine. I don’t do it for everybody. Or anybody. I do it because I can’t not do it.” You can’t be that crazy, I say: you managed to stay in one relationship for half a century. “Yes! And he was – well. He was a man who loved music and reading. He never smoked and he died of lung cancer, utterly ridiculous. I had that friendship for a long, long time.”

And finally…

One Step Ahead of the Scrap Dealers — The Globe and Mail obituary for typographer and book designer Glenn Goluska who died of lung cancer on Aug. 13 in Montreal at the age of 64:

In the mid-1970s, Glenn Goluska was usually one step ahead of the scrap dealers.

The typographer and his buddies would be on the prowl in Toronto for cast-aside printing equipment. Specifically, they were picking up letterpress, its type made from carved wood or cast metal that left unique marks when smashed on to paper. The technique had stopped being economical for large printing outfits and had been on a 20-year decline, replaced by offset printing, which used a photographic process. This left all kinds of wood and metal cuts, linotype and letterpress machines available for a song.

For Goluska and his friends, here were historic pieces of art-making tools and all they needed to do was gather a few guys and find a truck with reliable suspension.

R. I. P.

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Published October 3, 2011

Monday Miscellany

I’m sorry for the lack of a weekend post, but to make up for it, here is a Monday round-up to get your week started right…

Owned — Josh Davis AKA DJ Shadow interviewed on the Intelligent Life blog:

My sense of value comes from the fact that music is my life… People always think it’s about money or my personal wealth or something like that. It’s about this art form that’s taken a drubbing in the last decade. I’m not talking about what a wonder it is that music has been democratised. Music between 1960 and 1970: how can you even chart that progress? Music between 1970 and 1980: entire genres come and go, massive leaps. Music between 2001 and 2011: I don’t think there’s a massive difference… We have access to all this music now and I’ve been hearing for 12 years what a miracle that’s going to be and how it’s going to revolutionise music. But I work in the clubs and I’m not seeing any evidence of this shift. People seem to think we own the internet as a collective brain-trust. We don’t own the internet. The internet is owned by the same people that own everything else. They make money from the advertising that you’re being shown as you look at somebody’s life’s work, and they’re not being given a dime.

You can listen DJ Shadow’s new album The Less You Know, The Better on NPR.

And on a semi-related note: Chuck Klosterman on music and nostalgia for Grantland.

The Idiot — Cartoonist Daniel Clowes interviewed at Flavorpill:

If I ever met a young cartoonist who is really amazing I would say just don’t do any interviews, don’t do any public appearances. Just remain a mystery. Because once you do one, then that becomes your opinion on record. Unless you get it exactly right that first time, you have to keep modifying it over the years, because I’m certainly not the same person I was when I did my first interview. I was probably 26 years old. I was an idiot.

Playing the Part — Grant Morrison’s Supergods reviewed at Robot 6:

[M]any creators Morrison discusses are his peers, rivals, colleagues and bosses — it’s nice to get a book like this that’s unafraid to engage in industry gossip from a working creator, but, at the same time, it makes one suspicious of the writer, who becomes an unreliable narrator of his own career. This is perhaps exacerbated by the fact that early on in the book, Morrison says he was acting a part, an invented persona as a sort of demonic, enfant terrible punk early in his career, publicly sneering at Alan Moore’s work and engendering animosity. How does a reader know he’s not still playing a part?

And finally…

From Business Week: Amazon, the company that ate the world:

Although the decision to design and build its own hardware is a high-stakes bet, it’s equally true that Bezos had no choice but to enter the tablet business. About 40 percent of Amazon’s revenues comes from media—books, music, and movies—and those formats are rapidly going digital. Amazon was late to understand the speed of that transition; Apple, which launched the iPod in 2001 and iTunes two years later, wasn’t. The iPad has only strengthened Apple’s hold over digital media. There’s a Kindle app for the iPad, but Apple takes a 30 percent slice of all content that app makers sell on the tablet and has restricted Amazon from directing iPad users to its website in order to avoid giving Apple its cut. Doing business on the iPad threatens Amazon’s already thin profit margins.

Bezos claims he doesn’t think defensively. “Everything we do is driven by seeing opportunity rather than being worried about defending,” he says. Given Apple’s inroads into the media business, that’s hard to believe. Bezos is magnanimous toward Jobs. “On a personal level we have a tremendous amount of respect for Apple and Steve. I think that’s returned,” he says. “Our cultures start in the same place. Both companies like to invent, both companies like to pioneer, both companies start with the customer and work backwards. There’s a like-mindedness.” Pause. “Are two companies like Amazon and Apple occasionally going to step on each others toes? Yes.”

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Published September 23, 2011

Something for the Weekend

Peirene Press is small independent publisher in the UK specializing in previously untranslated contemporary European novellas. Their most recent series of books, designed by Sacha Davison Lunt, has been short-listed for the 2011 British Book Design and Production Awards in the Brand/Series Identity category.

Txt — Thomas Jones looks back at the work of author William Gibson at The Guardian:

The most striking feature of cyberspace in Neuromancer, however, the most radical way in which it differs from the modern internet, is its textlessness. Case is, or may as well be, illiterate: his skills as a cyberspace “cowboy” don’t depend on being able to read. He wouldn’t get very far as a hacker these days. The internet, as we now know it, even in the era of YouTube and podcasts, is still heavily text-based and text-dependent. Tweeting not only looks about as low-tech as you can get, it’s also all about language.

One Way or Another — Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud talk about the film adaptation of Chicken with Plums with New York Magazine:

When you draw, you don’t have any limits; it kind of transforms our brain. Also, we had not [gone to] any cinema school, so we don’t have these techniques. Like when we started the project they were telling us things like, “Voice-over? Nobody does that any more” and “Cross-dissolve is out.” This notion of “out” and “in,” it depends on what you are saying. You don’t have one way of doing things.

Also at New York Magazine, Scott Snyder talks about the Batman #1 relaunch and rewriting Batman:

Gotham is almost a nightmare generator, filled with villains that seem to represent an extension of Batman’s greatest fears. A lot of his greatest villains feel like mirrors: the Joker is who Batman would be if he broke his rule and fell into madness; Two Face is a mockery of the duality of his life. But what I love about Bruce in particular, and the reason I’m so excited to be doing Batman, is he’s a superhero that has no powers. He takes it upon himself to go out every night, punish himself, and be the best out there. To me, that is both incredibly heroic and exciting, but also really pathological and obsessive.

Related: Scott Snyder interviewed about the same (but at greater nerdiness) at The Huffington Post.

And finally…

Here’s a short documentary about the making of the Vitsœ shelving system, originally designed by Dieter Rams in 1960 and still going strong:

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Published September 22, 2011

“Why comics? Why mice? Why the Holocaust?”

Cartoonist Art Spiegelman talks about his new book MetaMaus:

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Published September 7, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Book designer and all-round good chap David Pearson on phillumeny at We Made This:

It’s no coincidence that a book designer should be drawn to matchbox labels. Their shape is intrinsically book-like, their method of communication instantaneous and spare, and they provide a dizzying range of illustrative styles. Their uncluttered compositions ensure communication across language barriers, and designs appear cohesive as a result of type and image being rendered by the same hand. But perhaps most alluring of all is their uncompromised clarity of purpose, an attribute that most modern designers can only dream about.

You can see more of David’s ephemera collection on Flickr, there’s another amazing collection of match-box covers here.

An Invisible Rightness — Six graphic designers, including Derek Birdsall and Peter Saville, discuss designers they admire in The Guardian.

A Repurposeful Life — Author William Gibson on cities and fiction in The Scientific American:

Necessity being one of invention’s many mothers, I have a certain faith in our ability to repurpose almost anything, provided it becomes sufficiently necessary. Then again, I suspect we’ve abandoned cities in the past because they were too thoroughly built to do some specific something that’s no longer required.

Let Us Tweet! — An epic-length rant by Jared Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget, at Edge:

I’m astonished at how readily a great many people I know, young people, have accepted a reduced economic prospect and limited freedoms in any substantial sense, and basically traded them for being able to screw around online… What that leads to is the world that Wells and Kurt Vonnegut and many others wrote about, where there just is enough virtual bread and circuses, just barely enough to keep the poor in check, and perhaps somehow not breeding, and they just kind of either wither away through attrition or something.

The A.V. Club offer a nice primer on newspaper comics.

Meanwhile… Robot 6 lists six great superhero comics from unlikely sources.

And finally…

An Act of Vengeance Against Former Pleasures — The Comics Journal reviews The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1969, neatly summing up my own reservations about the direction of the series:

What’s disconcerting about 1969 is how joyless the exercise has become, and how wan and stretched the story feels. Like its predecessor…, 1969 comes off as glum and a bit rancid. It feels like the story of characters who have outlived their time, which may indeed be the point… I don’t need to itemize the various bits of cleverness in 1969, or to point out the screamingly obvious, that 1969 is more intelligent and insinuating than most comic books. It is, after all, a book by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. But the taste of it sits like battery acid on the tongue, and, like 1910 before it, it reads like an act of vengeance against former pleasures.

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Published August 31, 2011

Midweek Miscellany


Nick Hornby on book cover design at We Made This:

[I]ncreasingly the big retailers, Amazon and the supermarkets, have a say in how a book looks before publication, if the book in question has serious commercial prospects. I don’t really know what to say about that, apart from observing that the people who sell books in supermarkets have different tastes from my own. I am at liberty to object to the covers on my novels, if I really hate them, but my publishers would then, I think, be entitled to ask me to take a lower advance, if I care about aesthetics so much. The days of the iconic jacket illustration, the image that forever becomes associated with a much-loved novel, are nearly gone. The stakes are too high now.

(pictured above, the cover for the Penguin Ink edition of High Fidelity by a tattooist Russ Abbott)

George Pelecanos chooses a music playlist for his new book, The Cut, at Largehearted Boy.

Brian Doherty reviews three books on comics history for the LA Review of Books.

And finally…

Longing for the Little Bookstore — Ann Patchett, author of State of Wonder, on bugs, book tours and bookstores, for the New York Times:

With the demise of the Borders chain and the shaky footing of Barnes and Noble, one might be tempted to write off the whole business. But as one who spent her summer on a book tour, I would like to offer this firsthand report from the front lines: Americans are still reading books. Night after night after night I showed up in a different bookstore and people were there with their hardbacks. Sure, I signed a couple of iPad covers, Kindle covers. I’ve got no problem with that. But just because some people like their e-readers doesn’t mean we should sweep all the remaining paperbacks in a pile and strike a match. Maybe bookstores are no longer 30,000 square feet, but they are selling books.

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