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Tag: Comics

Published April 9, 2018

Grown Men Reading Nancy

Writing for the New York Review Books, Dash Shaw reviews How To Read Nancy: The Elements of Comics in Three Easy Panels by Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden: 

Today, comics are studied in colleges and reviewed in prominent magazines, but they are often discussed either as vessels for urgent, personal stories or as objects filled with beautiful, unusual graphics. They are rarely discussed or reviewed for their “cartooning,” the particular panel-to-panel magic, the arrangement of elements that mysteriously combines reading and looking, and distinguishes why a comic like Nancy is masterful and others are not. Beautiful cartooning affects a comic the way a well-chosen word, arriving at the right time in a sentence, makes for good writing, or the way a room composed with the right combination of things in the exact right places is good interior design.

I don’t think it’s any secret that I love Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy. It is, as the review points out, a beautifully constructed comic strip. But it is more than that. It’s also genuinely warm, funny, and relatable. I see a bit of my kids in Nancy and Sluggo, I see a bit of myself too.

I that think Steven Heller kind of gets to it in this interview with co-author Paul Karasik: 

Nancy reminded me of someone close to me. In fact, she reminded me of me in a deeply existential way that cannot be explained properly in this brief column… In any case, whenever a collection of strips emerged, I’d scarf them up. They were gags but poignant. They were comic but deep. And Sluggo. How can you not love Sluggo? This was the world of comics where kids were the wise ones, the keepers of wisdom and truth. 

If you haven’t read any of the Nancy comic strips don’t start with How to Read Nancy (with all due respect to Karasik and Newgarden!), start with Nancy is Happy, the first volume of daily strips republished by Fantagraphics.  

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Published February 21, 2018

Questions from the Audience

 

By Tom Gauld for The Guardian, of course.

This has happened at pretty much every event I’ve ever attended at a book festival. 

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Published December 27, 2017

The Ghost of Future Book Sales

Tom Gauld for The Guardian.

Tom’s latest collection of cartoons, Baking With Kafka, is in stores now. 

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Published November 8, 2017

Memoir, Chapter 1

Oh, Batman.

(Zachary Kanin for The New Yorker). 

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Published September 29, 2017

It Is a Truth Universally Acknowledged…

Tom’s new book, Baking with Kafka, is now available in the UK from Canongate Books, and in the US and Canada from D+Q next month.

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Published September 21, 2017

No Offense!

Argentinian cartoonist Liniers celebrating Steven King’s birthday today:

(I think it roughly translates as “I’m reading a scary book. ‘It’ by Stephen King… It’s about a clown monster with pointed teeth that appears to a chil… No offense!”)

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Published September 15, 2017

Jeet Heer on Jack Kirby

At the New Republic, Jeet Heer looks back at the work of Jack Kirby, the cartoonist who shaped the Marvel Universe and remade popular culture: 

The superhero stories Kirby created or inspired have dominated American comic books for nearly 75 years and now hold almost oppressive sway over Hollywood. Kirby’s creations are front and center in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but his fingerprints are all over the DC Cinematic Universe too, where the master plot he created—the cosmic villain Darkseid invading earth—still looms large. It was Kirby who took the superhero genre away from its roots in 1930s vigilante stories and turned it into a canvas for galaxy-spanning space operas, a shift that not only changed comics but also prepared the way for the likes of the Star Wars franchise. Outside of comics, hints of Kirby pop up in unexpected places, such as the narrative approaches of Guillermo del Toro, Michael Chabon, and Jonathan Lethem.

If you walk down any city street, it’s hard to get more than fifty feet without coming across images that were created by Kirby or inflected by his work. Yet if you were to ask anyone in that same stretch if they had ever heard of Kirby, they’d probably say, “Who?” A century after his birth, he remains the unknown king.

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Published September 5, 2017

At Least She’s Reading

Another back to school appropriate comic, this time by J.A.K. (AKA Jason Adam Katzenstein) for The New Yorker: 

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Published August 28, 2017

A Cocoon Over There!

‘A Cocoon Over There!’ is a lovely cartoon about going back to school by Argentinian cartoonist Liniers for the New York Times Book Review:

Liniers has a new kids book out this fall from Toon Books called Goodnight, Planet.

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Published June 13, 2017

The Appointment

Tom Gauld takes a look at editing process for The Guardian. 

Tom’s recent comic ‘Editor’s Letter’ for the New York Times Magazine‘s ‘New York Stories‘ comic strip issue is also great: 

Tom illustrated a story by Andy Newman called View Finder, and provided other incidental illustrations and lettering for the magazine, but the cover was illustrated by Bill Bragg who also, you may remember, illustrated the cover of Welcome to Lagos by Chibundu Onuzo, published by Faber earlier this year.  

You can read more about the issue at Creative Review and It’s Nice That.

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Published May 16, 2017

Poets with Cellphones

Stephen Collins for The Guardian. 

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Published May 3, 2017

Put Your Faith in Comics

At The New Yorker, Jia Tolentino profiles G. Willow Wilson, the writer behind Ms. Marvel, a superhero who is (in her current incarnation) a teenage Muslim from Jersey City:

The première of “Ms. Marvel” sold more copies digitally than it did in print—a company first. Marvel doesn’t release digital-sales numbers, but piecemeal statistics have shown female characters performing especially well in digital formats. Traditionally, comic books are purchased in single, floppy issues at dedicated brick-and-mortar shops, but these can be intimidating spaces for novices: when I walked into Forbidden Planet in Manhattan, I found myself wishing for the ability to act like I belonged. Some readers may simply opt to buy collected issues in paperbacks at regular bookstores or, increasingly, to download e-books. There are now, Wilson suggested, two audiences for comic books, and many people in the industry “are loath to recognize that these two audiences might want two very different things out of the same series. They don’t shop in the same places, they don’t socially overlap, and their tastes might not overlap.”

The relationship between this divided landscape and the most recent Presidential election is not lost on her. At the coffee shop, as a barista cleared our plates, we talked about how the stakes of every identity-politics debate feel heightened since November—and also about new alliances that seem to be forming in the election’s wake. Wilson spoke with some astonishment about the fact that she could include a gay secondary character in “Ms. Marvel”—the blond, popular Zoe—and still have mothers and daughters show up to her readings in hijabs. “It’s funny. Those right-wing bloggers who said my work was part of some socialist-Muslim-homosexual attack on American values, they really created the thing they feared. There wasn’t a socialist-Muslim-homosexual alliance before, but there sure as fuck is one now, and I love it.”

I don’t read a lot of comics from Marvel (or DC for that matter) these days, but Ms. Marvel is truly a joy. 

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