Books, Design and Culture
I really like Emily Carroll‘s online horror comics, so I’m really pleased that a collection of her work is going to be published by Simon & Schuster next July. Through the Woods will include comics like His Face All Red as well as some new, but similarly dark and folkloric, short stories Carroll has been working on.
(via Robot 6)
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Just in time for Halloween and clocks going back, Canadian artist Emily Carroll has posted a chilling new webcomic called Out of Skin. Although it can be read a standalone story, Carroll says on her blog that she considers it “part of a trilogy in terms of setting & theme” with her earlier comics His Face All Red and Margot’s Room, both of which are well worth reading if you haven’t doesn’t already.
Happy Halloween!
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Did you read the end of Emily Carroll’s gothic horror story Margot’s Room? She did say there would be blood. But holy shit… Amazing.
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I was really impressed by Emily Carroll’s Halloween comic His Face All Red last year, so I’m very much looking forward to reading Carroll’s new 5-part story Margot’s Room.
According to Carroll, the story will be updated every Friday until the end of October, with a new line of poetry providing a clue to the whereabouts of the next comic in the illustrated room. The first instalment ‘Flowers’ was posted last Friday (hint: click the flowers).
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Comic Unease — Cartoonist Emily Carroll talks about comics, fairy tales, dreams, and her story His Face All Red with The Comics Journal:
I think a lot of fairy tales have that sort of unease built into them, just because they introduce so many elements that they never explain, and use fairy tale logic—the kind that isn’t really logic at all, but has that matter-of-fact feel to it anyway—and the reader just has to roll with it.
Dark Matter — Author Lev Grossman on fan fiction for Time Magazine:
Fan fiction is what literature might look like if it were reinvented from scratch after a nuclear apocalypse by a band of brilliant pop-culture junkies trapped in a sealed bunker. They don’t do it for money. That’s not what it’s about. The writers write it and put it up online just for the satisfaction. They’re fans, but they’re not silent, couchbound consumers of media. The culture talks to them, and they talk back to the culture in its own language. Right now fan fiction is still the cultural equivalent of dark matter: it’s largely invisible to the mainstream, but at the same time, it’s unbelievably massive.
Grossman’s new novel The Magician King (the sequel to his 2009 novel The Magicians) is published next month.
Dysfunctional Spies — Author John Le Carré reflects on his time in MI6:
The creation of George Smiley, the retired spy recalled to hunt for… a high-ranking mole in Tinker, Tailor, was extremely personal. I borrowed elements of people I admired and invested them in this mythical character. I’m such a fluent, specious person now, but I was an extremely awkward fellow in those days. I also gave Smiley my social ineptitude, my lack of self-respect and my fumblings in love.
Because I came from a dysfunctional background, I made home the most dangerous place for Smiley. Home is where he lets himself in cautiously. Home is where he sees the shadow of his adulterous wife in the window and wonders who she’s with.
Pictured above is Matt Taylor’s incredible illustration for a new Penguin US edition of Le Carré’s novel Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy — more of that wonderful stuff to come — and a new film adaptation of the book, starring Gary Oldman as Smiley, is being released later this year:
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I loved last year’s spooky His Face All Red, and now cartoonist Emily Carroll has just posted a new, similarly atmospheric strip called The Prince & The Sea.
Carroll recently won the Joe Shuster Award for ‘Outstanding Webcomics Creator.’
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Nothing is Forgotten — A dark and beautiful wordless webcomic by Ryan Andrews (via Drawn).
And on the subject of comics, Kelly Thompson of the brilliantly named 1979 Semi-Finalist blog picks her top 20 favourite female comics creators of 2010, including Kate Beaton and Emily Carroll, for Comics Should Be Good: Part One and Part Two.
Most Anticipated… — The Millions list of interesting new books coming out in 2011 (not that I’ve caught up with 2010 yet).
The Best Fonts of 2010 as chosen by FontShop.
Wordmark — A handy online tool that allows you to preview and compare all the fonts installed on your computer (via Fontblog).
And lastly…
Critical Life — Ramona Koval interviews Gabriel Josipovici, author of What Ever Happened to Modernism?, for The Book Show on ABC Radio National. From the transcript:
[F]or all my writing life I felt one shouldn’t comment critically about one’s contemporaries, because in a way that is self-defeating. What one should do is praise the works one likes and gradually people will see their value. I suppose I was being unduly idealistic and I felt that I was only talking to the converted, as it were, and I wanted just for once to actually make people sit up a little more and to let out in print what I have said and talked about with friends, this feeling that English culture had become this thing that was rather mean and dispiriting, aided and abetted not just by…it wasn’t just something in the writers but it was something in the whole culture…
(via ReadySteadyBlog)
HAPPY NEW YEAR!
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A bit late in the day on this — it would have been a perfect post for Halloween — but Emily Carroll’s chilling short-story comic His Face All Red is still pretty darn great.
(via The Ephemerist)
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