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Tag: jaime hernandez

Published September 13, 2022

Love and Rockets: The Story Behind the Great American Comic

A documentary on the Hernandez Brother’s groundbreaking alternative comic Love & Rockets will launch the new season of KCET’s art and culture series Artbound, streaming on the PBS app October 5, 2022.

Love & Rockets turns 40 this year, and if you have $400 USD burning a hole in your pocket, Fantagraphics are collecting together bound facsimiles of the original fifty issues in a special eight-volume boxed set. (Although I would settle for a slightly more affordable Love and Rockets #24 t-shirt myself!)

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Published December 1, 2010

Midweek Miscellany

I’m something of skeptic when it comes to Nick Hornby (to put it politely) but the “Ministry of Stories” is, despite its Orwellian moniker, clearly a well intentioned venture, and the design of its Hoxton Street Monster Supplies storefront by We Made This is pretty stellar.

There is more on the Ministry of Stories, which is based on David Eggers 826 project, at The Guardian.

Elsewhere…

Largehearted Boy is doing everyone a favour by aggregating every online “Best of 2010” book list he can find.

AND Design Observer’s contributing writers recommend books for the holidays. While The Bygone Bureau asks some stellar bloggers for their Best BLOGS of 2010.

The Daily Cross Hatch has a four-part interview with Love & Rockets cartoonist Jaime Hernandez:

There are teachers and there are doers—I’m a doer. I don’t know how this stuff happens, it just spills out of me, it’s that kind of thing.

After a while, I’ll think about it and say, “oh, that’s how I do it.” But I couldn’t stand in front of a class and tell them how to do it.

[part one] [part two] [part three] and [part four]

And finally…

A fantastic animated Batman short by Spanish illustrator Javier Olivares:

(via The Ephemerist)

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Published August 6, 2010

Something for the Weekend

Patrick Cramsie, author of The Story of Graphic Design, chooses his top 10 graphic design books for The Guardian. The list includes Notes on Book Design by Derek Birdsall.

Type Education — FontShop have released a handful of free typography primers designed for downloading and printing, including ‘Seven Rules for Better Typography’ by Erik Spiekermann.

Frost — Sifting through the Penguin archive in Bristol, writer Gaby Wood profiles the late Eunice Frost, who became an editor at Penguin in the 1930’s and went on to become its first female director, for The Telegraph:

Frost was sharp and, for all her youth and inexperience, in many ways more culturally engaged than the Lane brothers… It was to a large extent thanks to her that Penguin began to publish original work – not just reprinted fiction but the Pelican series of new non-fiction, and the Penguin ‘Specials’ series – quickly produced tracts on various subjects of urgent import. Three weeks after war was declared, for instance, Harold Nicolson was commissioned to write a 50,000-word book entitled Why Britain Is at War, which he delivered two weeks later and which was published a fortnight after that.

Secrets of Life and Death — Artist Jaime Hernandez, co-creator of Love & Rockets, and comics scholar Todd Hignite discuss their new book The Art of Jaime Hernandez with Eric J. Lawrence on KCRW.

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Published May 14, 2010

Something for the Weekend

David Drummond’s Parker Series for University of Chicago Press.

“a little bit Warhol, a little bit Factory Records” —  Christian Schwartz explains why he started type foundry Commercial Type at I Love Typography:

It’s much easier to be an “armchair quarterback,” second-guessing everyone else’s seemingly questionable decisions regarding everything… than it is to deal with the actual reality of budgets, technology, and timelines. Theorizing about how and why things work is all well and good, but putting our ideas into practice is of course the real test…

Typography and Judaica — Steven Heller interviews book designer and typographer Scott-Martin Kosofsky. Fascinating stuff:

It’s the best of times and the worst of times, but I have a feeling that people have always said that… In regard to print, I think we’re at a great moment, with access to mature technology and aesthetics… There’s no excuse for anything looking less than great. But books (and print in general) have lost their pride of place. Book publishers, a group nearly always behind the curve, have failed to grasp that their online counterparts spend a lot of time and money concentrating on User Experience, while they remain unfamiliar with the concept. It wasn’t always that way, but when the professionalism and discipline that was demanded by metal type fell away, things got worse and worse, especially typographically.

Punk — An interview with Jaime Hernandez about Love and Rockets and the recently published The Art of Jaime Hernandez at NYC Graphic:

“That’s how Love and Rockets started: we were just cocky and didn’t know we could fail. We went ahead and published the first one ourselves and didn’t care what the outcome would be, we just wanted to be printed. Hopefully we could sell it and make money, but there was no one to tell us not to. That was the punk part of it. The more we got good response, the more we kept doing it.”

And finally…

The Pollak Coffee Table Book seen at UnderConsideration’s FPO. Breathtakingly beautiful.

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Published August 26, 2009

Midweek Miscellany, August 26th, 2009

Black Jackets — The mighty Peter Mendelsund is giving away all of Osamu Tezuka’s Black Jack manga series in return for some assistance designing the next cover.

Take That! And That! And That! — Sony, having recently announced a pocket-sized reader and their switch to the ePub format, have now unveiled a new wireless electronic book reader with a 7-inch touch screen.

And on a related note, E-Reads tries to unpack some of the complex issues around Sony, ePub, and DRM.

Typedia — much linked to elsewhere (causing a severe strain on their servers earlier this week), Typedia is “a community website to classify typefaces and educate people about them.” I have no idea what I might use it for, but it looks pretty neat. You can also follow them on Twitter.

On the subject of typography, check out The Alphabetography Project, a photography blog cataloging found letters of the alphabet.

And hell, why not take a look June Corley’s charming typographic sculptures while you’re at it (via The Daily Heller and pictured below)…

Board — Also much linked to elsewhere, the New York Observer‘s Leon Neyfakh looks at three new hardcover books designed without dust jackets. It’s not exactly “the new thing” — more a case of the mainstream catching up with indies perhaps (and a light news day) — but there are still some interesting comments about book design:

Most of the publishers experimenting with jacketless hardcovers, including Viking, FSG, and Graywolf, are consciously taking their cues from the folks at McSweeney’s, who have been putting out beautiful books designed in this style for years. For Eli Horowitz, the managing editor at McSweeney’s, the method is a means of restoring some of the permanence and singularity to the book as object.

From the Design Desk — Designer Suzanne LaGasa talks about the cover design process at Chronicle Books.  (Full disclosure: Chronicle are distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books, my employer).

Big Comics — reviewsnthings asks notable comic artists, writers, publishers, editors and the like “what’s your opinion of the term ‘Graphic Novel’?” stirring up some interesting reactions. Here’s Leigh Walton, comics editor, and Top Shelf’s marketing coordinator, for example:

I find it intensely frustrating, in the sense that I can’t fully support it and I can’t fully dismiss it. Great minds have worked for ages to invent a better term, and they’ve failed. Its shortcomings are obvious — it’s based on a term, ‘novel,’ which has specific requirements of length and content, and it can never replace ‘comics’ as a general term for the medium… Yet ‘comic book’ was reserved ages ago for a format that isn’t really very booklike at all.

Mixtape — Robin McConnell is compiling cartoonists’ playlists for Inkstuds (the radio show about comic books), including Love and Rockets legend Jaime Hernandez.

And lastly, something for the fanboys to argue over: The Top 70 Most Iconic Marvel Comic Panels. (via LinkMachineGo)

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