Following on from my post yesterday, Joe Sacco talks about his new book The Great War with Michael Silverblatt on Bookworm:
KCRW Bookworm: Joe Sacco The Great War mp3
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Published December 20, 2013
Tag: joe sacco
Published December 19, 2013
Joe Sacco and Journalism
In this bonus footage from the W.W. Norton’s documentary short on The Great War, Joe Sacco explains his relationship to journalism:
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Published December 3, 2013
Joe Sacco: Putting the Reader in the Picture
Cartoonist Joe Sacco discusses his new illustration/book The Great War in an interview at Salon:
Comments closedI think every medium has its strengths. But I think illustrated work puts the reader directly into a picture. You open up, let’s say, a comic book, and I’ve drawn a Palestinian refugee camp — you’re inside it, and with the multiple images, you’ll hopefully get an idea of the atmosphere. As a cartoonist, you’re concentrating on giving visual information — especially in the background — that can be conveyed by multiple images. And things follow the reader around. You know, the architecture will follow the reader from one panel to another, so it becomes part of the atmosphere that the reader is imbibing. With the written word, you can describe the architecture, but you’re not going to keep mentioning it as a figure is walking down the street, you’re not going to keep mentioning what the background is. With comics you can do that.
Published November 20, 2013
The Great War by Joe Sacco
Joe Sacco talks to The New Yorker about his new accordion book The Great War, which folds out to create a twenty-four-foot-long panorama of the Battle of the Somme:
When we first talked about my drawing a panorama of the Western front, the idea seemed static. But immediately I thought of the Bayeux Tapestry… which has a narrative. William the Conqueror in France is getting ready for the invasion; they’re building the boats; they’re crossing the English Channel; then there’s the Battle of Hastings, and you basically read it left to right. It just came to my mind that I could show soldiers marching up to the front, going to the trenches, going over the top, and then returning after they’ve been wounded, back through the lines to the casualty-clearing station behind the front. So it seemed like a very simple idea, and to be honest, I just wanted to draw. On a visceral level, it was just a pleasure to think only in terms of drawing.
It was a relief not to think about words, and to do a different kind of research. I did a lot of image research and I actually had to read a lot of books, because sometimes prose takes you where photography never went. I would read and get images in my head, and it was just a matter of putting them down. I’ve spent a lot of time doing journalism, and I still am interested in it, but I think the artist side of me wants to sort of come out now. And that’s what the Great War was to me, letting myself go in that direction.
Sacco talks more about the work in this video for publisher W. W. Norton:
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Published December 10, 2010
Something for the Weekend
Past and Present — An excerpt from Born Modern: The Life and Design of Alvin Lustig by Steve Heller and Elaine Lustig Cohen at Design Observer*:
Lustig’s designs fluidly shift from past to present. For his early “experimental” work he built upon an armature of old technologies… and techniques…, which evolved through new technologies… into unprecedented styles… Toward the end of his life, his typography turned into a playful amalgam of vintage letters composed in contemporary layouts with vibrant colors. In “Personal Notes,” he wrote, “As we become more mature we will learn to master the interplay between past and present and not be so self-conscious of our rejection or acceptance of tradition. We will not make the mistake that both rigid modernists and conservatives make, of confusing the quality of form with the specific forms themselves.”
The Authentic — Chuck Klosterman, author most recently of Eating the Dinosaur, profiles Jonathan F., author of Freedom, for GQ Magazine:
It’s a present-day problem: There’s just no escaping the larger, omnipresent puzzle of “reality.” Even when people read fiction, they want to know what’s real. But this, it seems, is not Franzen’s concern. He disintegrates the issue with one sentence.
“Here’s the thing about inauthentic people,” he says on the train, speaking in the abstract. “Inauthentic people are obsessed with authenticity.”
Telling Stories — Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, on interactive storytelling:
The ability to write communally and interactively with computers is nothing new… Digital tools for collaborative writing date back twenty or thirty years. And yet interactive storytelling has never taken off. The hypertext novel in particular turned out to be a total flop. When we read stories, we still read ones written by authors. The reason for the failure of interactive storytelling has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with stories.
Footnotes — Part one of a long interview with journalist and cartoonist Joe Sacco, author most recently of the remarkable Footnotes in Gaza, at Art Threat (via Drawn):
[T]he biggest influence on me journalistically speaking has been George Orwell. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the book Road to Wigan Pier, but Orwell spent time in the industrial areas of Britain during the depression and took a room with a miner, lived with miners. He went down into the mine shaft with the miners. His ability to go to these places and really look at things from a ground level, that was impressive to me. And for other reasons too: because he was so dedicated to his work, and he felt that his work was sort of bigger than himself as a human being. I appreciated that dedication.
Part two will run on Monday apparently…
And finally… Superhero WikiLeaks:
(Thanks Shawn)
*Born Modern is published by Chronicle Books and is distributed in Canada by my employer Raincoast Books.
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Published July 21, 2010
Midweek Miscellany
Finding a Cover for The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo — A WSJ article and slideshow on the cover design process for the bestselling novel by Steig Larsson:
For three months, Peter Mendelsund, a senior designer at Knopf, prepared nearly 50 distinct designs… Mr. [Sonny] Mehta ultimately endorsed the vivid yellow jacket with the swirling dragon design: “It was striking and it was different.”
Peter Mendelsund has some further thoughts about the cover, Wittgenstein, David Foster Wallace, and design in a great post on his blog JACKET MECHANICAL:
Due to many factors (the mechanisms of the approval process; design’s fundamentally commercial aspects…) when one examines the field of design, one cannot help but come to the conclusion that good design must be, above all, likeable.
Design is too intimately entangled with matters of taste (to use Wittgenstein’s word) to be demanding enough to be Art. I have to say that in my years in the field, I’ve yet to be made to cry by a work of design. I’ve yet to be forced to view the world differently due to a work of design. I’ve yet to be really, truly gripped by a work of design. I know it’s deeply self-defeating to say this, yet, the best design has only ever evoked in me the feeling of “that’s cool.”
And on the subject of book cover design…
Creative Problem Solving — Macmillan Designers and art directors Susan Mitchell, Charlotte Strick, and Henry Sene Yee discuss the state of book cover design at FSG‘s new Work in Progress blog:
We’re interpreting or packaging other people’s ideas. If someone gives me a manuscript, I interpret it. That’s problem solving… I’m not just here to create something beautiful. Sometimes I’m here to be a plumber. I love that aspect—I can fix things. I’ll make it balance, whatever it is.
Still Reading? — Patrick Kingsley on the art of slow reading for The Guardian:
Still reading? You’re probably in a dwindling minority. But no matter: a literary revolution is at hand. First we had slow food, then slow travel. Now, those campaigns are joined by a slow-reading movement – a disparate bunch of academics and intellectuals who want us to take our time while reading, and re-reading. They ask us to switch off our computers every so often and rediscover both the joy of personal engagement with physical texts, and the ability to process them fully.
Also in The Guardian…
Unwanted — A 12-page comic strip tale of unwanted immigrants by Joe Sacco, author of Safe Area Gorazde, Footnotes in Gaza, and Palestine…
…And on a not unrelated note: Publishing Perspectives looks at comics and graphic novels in the Middle East and how they are pushing at cultural boundaries.
And finally…
Bob Stein of The Institute for the Future of the Book interviewed by On The Media:
The western version of the printing press is invented in 1454. It takes 50 years for page numbers to emerge. It took humans that long to figure out that it might be useful to put numbers onto the pages.
What is slightly curious about this interview is that Stein acknowledges the essentially unpredictable messiness of the future, and yet it doesn’t seem to stop him…
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Published December 4, 2009
Something for the Weekend
Gosh! — Limited edition Footnotes in Gaza bookplate by Joe Sacco for Gosh! Comics in London (seen at The Ephemerist).
There is also an interesting interview with Joe Sacco about his new book on the BBC World Service’s The Strand.
How To Be An Artist — Criterion designer Eric Skillman discusses his design process for Eddie Campbell‘s Alec: The Years Have Pants published by TopShelf.
And Eddie Campbell is interviewed by USA Today about the book.
Imaginary Worlds — PW Comics Week talks to Helen McCarthy, author of The Art of Osamu Tezuka: God of Manga:
I don’t know if it’s his themes that make his work timeless, so much as his breadth of interest. He was interested in everything and everyone that lives. He gives every character in his works the respect of allowing them to exist as real individuals; whether they’re likeable or not, they’re real. I think that’s the quality that makes animation director Hayao Miyazaki resemble him most strongly, that insistence that nobody is a stereotype or a cipher, that everybody has equal validity whether they’re a ‘nice’ person or not. Personally, I love his approach to women. He treats them exactly like normal human beings, and so few writers really do that, even in these allegedly liberated times.
There is also a short interview with the author in the WSJ.
Is Publishing Dead? (PDF) — An good interview with Sarah Nelson, former editor-in-chief at PW and now book director for O, The Oprah Magazine, from the 2009 PubWest Conference (via GalleyCat):
I don’t think that digital, per se, is the culprit. I don’t even think that Google, per se, is the culprit. I think that there are a lot of people in publishing who look to those things, to Google, to eBooks, to Amazon and say that they are the devil, and they are killing our business. I think it’s not that simple. I think that publishers need to think about the business model in which they operate and to give advances – and… it’s less true of the small and medium sized publishers, and for that reason, they’re in better shape than some of the big guys – but when you’re giving several million dollar advances on books, you are destined to lose money. And that is only going to become more true if more books are read digitally, because the amount of money you’re going to make on a digital book is a lot less than the amount of money you’re going to make on hardcover.
Judging 2009 by its Cover — Amazon (somewhat ripping our friend at The BDR) have started a Best Book Cover of the Year poll. Please vote for something worthy.
And, as you’ve no doubt seen, Ben has chosen his top 10 covers of the decade at the Book Cover Archive Blog.
And last (but by no means least)…
Advent Books — Crazy Sean Cranbury of Books on the Radio, and Book Madam Julie Wilson have a Christmas book project:
The idea behind it is simple: authors, publishing professionals, bloggers, and booksellers will write short enthusiastic recommendations of their favorite books that have been published in the last year. We’ll publish a few of these every day, including pics and links for the books… It’s what we’re calling the Digital Handsell 3.0. Just in time for the Holiday Season.
I don’t think my selection will come as surprise to anyone who reads this blog regularly, but apparently it’s controversial.
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Published November 26, 2009
Midweek Miscellany (Paul Auster Edition), November 25th, 2009
The award-winning Folio Society edition of The New York Trilogy by Paul Auster and illustrated by Tom Burns has just about blown my mind. MUST. HAVE.
James Wood on the novels of Paul Auster in the The New Yorker:
Auster is a compelling storyteller, but his stories are assertions rather than persuasions. They declare themselves; they hound the next revelation. Because nothing is persuasively assembled, the inevitable postmodern disassembly leaves one largely untouched. (The disassembly is also grindingly explicit, spelled out in billboard-size type.) Presence fails to turn into significant absence, because presence was not present enough. This is the crevasse that divides Auster from novelists like José Saramago, or the Philip Roth of “The Ghost Writer.”
(Personally speaking I think I prefer Auster’s interesting awkward failures over the portentous bludgeon prose of Philip Roth, but that’s just me…)
And, if you haven’t had enough Auster for one post, he’s also interviewed in New York Magazine.
The Making of Fantastic Mr. Fox designed by Angus Hyland — New work from Pentagram for Rizzoli.
Covers from Cleethorpes — A brief, but funny, interview with designer David Pearson at It’s Nice That.
“We Like Lists Because We Don’t Want to Die” — Umberto Eco interviewed in Der Spiegel:
The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries.
An Innocent Abroad — Journalist and cartoonist Joe Sacco (Palestine, Safe Area Gorazde) interviewed about his new book Footnotes in Gaza in The Observer:
I’m a nondescript figure; on some level, I’m a cipher. The thing is: I don’t want to emote too much when I draw myself. The stories are about other people, not me. I’d rather emphasise their feelings. If I do show mine – let’s say I’m shaking [with fear] more than the people I’m with – it’s only ever to throw their situation into starker relief.
And on the speaking of comics…
Paul Gravett, author of multiple books on the art form, interviewed by Dazed & Confused:
I like the control I have when reading a comic. I’ve grown impatient and disenchanted with the tropes of a lot of movies and TV, their conventional angles and cuts, their manipulation through music, lighting, special effects and above all, the efforts of acting to make me emote. Comics struggle to make us feel anything at all… They often don’t work that brilliantly, but when they do, the impact of fixed, unephemeral, often hand-drawn images can really surprise me. It’s a primal, even primitive medium, as old as our first cave paintings, and it is still being invented and discovered.
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