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Tag: marjane satrapi

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 21, 2011

Marjane Satrapi | Ideas

Iranian cartoonist and filmmaker Marjane Satrapi, best known for her memoir Persepolis, talks to CBC Radio’s Eleanor Wachtel about her life, her work and a new film adaptation of her book Chicken with Plums:

CBC Radio Ideas: Wachtel on the Arts with Marjane Satrapi

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Published June 17, 2011

Something for the Weekend

Simplicity and Economy — Mike Dempsey profiles Keith Cunningham, who designed book covers for Peter Owen, for the Foyles bookshop blog:

A tight discipline can galvanise a creative designer’s mind and Cunningham rose to the occasion with his very first cover for Peter Owen.

This sparse graphic approach was to become the visual hallmark of Peter Owen covers in the 60s and 70s. Over a relatively short period Cunningham quickly created a highly individual ‘brand’ (before the term was used) via the houses jackets distinguished by their utter simplicity and economy.

There is a much longer profile of Cunningham on Dempsey’s own (and excellent) blog Graphic Journey.

Movement and Sound — Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis, offers advice on how to film comics:

Animation and comics are false siblings. They resemble one another but they’re two completely different things. The relationship a reader has with a comic is nothing like the one a viewer has with a film. When you read a comic, you’re always active, because you have to imagine all the movements that happen between the frames. In a film, you are passive: all the information is there. And when you make a comic it never happens that you have 500 or 1,000 people reading it in the same place at the same time, all reacting. The language of cinema and comics is different, even though they both use images. In comics, you write with images; they’re like pictograms. And in a movie you think about movement and sound and music, all those things that are not considerations when making comics.

Cutting to the Chase — Alan Moore discusses his new novel Jerusalem with Helen Lewis Hasteley of The New Statesman:

[W]hile his first prose novel, Voice of the Fire (published in the mid-1990s), took 300 pages to cover the county of Northamptonshire, Jerusalem uses 750,000 words to explore an area of Northampton about half a square mile across. “So the next one will be several million words and it’ll just be about this end of the living room.”

Moore says he hopes never to write anything as long as Jerusalem again but he won’t countenance scaling it back. “Any editor worth their salt would tell me to cut two-thirds of this book but that’s not going to happen. I doubt that Herman Melville had an editor — if he had, that editor would have told him to get rid of all that boring stuff about whaling: ‘Cut to the chase, Herman.'”

And finally…

Manual Labour — Peter Foge profiles philosopher Simone Weil, who work for a time in a steel plant and died of self-induced starvation in wartime London, for Lapham’s Quarterly:

Part philosopher, part activist, part mystic, Weil is almost impossible to classify. A youthful Marxist who abandoned the faith in favor of liberal pluralism. A lover of all things ancient Greek who equated the Roman Empire with Nazi Germany and Hitler with Caesa, she was a mass of contradictions. Yet her reputation has grown over time as one of the most original and uncomfortable thinkers of the twentieth century. T.S. Eliot, a great admirer, considered her “a woman of genius, a kind of genius akin to that of the saints.” “A genius,” added one of her many anthologists, “of immense revolutionary range.”

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