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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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Published January 11, 2013

Something for the Weekend

Flavorwire asked a number of prominent designers — including Coralie Bickford-Smith, John Gall, Peter Mendelsund and Barbara deWilde —  to choose their favourite book covers designs from the previous year. I feel a slight tinge of regret that the cover for R.J. Palacio’s Wonder designed by Tad Carpenter didn’t make it on to my list…

Mind-Boggling — Tom Spurgeon interviews Sean Howe, author of Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, at The Comics Reporter:

I worried that it would seem like the world’s longest wikipedia entry. There were so many things I wanted to include. I had a very good sense of what the narrative arc was. There’s a rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall structure here. If I were writing a play, I’d be failing miserably. But you can’t allay that stuff, you can’t recraft the narrative, without fictionalizing it. Having to get into everything that was going on as Marvel was commercially ascending, like in the early 1980s, I guess that I felt a responsibility to not over-summarize. I constantly worried that I was reciting too many facts as I went. Then I hear from people who are like, “Wow, that was a quick read. I wish you’d done more descriptions.”… Which boggles my mind.

From Psychopaths Lairs to Superhero Mansions — Charlotte Neilson on modern architecture in film, at ArchDaily:

We all know that psychopaths prefer contemporary design. Hollywood has told us so for decades. From the minimal lairs of Bond adversaries to the cold homes of dysfunctional families, modernist interiors scream emotional detachment and warped perspectives.The classic film connection between modern buildings and subversive values is well documented and, for the architectural community, quite regrettable. The modernist philosophy of getting to the essence of a building was intended to be liberating and enriching for the lives of occupants. Hardly fair then that these buildings are routinely portrayed with villainous associations.

And finally…

A (very) long review of Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life by Artur Domosławski at Dissent magazine:

Kapuściński’s genius was his dissection of comportments, his insight into politics that derived from conversations and observations of regular people. Clearly, his books were something other than traditional journalism, and he never claimed otherwise. Indeed, he was acclaimed in both Poland and the West precisely for offering a new kind of journalism. Domosławski relates the various criticisms, but suggests that the Catalan critic Luis Albert Chillón probably had it best when he wrote of Kapuściński creating a “formerly unknown symbiosis” combining “the information-gathering techniques that belong to investigative journalism, the art of observation that is typical of reportage, and a quest for a kind of poetic truth, which through a narrative mode that is closer to myths, legends and folk tales than to realistic novels, transcends the boundaries inherent in simple documentary truth.”

 

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Published December 8, 2012

Something for the Weekend

Down the River — An interview with Sean Howe, author of Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, at The Phoenix:

Marvel is this narrative tapestry that all of these people have worked on and passed on. It’s sort of like television soap operas, but there’s something about that creative ownership that somebody has that’s not lasting, and the proprietary feeling that they have when something that they are a collaborator on doesn’t belong to them at all. It’s due to the way that Marvel ’s storytelling worked — Marvel Comics was this river that rushed by all these people, and they would throw their ideas into this river, and the river would just keep going on without them, it was bigger than any of them. And I think that Marvel is just an extreme example of that kind of thing which exists in the comic book industry.

See also: Sean Howe interviewed at Publishers Weekly; a review of the book at the A.V. Club; and for the (even) nerdier among you, a more critical review at The Hooded Utilitarian.

And on a semi-related note… Chris Ware interviewed by Tavi Gevinson for Rookie Magazine. It’s a little different from all the other interviews I’ve read with Ware recently:

Our memories are all we have, and even those we think of as “real” are made up. Art can condense experience into something greater than reality, and it can also give us permission to do or think certain things that otherwise we’ve avoided or felt ashamed of. The imagination is where reality lives; it’s the instant lie of backwash from the prow of that boat that we think of as cutting the present moment, everything following it becoming less and less “factual” but no less real than what we think of as having actually occurred.

Dead Comrades — D. J. Taylor on the writer Julian Mclaren-Ross, for The Guardian:

In strict category terms, the author of Bitten by the Tarantula (Maclaren-Ross’s titles nearly always leap up at you from the library catalogue) is a classic English literary bohemian in a tradition that goes back at least as far as Marlowe: one of those people who really do live their lives out of suitcases, whose books are ground out in a procession of rented rooms with the landlord’s boots resounding on the carpetless stair and whose best work appears in a brief window of opportunity before the milieu in which they operate rises up and drowns them. Certainly the form of Maclaren-Ross’s fiction seems intimately connected to the circumstances in which it was composed: written at night, Benzedrine tablets (“My pills”) to hand, in seedy west London hotels after a day spent bar-propping in the Soho drinking dens.

And finally…

Little Sun — Jon Gray on his cover design for The Yellow World by Albert Espinosa, at Design Week:

The brief was: ‘read this amazing book and please give it an interesting cover’. I’m really lucky in that Jim Stoddart, the art director, gave me pretty much free-reign.
.. I thought that there was something appealing in the big yellow ball. Rather like Olafur Eliasson’s giant sun at Tate Modern a few years back. It’s warming and comforting on the eye. I also thought it would stand out against other books and without type would make you want to pick it up and find out more.

(via Theo Inglis)

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