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.”
Chisel Away
