indy comics
Everyone’s a Critic | A roundup of comic book reviews and thinkpieces
A panel from Simone Lia's Fluffy
Profile: Paul Gravett looks at the work of British cartoonist Simone Lia, whose comic Fluffy chronicles the relationship that grows between a man and a rabbit on a tour through Sicily. Gravett writes:
Lia spins together realistic emotional situations with fanciful, cartoonish playfulness, using diagrams of the thoughts cramming a character’s head, guest narrators like a cheery dust particle and a grouchy piece of dandruff, or “footage” of a little brain cell.
Theory: Shaun Huston discusses comics based on movie and television properties, and how they fit—or don’t fit—with the franchises they are based on:
For both writers and artists working on adaptations of movies and TV shows the challenge is to find a working space wherein one’s own sensibilities can be effectively meshed with the look and feel of the original text and into a book that works for readers. As [Douglas] Wolk implies, this may not be the highest or best expression of art and craft in comics, but doing it well is, in its own way, still an achievement, perhaps even more so because of the mixed reputation of such books.
Review: Kate Dacey writes a mixed review of the first volume of Library Wars: Love and War, a manga about “hot guys who hate censorship but like books, libraries, and butt-kicking women.”
Review: David Brothers has four reasons why he likes Heralds #1—and you should, too!
Advocacy: Ben Morse feels that Young Justice: Sins of Youth has been sadly underrated and unjustly overlooked, so he takes the opportunity to discuss just why it’s so great.
Review: Oliver Ho reads Taiyo Matsumoto’s GoGo Monster, a coming-of-age story that takes a walk on the weird side.
Review: I know that reviews of Daniel Clowes’s Wilson are a dime a dozen, but Michael Buntag’s review sums it all up nicely, so if you don’t have time to read them all, read his.
- June 8, 2010 @ 12:00 PM by Brigid Alverson
Everyone’s a Critic | A roundup of comic book reviews and thinkpieces
The consequences of wearing a metal suit (from Windell's Superhero Showcase)
Review: Richard Bruton on Windell’s Superhero Showcase, which “mercilessly takes the superhero ideal out the back and kicks it in the face a few times.”
Advice: Erica Friedman discusses condescending comics, using Tantric Stripfighter Trina and Executive Assistant Iris as exhibits A and B:
It can be argued that publishers only publish what sells, which is exactly why I chose these two specific series. I can pretty much *guarantee* than neither of them sold all that well, if at all. And, instead of investing in something groundbreaking, or heck, something marginally less sad, the publisher said that they approved of this utter crap. I’m all for having comic company execs walk around with signs that say, “Why yes, we ARE condescending assholes.”
She has plenty to say about fans and creators as well. When Erica gets on a roll, she takes no prisoners.
Art critique: Frank Santoro shows some panels from Jonah Hex to demonstrate how photo-referencing is killing comics art.
Review: How do I love thee, Wally Gropius? Ken Parille counts the ways.
Contrast: Sean Kleefeld reviews Jeff Parker and Steve Lieber’s Underground, and he notes that this very (visually) dark book is drawn with a wide-open format, where Lieber’s earlier Whiteout, which is set in Antarctica, has much smaller panels (the opposite of what one might expect). Bonus reading: Kleefeld is temporarily thrown by some curvy women in Dynagirl.
Review: Matthew J. Brady finds Curio Cabinet utterly incomprehensible, and he’s not afraid to say so.
Reality check: Bob Temuka points out that punching people in the head and knocking them out is really quite dangerous. Why haven’t they done a Law & Order about this?
Review: Kristy Valenti takes a dim view of the graphic-novel adaptation of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.
- June 4, 2010 @ 09:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Everyone’s a Critic | A roundup of comic book reviews and thinkpieces
To Terra
Philosophy: Ed Sizemore writes about the deeper meaning of Keiko Takemiya’s classic sci-fi manga To Terra:
Takemiya’s real concern is the same as the ancient Greek playwrights. She is writing to combat hubris, or extreme arrogance. It’s a belief there are no limits to one’s actions and a failure to recognize there are boundaries to life, which if violated will result in one’s destruction. In the old Greek tragedies, hubris was the downfall of the protagonist. The gods swiftly punished those that dared violated divine law or dared to imagine themselves as equal to the gods. Takemiya isn’t worried about divine law, but natural law. She is writing to warn us against the belief that we can become masters of nature and ourselves.
Review: Christopher Allen reviews Tim Hensley’s Wally Gropius, which mimics the style of Harvey comics and relies on a lot of sight gags: “I think the way to approach the book is as a lavish, frequently funny, if superficial, joke.”
Review: Tucker Stone, on the other hand, immerses himself in Jim Woodring’s Weathercraft, which he finds anything but superficial.
Review: It’s good news for readers when Chris Sims hates a book, because it gives him an excuse to perform one of his trademark vivisections, as with this takedown of Justice League: The Rise of Arsenal #3.
Auteurs: You know, there’s something awesome about reading a critique of The Wizard of Id in French. Loleck analyzes the humor of the long-running strip at du9.
- June 3, 2010 @ 11:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Everyone’s a Critic | A roundup of comic book reviews and thinkpieces
M.K. Reed's Cross Country
Indy comics: Johanna Draper Carlson reviews a handful of self-published comics at Comics Worth Reading.
History: Jason Thompson takes a look at the early days of manga publishing and the creator Ippongi Bang, who drew rebel manga and liked a good party, too.
Quickies: Top Shelf recently brought over not one but four Swedish graphic novels. Not sure where to start? Rick Marshall has quick looks at all four, ranked in his order of preference.
Art comix: Charles Hatfield is pleasantly mystified by Blaise Larmee’s Young Lions, a wispily drawn story about conceptual artists.
Previews: The reader is the winner every time when Paul Gravett plays the Previews game.
Review: Greg McElhatton reads the graphic novel version of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and concludes that you can stretch a joke too thin.
Politics: I don’t follow DC’s non-manga lines closely enough to be able to intelligently evaluate Rob McMonigal’s claim that the company is regressing into a white-male bastion, and I won’t go there with the Tea Party logic, but I’m including this link for discussion purposes. One could argue the opposite, that they kept CMX going long after they probably should have killed it, but I think that CMX, like Minx, could have been a success if anyone outside the immediate circle of editors had acted like they cared.
Criticism: Domingos Isabelinho launches his new column at The Hooded Utilitarian with some musings on criticsm, wondering, “What twisted mind picks up the scalpel after love?” and then puts Pierre Duba’s Racines under the microscope. Also at HU: Noah Berlatsky, ever the contrarian, turns in a rare negative review of Naoki Urasawa’s Monster.
- May 26, 2010 @ 11:00 AM by Brigid Alverson
Panter Pix from PCC
Poster for Panter's lecture
At Thought Balloonists, Charles Hatfield reports in on Gary Panter’s talk at Pasadena Community College last March, as part of their Artist in Residence series, and the exhibit of Panter’s paintings and prints that accompanied it. This is an image-heavy post with lots of photos of Panter and others (Mike Dooley, Matt Groening, Jaime Hernandez, Brian Tucker). Good times!
- May 17, 2010 @ 11:30 AM by Brigid Alverson
Doug Wright Awards announced
The cover of Lose #2, by Michael Deforge
The winners of this year’s Doug Wright Awards for best Canadian comics and creators working in English were announced at the Toronto Comics Art Festival last weekend. The Best Book award went to George Sprott, by Seth; the Best Emerging Talent award to Michael Deforge; and the Pigskin Peters award to Hot Potatoe, by Marc Bell. (That last is for “experimental and non-narrative efforts of Canadian cartoonists,” in case you were wondering. Pigskin Peters was a character created by cartoonist Jimmy Frise.)
The National Post provides a bit of context and notes that Martin Vaughn-James was also honored at the award ceremonies.
- May 10, 2010 @ 09:30 AM by Brigid Alverson
Make Mine MoCCA: Big pictures edition
James Sturm's Market Day
Indy comics publisher Drawn & Quarterly is bringing Adrian Tomine, Gabrielle Bell, R. Sikoryak and James Sturm to MoCCA, and all four will be doing panels and signings at the D&Q booth; check the publisher’s blog for the schedule.
- April 8, 2010 @ 09:30 AM by Brigid Alverson
Unbound: Checking out the Ignatz nominees
The major gag in George Herrimann’s Krazy Kat comic strip, which ran from 1913 to 1944, was Ignatz Mouse’s repeated attempts to clobber the title character with a brick.
I’m not sure why the Small Press Expo folks thought this Ignatz would be the best character to represent their indy-comics awards. Perhaps the organizers think of independent creators as lurking in the shadows, waiting to pelt the behemoths of the industry with bricks, or perhaps it was just getting late and everyone wanted to go home.
Anyway, the nominations for this year’s awards are out, and voting will be taking place at SPX, which is actually rather soon, so I figured this would be a good time to take a look at the nominees for Best Online Comic.
- September 1, 2009 @ 01:00 PM by Brigid Alverson