The New Yorker
New Yorker holds yet another cartoon contest
One of the cartoon entries
In addition to that neat Chris Ware strip in this week’s New Yorker magazine (I should note he did the cover too), the venerable magazine is holding a do-it-yourself cartoon contest. Using the cartoon kit provided on the Web site (using art by Alex Gregory), simply create as many gags as you like and send them in by Nov. 22. The top five winners will be featured in a slide show. Yeah, I know, that’s not much of a prize, but still, it beats a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, as my father used to say. Oh, if you register the kit (which you have to do anyway to use it) you’ll enter a sweepstakes to win a trip to New York City. Now that’s more like it.
Your video of the day | Mouly and Clowes talk covers
Clowes' New Yorker cover
Dan Clowes graces the cover of this week’s new Yorker, as seen above, and in the video below, he and New Yorker Art Editor Francoise Mouly, along with several other contributing artists, talk about how the image came to be. (found via D&Q)
Bob Mankoff thinks big
Thinking Big With Robert Mankoff is a series of video interviews with the New Yorker Cartoon Editor in which he talks about the role and history of humor in society. In the one below he talks about how he became a cartoonist and what makes things funny. (found via Drawn)
New Yorker drops more Genesis project tidbits
Dig those unfinished pages man
The New Yorker, or at least its Web site, has quickly become the go-to place for those eager to learn about Robert Crumb’s upcoming and much-anticipated adaptation of the Book of Genesis. Blogger Leigh Stein’s latest revelation comes courtesy of Crumb neighbor and fellow artist Peter Poplanski, who talks about how he helped Crumb do research for the book by taking photos of Biblical-themed movies:
“Robert would go over and over the costume folds, how the robes fit, the drapery. Once you know the gravity of fabric, you also have to light it, so the fabric has weight,” Poplaski said.
He scoured flea markets and discount bins for copies of Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments” (1923 and 1956), William Wyler’s “Ben Hur” (1959), and a made for TV Samson and Delilah starring Dennis Hopper as a Philistine general. He also turned to some less predictable Hollywood sources—Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Sheltering Sky” (1990), Martin Scorsese’s “The Last Temptation of Christ” (1998), and Stephen Sommers’s “The Mummy “(1999) and “The Mummy Returns” (2001).
Update: I haven’t gotten my copy yet, but apparently the latest issue of the New Yorker contains an 11-page excerpt from the book. So be sure to run out to your local newsstand dealer post-haste.
Dan Clowes does New Yorker cover, drops hints on next book
Dan Clowes' New Yorker cover
In addition to providing a fantastic cover to this week’s issue of the New Yorker, Dan Clowes also gave Leigh Stein the briefest of hints about the graphic novel he’s currently working on:
“I don’t even have a title for it yet,” he told me, but hinted that the plot concerned “a guy whose father dies, and he’s completely alone, so he tries to reconstruct what he’s lost, to approximate a nuclear family by joining people together.” Each page of the book is an individual scene, a joke on the format of a Sunday cartoon strip, but cumulatively the scenes create a larger narrative that turns from comic to tragic.
If that doesn’t whet your appetite enough, Stein also posted a slide show of preliminary sketches from the upcoming book.