An interview with Alison Bechdel, author of Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic and the 24-year-old comics series Dykes to Watch Out For.
Category: comics
Tom Edwards makes comics on ceramics/ panels on pottery.
I’m going to have to take a look at Matt Madden’s 99 Ways to Tell a Story: Exercises in Style. It’s a one-page comic told with 98 variations, inspired by Raymond Queneau‘s prose book by the same title. There are some sample pages on the book’s website.
This Godless Communism was a multi-issue comics series published by the Catholic Guild beginning in 1961. It even has a foreword by J. Edgar Hoover.
Kottke points to the audio and video for a talk that Chris Ware recently gave at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.
How to break in a new book. While McAuliflower had cookbooks in mind, this is also really helpful for speed reading when you want to minimize fussing with pages. [via not martha, again]
Here’s an archive of annotations for Neil Gaiman‘s Sandman comics. It fleshes out the character relationships, mythology, allusions, references, quotes, and other variety of minutia.
Comics with problems. A small collection of public service comics that deal with topics like AIDs, diabetes, drug abuse, etc.
Curses (review: 5/5)
I lucked out again. Curses is a delightful collection of comics by Kevin Huizenga. This collection fits in the “slice of life” category, but mixed with the occasional bout of the surreal, and thankfully free from most the angst and ennui that crept in some other comics I’ve read recently. My favorite of the stories was “Jeepers Jacobs,” with a sketch about a golfing theology professor who writes about Hell. A close second is “Not Sleeping Together,” about passing the time with one you love.
I love the artwork—Huizenga draws these clean, spare lines that still feel kind of loose and earthy, somehow. There’s some pretty incredible suburban skylines, even managing to make suburbia look kind of interesting. But the art is only half the battle, and the pictures and the words really work so well together here. I think part of it is Huizenga’s willingness to put a lot of text in his panels when he needs to. There’s no timidity about using a lot of block narration. And the silent panels are able carry their own weight.
I guess the best thing I can say is that I’d want to write comics like this. Well done!
Bonus: A few days ago Kevin Huizenga did a brief interview with Publisher’s Weekly.
Interview with comics genius Alan Moore on the BBC.
The New York Times has a good profile of comics writers Robert and Aline Crumb.
Here’s a great essay exploring the connections between comics, games, and world-building.
Perhaps when we find ourselves disturbed or bewildered by the popularity of a new genre or medium, itÄôs precisely by giving it that “serious consideration” that we will begin to get to grips with what it is and how it works. But how do we do this, when the new work often seems to have so little to do with our existing aesthetic criteria?
Austin Kleon has drawn up a cool mind map about comics and information design. Apparently he’ll be working on a thesis on some aspect of the relationship between the two. Cool.
Winsor McKay agrees to make four thousand pen drawings that will move. In this silent film from 1911, cartoonist Winsor McKay (of Little Nemo comics fame) demonstrates some of the first animation, AND it’s in color. The actual cartoon starts around the 7:30 mark. [via four color comics]
Marc Singer reviews the MOME Spring/Summer 2006 comics anthology, and riffs on the state of today’s independent comics: “When comics aspire to the stature of literature or art they have to succeed as literature or art, not as not superheroes.” There’s some great discussion there in the comments, where Kevin Huizenga and some others weigh in.
When I was at the Atlanta History Center on Monday for the exhibit of Martin Luther King’s papers, one particular item really caught my eye: Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, a comic book!! I wrote myself a note to look for it, and I’m glad I was able to track it down. [via bully says]
The Duke Center for the Study of the Public Domain made a comic book about Fair Use. Law professor James Boyle talked with NPR about it.
This website features extensive speculation on Batman’s religion, who is most likely a lapsed Catholic or Episcopalian. There are also features on other comics characters.
Mark Larson 