Nate Patrin makes his Comics Journal debut this morning, with a review of the first issue of Brandon Graham and Emma Ríos's new comics anthology magazine, Island:
In the heady late-aughts days of Brandon Graham's WordPress blog Royal Boiler, he'd freely post sketch pages, previews of upcoming work (typically King City panels), and personal work anecdotes -- but he'd also act as a curator. Each post usually included a bunch of scans of comics he'd found in stores or somewhere online: old-school manga, bandes desinee, comics from the '80s black-and-white indie boom, or whatever high-profile recent releases caught his eye, all with his own personal notes on what he liked about the character design or line weight or background detail. Like Scorsese in film and Questlove in music, it seems like Graham's the kind of artist who seems as intent on preserving and advocating for his medium as he is in adding to it.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—Interviews. Phoebe Gloeckner talks to Vice.
But was it painful to write the book at all? Did you, at times, feel you had been victimized, either when you were going through "the situation" or afterwards?
I realize that as a teenager I didn't really have a lot of the experiences that other teens have. I didn't have a teenage boyfriend, a real one, and I couldn't tell most of the people I knew that I was having any relationship [at all]. My mom would say, "Why don't you have a boyfriend?"--it sort of cut me off from my mother. I was basically alone. There were no adults that I could talk to at all about anything. I kind of mourn that. I kind of missed a certain part of growing up. I had something else, but I never shared innocence with a kid.And then, after everyone found out, I was told that I shouldn't talk about it. In my mind I wasn't dwelling on anything--I was telling this story. Probably because I was always told not to tell it, and I was like, why the fuck can't I tell it?
—Commentary & Reviews. Derf Backderf strongly defends Ted Rall against the Los Angeles Times.
Rob Clough finds himself underwhelmed with Lucy Knisley's Displacement.
At Hazlitt, Pilot Viruet advocates strongly for Kelly Sue DeConnick and Valentine De Landro’s Bitch Planet.
—Funnies. Steve Brodner "live-doodled" the first GOP debate last night.
