Hi there,
Today on the site Lauren Weinstein talks to Mike Dawson about 5,000 km per second in this latest installment of TCJ Talkies.
And Greg Hunter is here to review Patrick Kyle's Don't Come in Here, and makes some good points about certain prevalent cartooning tropes. Every generation settles into a certain sameness -- we're there now with a certain flat abstraction and distanced narration, in part because of the rise of festivals and over-indulgent publishing practices. Those things, and this aesthetic, will pass and then be looked back on and revived, etc. etc. Just like many other aesthetics. Here's a bit of Greg's review.
Reading Don’t Come in Here is like navigating a built space. Kyle has subdivided the work into surreal vignettes, and the combination of the book’s dimensions and its use of tiered, two-panel grids makes each turn of a page feel like the next step down a corridor. This is not to say the space feels wholly new. The depth and the novelty of Kyle’s insights vary throughout the book—it’s the work of an artist who appears willing to try anything and unable to leave anything out.
At its best, Don’t Come in Here shows off a kind of Brechtian comics-making. Kyle’s pieces draw attention to different human dilemmas while also drawing attention to the comics form itself. In “Message”, the book’s main character knocks on a shared wall between its apartment and its neighbor’s, a move that creates a widening hole in the wall. Eventually, the neighbor appears at the hole, scolding the figure that knocked. In turn, the main character smears the hole and the neighbor inside it as if they were two-dimensional rather than existing in real space. It’s a funny, surprising formal trick as well as a vivid depiction of the challenge of living among strangers.
Elsewhere:
Geneviève Castrée has reached a fund-raising goal at gofundme, but there may be further challenges, so please continue to check the site.
Greg Cooke writes about the children's book artist Leonard Weisgard.
Finally, Ron Rege has a video up of his show in Australia:
