Today Ken Parille looks at the "elegantly bleak, un-cinematic minimalism" of Harvey Comics:
In Casper the Friendly Ghost, for example, Casper’s repeated attempts at friendliness are thwarted by his ghostliness—he accidentally scares would-be companions. The company’s visual strategies are equally basic: this page from “Search Party” consists of sparsely-filled, same-sized panels all drawn as ‘wide shots’ (showing the full character and his environment) and colored with a limited flat palette. But we shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that Harvey’s reliance on a few narrative ‘blueprints’ guarantees an uninteresting comic or reflects an unexceptional design sensibility. The more we look (or at least the more I look) at this page, the more carefully organized and attractive it becomes.
And Rob Clough reviews Windowpane.
Elsewhere:
Only comics by way of baseline ideas: TCJ-contributor Naomi Fry on the power of teenage artifacts, Kurt Cobain, Courtney Love and other matters.
Here's a big and fun blog account of this year's Angouleme from Drawn & Quarterly.
Maurice Sendak will have a school named for him Park Slope, Brooklyn, just around the corner from me.
Here's a delightful cave-boy strip (cave-man culture is always a winner) by the man better known for lettering for Milton Caniff: Frank Engli.
TCJ-interviewee Ed Piskor on his upcoming residency in Ohio.
Cartoonist Marian Churchland buys an apartment, draws beautiful tree-dwelling.
And finally, TCJ-columnist R. Fiore needs a little visual aid assistance. He asks if you can locate this image on this here Internet: "there was a panel from a DC comics story that showed up on a number of blogs. It was the character Darkseid sitting in a chair in a hotel room or something like that, chatting with another character. I think it showed up repeatedly because it just looked so weird to have Darkseid sitting in a normal chair like a normal person, when he actually ought to be on a throne in a cave."
