There is no way to adequately replace Joe McCulloch's This Week in Comics! column, and so we will not try. While we figure out what to do, Dan and I (and possibly others) will still provide the buyers' guide portion of the column, spotlighting the most interesting-looking comics new to stores each week. This particular week is pretty skimpy, unfortunately. (I'm sure few of Craig Yoe's defenders will take any note of the Fantagraphics pans, either...)
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—Podcasts. Joe McCulloch hasn't vanished completely, though, and will hopefully return to this very site in some form or another. In the meantime, he's still one of the regular hosts of Comic Books are Burning in Hell, and their latest episode attempts to replicate the This Week in Comics! magic in audio form.
Other recent podcasts of note include Jerry Moriarty on Inkstuds, Jeff Smith on Process Party, and Kathy Bidus on Virtual Memories.
—Reviews & Commentary. Sarah Chihaya reviews Jillian Tamaki's Boundless.
The easiest way to read Tamaki’s title is formally: Boundless is a book that plays with the malleable conventions of graphic storytelling. The portrait orientation of its first piece, “World Class City” — a dreamlike semi-narrative that slips back and forth between pop lyric and lyric poem — demands that the reader turn the book sideways, while the abstract bodies and plants it depicts bleed across generous two-page spreads and, in a couple of cases, over page turns. The final section, “Boundless,” mirrors this vertically oriented, panel-free format, as a menagerie of urban animals flit and swoop across its sparse pages, narrating their nonhuman lives with deadpan panache. The stories contained between these bookends require the same readerly dexterity. Even when she works within the constraints of panels and gutters (which she often abandons in favor of borderless panels, backgrounds that are either overfull or hauntingly vacant, and splash pages), Tamaki’s layouts are kinetic, fluid, and unexpected. Her style is similarly mobile, as each of these nine stories articulate their own distinct idioms of color and line.
Joe Riaola, senior editor of Mad magazine, writes about the most recent Charlie Hebdo controversy, and what he considers the limits of satire.
The editors of “Charlie Hebdo” would probably say that they were making a broad point about what they view as the prevalence of white nationalism in Texas. However, connecting white nationalism to random deaths caused by a hurricane is not only nonsensical, it makes light of the suffering of those who died. Newsflash: The editors of “Charlie Hebdo” don’t care. This is their brand, it’s what they do. We are just paying more attention now, because they are offending Texans instead of Muslims.
Robert Boyd rounds up his summer reading, including various prominent comics by Emil Ferris, Ron Regé, Gabrielle Bell, Noah Van Sciver, Mimi Pond, Jason Shiga, and Seth.
The end of Clyde Fans is kind of an epochal event in Seth's career as a cartoonist--the ending is very contemplative and somewhat melancholy. But the other story, "Nothing Lasts," is really good, too. A great work by one of comics' greatest artists.
—RIP. John Ashbery was happy to plunder comics and comics-related imagery and themes for his poems, such as Henry Darger in his 1999 book Girls on the Run and Popeye, in "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape."
The first of the undecoded messages read: “Popeye sits in thunder,
Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment,
From livid curtain’s hue, a tangram emerges: a country.”
Meanwhile the Sea Hag was relaxing on a green couch: “How pleasant
To spend one’s vacation en la casa de Popeye,” she scratched
Her cleft chin’s solitary hair. She remembered spinachAnd was going to ask Wimpy if he had bought any spinach.
“M’love,” he intercepted, “the plains are decked out in thunder
Today, and it shall be as you wish.” He scratched
The part of his head under his hat. The apartment
Seemed to grow smaller. “But what if no pleasant
Inspiration plunge us now to the stars? For this is my country.”
[...]
Also Walter Becker
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I0QhaBW73Sk
And Holger Czukay
