Today on the site, Frank Santoro writes a little about his recent crowdfunding experience, which will bankroll a new comics school in Pittsburgh.
I got the thing for 13K. It’s gonna take 20K to fix it up. Fortunately, that’s exactly what we got for the crowdfund (36K minus 3K of fees). So we have to watch every penny. I mean, Sam gave me the estimate for the new furnace and it’s 5K. Ray told me to save him 4K to fix the roof and repair all the damage done inside from the leaks. That's almost half of what we have to get it up to code. So, the money is already earmarked and while that is hard to swallow at this moment of victory—it’s not something I’m complaining about either. There’s no whining on the yacht here in Pittsburgh. Just put your head down and get to work—and that’s what we are doing. Ray’s got the roof. Sam’s got the basement. I’m clearing out the odds and ends in the middle.
Also, Daniel Kalder reviews the second volume of David B.'s Incidents in the Night, which is possibly even stranger and more recursive than the first:
David B. could easily have left Incidents in the Night there: as an enigmatic, fairly indescribable dream-narrative. However, he followed up [the depiction of] his own death with a multitude of cliffhangers and questions, and so it seemed possible that a continuation might be on the cards. For many years this appeared to be a ruse: volume 2 was not published in France until a decade after the first episode. American readers, however, have only had to wait a year to receive the continuation of the story. Incidents in the Night thus comes to us as if it were a “normal” serial narrative, published on a regular schedule- and not a mysterious book of questionable probability that presumably many French readers never expected to read. We are like foreigners discovering Guns N’ Roses twelve months before the release of Chinese Democracy, deprived of years of anticipation, doubt, and context.
Fortunately, comparisons to Chinese Democracy end there, as Incidents in the Night 2 is actually very good.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—Reviews & Commentary. Janean Patience returns to the comics internet to write at length about Dave Sim's Glamourpuss.
Dave Sim is still, in most of his dealings with the world, rational. And he knows that there is no audience for what he wants to say. He’s learned it by saying it, and watching that audience fall away. So for the first nine or so issues of Glamourpuss it’s all hidden, veiled behind parody or hyperbole. The misogyny is plausibly deniable; if a Sim fan wanted to argue it wasn’t there, he’s been given the tools. The model who addresses the reader as “microbe feces” and “paramecium vomit” in #7? Why, she’s just expressing the inexhaustible contempt that fashion magazines have for their readers! This isn’t personal.
But Glamourpuss the comic is nothing but personal. It’s nothing but an expression of Dave Sim’s psyche, of what’s going on in his head. So by the time we’re in double figures the facade falls away. The subtext becomes text.
At the New York Times, A.O. Scott reviews Adrian Tomine's Killing and Dying:
The awfulness of men — rendered more in rue than in rage — is the thread that binds these six pieces together. Male inadequacy is not a new subject for Tomine. It bubbles up in the otherwise lighthearted, autobiographical “Scenes From an Impending Marriage.” It sits at the anxious, lacerated heart of his earlier graphic novel “Shortcomings,” a breakup story set among young intellectually and artistically inclined Asian-Americans in the Bay Area. In that case the protagonist, Ben Tanaka, did not try to be a selfish jerk, but he succeeded all the same, and Tomine’s scrutiny of his dealings with women was both unsparing and sympathetic.
Slate has posted their choices for the best comics of 2015.
—Interviews & Profiles. The Chicago Tribune takes a guided photo-tour of Laura Park's bookshelves.
The Arab Times talks to Syrian artist Ali Ferzat about everything from the ongoing refugee crisis to the responsibilities of political cartoonists.
When the Baath party took over in Syria, they banned all privately owned newspapers. So censorship became very strong. For me and other artists to go around censorship, we had to revert to symbolism, that was the key. I transformed from symbolic and allegorical portrayals of political characters to bluntly drawing them with the support of the audience.
I feel very strongly that when a cartoonist portrays a political character as he is, he is able to break the bond of fear between the audience and the character. The people will see this and realise that it is okay to criticise that character. Having said that, in different situations it is important to go back to the symbolic representations, as they are important to caricature too.
—Misc. Ta-Nehisi Coates shares his thoughts on beginning to write Black Panther. He seems to be taking it pretty seriously.
I guess I should start by saying I’ve never done this before. I expect that there will be stumbles and screw-ups on my part. My nightmare basically involves this turning into some sort of stunt or vanity project. I did not take this on to look pretty, or add a line to my CV. I took it on for the same reason I take on new stories—to grow intellectually and artistically. In this case it’s another genre—fictional, serial story-telling—one a good distance away from journalism, memoir and essays.
And at Tor.com, Ada Palmer writes another nice appreciation of Shigeru Mizuki.
What we know of Betobeto-san and hundreds of other fantastic creatures of Japan’s folklore tradition, we know largely thanks to the anthropological efforts of historian, biographer and folklorist, Shigeru Mizuki, one of the pillars of Japan’s post-WWII manga boom, who passed away yesterday at the age of 93. A magnificent storyteller, Mizuki recorded, for the first time, hundreds of tales of ghosts and demons from Japan’s endangered rural folklore tradition, and with them one very special tale: his own experience of growing up in Japan in the 1920s through 1940s, when parades of water sprites and sparkling fox spirits gave way to parades of tanks and warships.
