Today on the site, we start a week with Melanie Gillman contributing to our ever-popular Cartoonist's Diary feature.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—News. The NCS Fest took place this weekend, and this year's Reuben Awards were announced, including Cartoonist of the Year Stephan Pastis.
At the Washington Post, Michael Cavna writes about the show's attempts to be more inclusive.
—Reviews & Commentary. Luc Sante writes about the comic-adjacent phenomenon of European fotonovelas.
Fotonovela, fumetti, roman-photo—the terms betray the fact that the form never got much traction in the Anglo-Saxon realm. There is no word for it in English, exactly. You could say “photo-comics,” but you’d risk being misunderstood. These narratives, often but not always romantic, are conveyed by means of photographs arrayed in panels on a page, with running text often in talk balloons. Their impact has been almost entirely restricted to countries that speak Spanish, Italian, or French; their readership is overwhelmingly female, at least in Europe. Their history formally begins in 1947 in Italy, in the magazine Grand Hotel, soon followed by its French sibling, Nous Deux; both magazines still exist. Fotonovelas flourished in the fifties and early sixties (into the eighties in Latin America), then began a slow decline that still refuses to yield to extinction.
—Interviews & Profiles. Alex Dueben talks to Mariko Tamaki.
I’ve always wanted to write a girl meets girl story. All the stories like that that I’ve read are about finding that perfect love, that first love. But I’m such a realist, it turned into an anti-Cinderella story. Writing this, I thought about the course of relationships, what happens AFTER the glass slipper (so to speak) and that just seemed like an interesting story, the story of things that aren’t “meant to be” or don’t work out, and how a relationship NOT working is something that can go on for a very long time. Like that can be a relationship, a not-working, not-healthy situation. Hopefully that’s not the only story you get, but it’s A story a lot of people have experienced.
The most recent guest on the RiYL podcast is Mort Gerberg.
—Misc. I think we forgot to link to this very funny Matthew Thurber comic at The New Yorker, which seems to have been inspired in part by the great interview Austin English conducted with him for this site.
