Hello, friends. Today on the site Dan Nadel writes a review of the Art Spiegelman "Co-Mix" career retrospective being shown at the Jewish Museum in New York.
Having a good pair of eyes sifting through the archive is essential. Just when you think you have Spiegelman nailed down, he kind of slips away again. Oh, there's a Viper page, and there's a Maus print I hadn't seen, and, oh, those Boris Vian covers... And this is thanks largely to the efforts of Rina Zavagli-Mattotti, the owner of Galerie Martel in Paris. Zavagli-Mattotti curated the original exhibition, which opened nearly a year ago in Angouleme. With Spiegelman, she selected the work for that show and each iteration thereafter (it has made stops at the Pompidou in Paris, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, and the Vancouver Art Gallery). So, yes, the "hits" are all here, but so are lesser known pieces, including the largest showing of underground work yet (certainly more than I've ever seen in an official compilation) and a fascinating set of layout progressions for Spiegelman's Raw #7 cover. Maus is rightly given pride of place, and beautifully installed, with Spiegelman's nearly frantic preliminaries occasionally jutting out from the finished pages like word balloons.
Elsewhere:
—Interviews. Joann Sfar went on Inkstuds. Georgia Webber shares her bookshelf to Hazlitt. Adrian Tomine talks about New York with British GQ. Rian Hughes answers questions from Steven Heller. Alex Schubert talks for two seconds to something called B Rad. Box Brown talks wrestling with Grantland.
—Reviews & Commentary. Tom Murphy at Broken Frontier reviews Gilbert Hernandez's Maria M. Mike Lynch shares strips from Chester Gould's pre-Dick Tracy career. Scottish crime novelist Ian Rankin reviews the new Asterix story set in Scotland. Dylan Williams wrote about Mort Meskin in 2003.
—News. According to Deadline, Warner Brothers has won another (and possibly final) major decision in its legal battle with the estates of Siegel and Shuster. Charles Hatfield reports from the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library opening weekend. Gary Tyrell writes about some pretty sleazy behavior from PC Magazine, regarding a webcomics listicle. Maggie Thompson is selling a big chunk of her comics collection.
Finally, researchers at the University in Calgary are conducting a study of working conditions in comics. If you are involved with comics creation, you may want to participate in this survey.
