Today, Rob Clough returns to the site with an extremely enthusiastic review of Eleanor Davis and Drew Weing's children's comic, Flop to the Top:
Working with her cartoonist husband Drew Weing (no stranger to comics for kids) in a style that's closer to Davis' hand on her adult comics but still unlike anything either has done before, Flop To The Top is the single best book in the entire Toon line. It is a perfect marriage of line, color, shadow, dialogue, and message. There's a gag or multiple gags on every single page, with a high concentration of background eye-pops adding extra laughs but not cluttering up the narrative. The gags continue to build in lockstep with the emotional narrative of the book, culminating in a well-earned moment of sincerity mixed with humor that is rare.
And sadly, today also marks the fifth and final day of Rina Ayuyang's week drawing our Cartoonist's Diary feature. Thanks, Rina!
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—News. The LA Times released a strongly worded, lengthy response to Ted Rall's recent complaints about his firing. The Times hired its own audio experts, conducted another review, and stands by their decision. Ted Rall disputes their account here, claiming that the Times statement is "a blizzard of misdirection, trivialities and distractions." If you are interested in the case, you owe it to yourself to read both carefully and decide on your own who's creating the blizzard.
In the end, this was a freelance position, and a news organization has the right (and even the obligation) not to hire anyone whose credibility they distrust; Rall's other contention, that the paper let him go on the behest of the police, is much more serious. I have not yet seen any strong evidence of this presented by Rall, but then again, that's something presumably difficult to provide. Barring the revelation of new evidence, choosing who to believe on this seems to come down to a judgment call. [EDITED TO ADD: But see this too.]
—Interviews & Profiles. Nicole Rudick visits Aidan Koch at her studio for The Paris Review.
Unless I'm mistaken, we neglected to link to last week's episode of Fresh Air featuring Phoebe Gloeckner.
