We've got a double shot of bande dessinée for you this morning, with two reviews of Humanoids releases. First, Joe McCulloch on the wandering American Terry Dodson's Muse:
Reverie is critical to Muse -- originally titled Songes, or “Dreams” -- a new collection of bandes dessinées drawn by Terry Dodson, a prolific 20-year veteran of the American superhero scene. It is fruitless to summarize such a long career in just a few sentences, but I think it’s fair to suppose that an artist who’s titled his homepage “The Bombshellter” is best known for his drawings of women, specifically the kind of top-heavy heroines who all but erupt, at times, from their tight ensembles, bounding into action with a twinkle and grin. But unlike the similarly-interested examples of Guillem March (who faced a terrific blowback over a Catwoman cover last year) or Adam Hughes (widely admired yet also prominently criticized), Dodson has evaded any wide denunciation for sins of depiction. He is one of "the good ones" - the girlie artists whose commitment to high-quality drawing supersedes more fundamental qualms over their aesthetics.
And then newcomer to TCJ.com Daniel Kalder on District 14:
Picking up District 14, I was mildly concerned. The first couple of pages show an elephant disembarking at Ellis Island, taking a shower, and then getting ripped off by corrupt officials who want to seize his mysterious seeds. The elephant makes a break for it, fleeing directly into a crime scene where a stag-headed mobster is delivering a suitcase with a severed chicken’s head in it to a man in a black suit. Shots are fired; the elephant meets a plucky news photographer with a beaver’s head; hi-jinks ensue.
Shite, I thought. Is this going to be completely trite Euronoir like Blacksad, a pile of clichés enlivened only by the gimmick of giving stock characters animal heads?
Elsewhere:
—LitReactor has a brand-new interview with Phoebe Gloeckner; Chris Mautner has an interview with a top recent contender for the title of most likeable person in comics, Rina Ayuyang; Mark Kardwell at Robot 6 talks to 2000 AD "reprographics droid" Kathryn Symes; and Nick Gazin drops in super-short interviews with Ben Jones and my colleague Dan Nadel in the middle of his latest Vice column.
—If you prefer your interviews multimedia, then Inkstuds talks to the cult-artist Sadler brothers here, and Jared Gardner talks to Ed Piskor there:
—The Reuben Awards announced the rest of this year's nominees.
—Ben Katchor's latest is reviewed in the L.A. Times.
—Jeet Heer drew my attention to the following George Herriman panels from the March 25, 1931 Krazy Kat daily strip, which seem relevant to the case currently being argued before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Jeet came across the image at Michael Tisserand's Facebook page, who suggested their relevance. Jeet wrote about another possible connection between Krazy Kat and gay culture in a blog post about a DC-area Krazy Kat nightclub.
