Today on the site, Tegan O'Neil returns with a review of Sarah Graley's Kim Reaper.
I’ve been sitting here trying to decide what I wanted to say about Sarah Graley’s Kim Reaper, the first volume of which – aptly titled Grim Beginnings – was delivered to my address by anonymous courier. I like the comic: I want to get that out of the way right up front. It’s not a perfect comic but it’s really solidly put together and very cute. Oops! Did I say cute? I didn’t mean to say cute.
In an Irish Lit seminar in college our professor informed us that “cute” was an Irish insult. Even over here in the wilderness cute can be a kiss-off. I try to remember the Irish definition whenever I use the word. It’s not a word I want to abuse in any way. I’d certainly never wield it as invective, because not only do I respect the idea of cute, but as an aesthetic mood I consider it a virtue worth promoting.
There’s nothing at all ironic about being cute in 2018.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—The New York Review of Books has published an excerpt of Eleanor Davis's Why Art?
—Caleb Orecchio writes about Julie Doucet's Dirty Plotte.
This encounter and subsequent reading of the issue reminded me of Doucet’s intensity as a cartoonist. An unfettered intensity and earnestness in both narrative and drawing. A simultaneity that basically went unrivaled among her comics graduating class (the exception probably being Chester Brown). Even in our current comics community, I am hard-pressed to think of any cartoonist that revels so deeply and gleefully in one’s day-to-day routine of life, fantasies and bodily functions—and in a completely fun and personal way.
—Boy, this CBLDF instructional comic for yesterday's gun protests sure seems concerned with teaching kids not to cause any kind of disturbance or distress to authorities and institutions. Is civil disobedience supposed to be disruptive and society-changing, or just a lifestyle signifier?
—RIP Stephen Hawking
