Dash Shaw wrote a "filmmaker's letter" for Landmark Theatres about how he created the original comic story that became My Entire High School Sinking into the Sea (and includes a pdf of the comic).
When I was a high school student, in the nineties, there were two main schools of comic books: autobio comics on one end and adventure comics on the other. I liked both of them. The idea behind this short story was to combine these two opposing schools; so I had a character named Dash, and it was based on real feelings and experiences, but it was thrown into a boy's adventure-style action comic. Whatever's true in it has been warped to favor the main character's perspective, which is often how autobio stories are. It's also a joke about how most stories are; like how we know Indiana Jones is George Lucas' fantasy, and it's based on his real interest in archaeology and history, but it'd be sort of sad and pathetic if he just named the character "George Lucas."
RJ Casey wrote about contemporary sports art (with a look back at cartoonist Willard Mullin) for The Classical.
Mullin acolytes and understudies carried this style forward in the 1950, ’60s, and ’70s. Murray Olderman penciled and shaded photo-realistic renderings mostly of football and tennis players. He then filled the frame with highly-stylized gags full of stats and jokes. He was—is now, in his late 90s—a polished polymath and pioneer in the field, an original whose only critique is that he maybe slummed it up in caricature work a bit. Olderman more than made up for that with his productivity and in the fact that he was also an accomplished journalist in his own right; he had a hand in creating the MVP trophy in many of the professional sports leagues.
For The Guardian, JA Micheline writes about Marvel, diversity, and the company's self-inflicted wounds.
Marvel is a business, but it’s a business that attempts to sell comics to a demographic that has demonstrated a categorical, historical (and ultimately violent) disinterest in anything that is not built explicitly for them, rather than seeking to expand by making concerted efforts to entice other people into the fold. Marvel is certainly subject to the demands of capitalism, but it sets its attempts at inclusivity up for failure when it continues to push white men as its “real audience” and makes them the metric for success.
The Doug Wright Awards have announced that Katherine Collins will their 2017 Hall of Fame inductee.
Collins is the creator of Neil the Horse, one of the handful of comic book series published during the 1980s in English Canada. The book was a whimsical throwback to the world of pre-World War II cartooning and popular culture, starring the titular Neil, a rubber-limbed horse drawn in an Ub Iwerks style, in a series of fantasy adventures alongside his best friends, a cigar-smoking cat and a sexy animated marionette, trying to make it as song-and-dance hoofers in the world of musical comedy.
The Comics Alternative podcast interviews Peter Bagge.
