These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Matt Seneca read so many comics that a capsule column was demanded. After all, if you can’t put wordless NYRC books next to Ben Grimm, where will your Yokoyama references find a home?
Search and Destroy
Bandy Designys: New French Comics Through the Wrong End of the Telescope
Matt Seneca returned from his French vacation with a stack of comics. I know they call them something different over there, but i’m not over there, am I? Let’s see what he thought!
Moebius’s Last: Le Maître à La Fin
Great cartoonists get weirder as they get older; as a general rule they stop expanding the scope of their work and drill down into old obsessions, attempting to answer the few fundamental questions that hindsight makes obvious they’ve been asking all along. Like Herriman or Ditko or Alan Moore, Moebius became more idiosyncratic and introspective with age, often seemingly in search only of himself.
Dermal Lift: Barry Windsor-Smith’s Weapon X
Weapon X isn’t the only superhero comic to tear down its protagonist’s heroic facade or even to indict its readers for believing in that image – though it is one whose force and quality surpasses all but the top rank of stories to do so.
Six Books from One Failed Bookstore
What can you learn from the comics found at a going-out-of-business sale? If you’re Matt Seneca, the answer is a whole hell of a lot.
Q1: A Good Comic is Hard To Find
Matt Seneca’s new column for the Journal documents what he’s read so far this year–the good, the great, the bad & The Authority.
