Today, Greg Hunter is back with another episode of his Comic Book Decalogue podcast. His guest this week is Lane Milburn.
And we also have Rob Clough's review of Liz Suburbia's Sacred Heart.
The best way to read Liz Suburbia's book Sacred Heart is to never stop asking questions about the details. Unlike many creators of art about teenagers that focuses on them to the exclusion of adults—or even touching on their absence, Suburbia immediately but subtly alerts the reader that something is not quite right from the very beginning of a story that otherwise focuses on teenage punk rock, romance, sex, rebellion, drinking, and free expression. The book's promotional materials link Suburbia to Jaime Hernandez and Brandon Graham, and for obvious reasons. Hernandez captured a certain era of punk and painfully real relationships in Love and Rockets, and that's certainly present in Sacred Heart. Graham draws a lot of inspiration from graffiti and street art, and one can see that at work here as well, as well as certain shared visual traits: facial exaggerations like thick eyebrows and a certain sharpness in the way Suburbia draws eyes.
However, after finishing the book, I find that it bears the most similarity to Gilbert Hernandez's Palomar work, especially "Human Diastrophism".
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—Interviews & Profiles. The latest guest on Marc Maron's WTF was Daniel Clowes.
Columbus Alive profiles Noah Van Sciver on his move to Ohio.
“I have no apartment yet [in Columbus], so my main priority is to find a good place and settle in, and then establish myself in the city,” Van Sciver said recently over the phone from the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont, where he’s been working as a Fellow for the past year. “But I’m already setting a lot of my stories [in Columbus], like, ‘This is it. This is my town. I’m going to stick around.’”
Over on Comics Workbook, Sally Ingraham interviewed Lale Westvind.
I think that alternative comics' roots in self-publishing is very important as a political act, increasingly so. Even if the work is not political, the way one depicts characters in a story is inherently an expression of personal morals and/or desires. My favorite comics shows are the one which are open and encouraging to all types of people. It should be a place where we exercise our freedom of speech, in an intelligent way conducive to love, change, appreciation, mutual respect, new construction. Having people tabling at different levels in their career, from different backgrounds.
—Reviews & Commentary. Romona Williams writes about Julia Gfrörer's Dark Age.
The cover image spans across the front to the back, revealing the slowly rotting corpse of a deer-like animal. The rib-cage juts out over what remains of the animal’s flesh, and only two legs and hooves remain. With the clues left by the decomposing body (the animal’s size, the fur, the hooves, and the intact skeletal structure), you are able to picture the what it may have looked like while alive. It would have stood tall, with a long torso, strong legs, and thick fur. It would have been a beautiful sight, but that particular animal will never exist outside of a mental approximation.
Kawai Shen writes about how internet usage is depicted through comics.
The norm of using multiple panels in comics presents an advantage over other mediums when it comes to representing the internet. Multiple panels easily mimic the multiple windows and tabs of our online browsing. Split screen representations don’t feel as jarring as it might in other mediums.
—Misc. C-SPAN3 will be showing a documentary about the suffragist political cartoonist Nina Allender this weekend.
