Joe McCulloch is here as always this Tuesday with his usual indispensable guide to the Week in Comics! His spotlight picks this time include new titles by David Hine & Shaky Kane and Elise Gravel. He also has some unkind words for the New York Times Magazine's all-comics issue.
Predominantly, it's the stories that hold prominence in these comics, and I'm not convinced that becoming comics does them many favors. Take Enemies Among Us (drastically reformatted for the online version, fyi), in which Marvel/DC/Archie veteran Francesco Francavilla draws a tale of WWII-era intrigue centered around ferreting out (German) terrorists who've slipped into NYC's immigrant community. This is a very hotly politicized topic, no doubt disinterred from 2002 for the purposes of new relevancy, but while prose could at least theoretically tease out nuance from the account, what emerges from out under the lacquer of Francavilla's four pages of backlit noir illustration is nothing more trying than a warm bath of civic flattery - one of the terrorists maybe becomes "affected" by the city life (no conclusions), and turns in the rest of them, his reward deportation over execution. I [heart] NYC too, but these tiny vignettes playing at resonance aren't helped by the translation to comics, and 'comics' is helped even less. This is not a testament to comics' sophistication, of its parity with nonfiction in prose; this is comics as a novelty act, rightfully dismissed the week after so that real work ostensibly can begin again.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—Interviews. The most recent guest on Process Party is Katie Skelly.
—Commentary. The Ignorant Bliss podcast posted an episode with various critics and comics figures (J. A. Micheline, Darryl Ayo Brathwaite, Cheryl Lynn Eaton, Jonathan W. Gray, and Ronald Wimberly) discussing the controversial cover for Island #15.
So when the last issue of the anthology comic Island was released and people saw the cover by the artist Dilraj Mann of a black woman rendered all in absolute black with red lipstick and door knocker earrings hit the internet it caused quite a stir. ... So I gathered some voices from the online debate and some others we knew to have a conversation about his cover, art, editorial practices in comics and voices of black women within the comic industry.
—Misc. Ethan Rilly has contributed a guest post to the AdHouse blog on the occasion of the upcoming release of Pope Hats #5.
Whenever I’m pushing into the final stretch of a project I get oddly superstitious. Every day I need to wear the same shoes, same watch, eat the same shitty snacks. Weird random stuff. And then there’s a list of normal human tasks that I have to keep on the back burner. It’s an extreme, productivity-based version of “Let’s not jinx this.”
