Jason Novak speaks with Gary Sullivan about making comics with an eye towards collage and memories of defunct message boards, and then Eleanor Davis reveals some of the work method behind her excellent memoir, You & a Bike & a Road.
If there is one thing which any comics critic worth their salt dreads, it’s a didactic comic. We are supposed to champion works that celebrate aesthetic anarchy, troubling personal visions, literary grit, formal splendor. Of course, we make an exception for marginalized expressions, inspired propaganda – the great and/or terrible messages told greatly through the… Read more »
Matt Seneca holds on tight for a freewheeling talk with Geof Darrow, creator of The Shaolin Cowboy and longtime specialist in heavy, bloody detail.
A pregnant pause, staring through the other side of the mirror.
Tegan pays tribute to a living legend of cartooning, the indefatigable Sergio Aragonés.
Thoughts an’ prayers! What follows is an exegesis – or more precisely: the art of exegazing. If you, like French dessinateur L. L. de Mars, have created comics like Jack Kirby walked through broken porticoes (Adverse, 2016), like Tarzan, Seigneur des signes (Éditions Rackham, 2017), you’re most likely familiar with man-gods striding amidst mere mortals,… Read more »
Ambitious, pugnacious, opinionated – Maurice Horn was a massive personality in early American comics studies, an editor of behemoth tomes filled with arcana and dotted with errata. Andrew Farago memorializes this complicated talent, who died last December.
There’s a scene in David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly where Jeff Goldblum, all hopped up on bug DNA, is unsuccessfully pressuring Geena Davis to go through the teleportation pods he invented. He describes her objections to this idea thusly: “You’re afraid to dive into the plasma pool, aren’t you? You’re afraid to be destroyed… Read more »
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?
Cartoonist and film director Dash Shaw catches up with cartoonist, art director and designer Joe Kessler in a sprawling conversation about the intersections of fine art and comics, the challenges and restrictions of the medium, and what their ideal reader might think of Kessler’s upcoming The Gull Yettin.
My sister sent me a Snapchat reading BEST POST-IT NOTE EVER. It was a sheet of paper reading “This is my life now.”
Remembering Rachel Pollack: a lifelong traveler in the arcane, the esoteric, and the revelatory.
It is perhaps some manner of consolation to imagine that contemporary political controversies shall appear as quaint to the world 500 years hence as the circumstances of 16th century England do to us, today. It’s not an easy matter to render these stakes legible for modern audiences, for those brave souls who endeavor to bring… Read more »
It’s off to Salt Lake City to speak with Greg Gage about back issues, what it’s really like to deal with all those new distributors, and how companies like Marvel & DC might get things back on track: the answer probably isn’t in a movie theater!
Paul Karasik pays tribute to Ed Koren, the beloved New Yorker cartoonist who died last week at the age of 87.
Jason Bergman catches up with Stephen R. Bissette – writer, artist, critic, editor, publisher and educator, feeling a sense of vigor about the future.
Well paint me pink and call me silly, for some odd reason I guess I thought roller derby as we play it now was a more recent invention. Apparently I never saw Mickey Rooney’s 1950 drama The Fireball, which according to Wikipedia contained the eighth screen appearance by Marilyn Monroe. Or even 1972’s Kansas City… Read more »
Bob grapples with three comics—all with varying degrees of venom within—and questions whether or not having a point is required, or if a point of view is enough.
An obituary for Al Jaffee, one of the last of the legends, and a truly beloved American cartoonist.
Risograph and scratchboard, handmade and silk-screened – Daria Tessler’s direct approach to comics making has seen her release all sorts of work over the last few years, and it looks like publishers are starting to catch on. She and Jake Grubman sit down to discuss comics – how to read them, how to make them, and how to navigate surviving them.
This post is your internet Easter bonnet. Put it on your head.
The manga artist Matsumoto Leiji died this past February, leaving a wide and varied body of work behind him – though he is perhaps best remembered for his lyrical SF comics. In this excerpt from a 1997 book, Natsume Fusanosuke considers how the famous Space Battleship Yamato represented the idea of war for a generation too young to have seen it for themselves.
Deniz Camp had a very good 2022. This realization came upon me all of a sudden, as I realized he had launched and was writing, more-or-less concurrently, three very good comic book series across last year. In the first place, he gave us new adventures of Valiant’s (literally) deathless black ops hero in the pages… Read more »
