Today at the Journal, we've got a debut reviewer: Daniel Schindel, who took a break from film criticism to reflect on Gumballs, the Top Shelf published collection of Erin Nations' comic series. Here's a bit:
Nations’ drawing style emphasizes angularity and few soft curves. He names Matt Groening as a major influence, and you can see it in the lovingly ugly-cute way he depicts people. Like many graphic novelists, the cartoony aesthetic cushions some intense subject matter, from physical dysphoria to mental illness to sexual assault. It also renders the mundane and the clinical, like descriptions of Nations’ physical changes during hormone therapy, into a visually engaging format. Nations continually expresses anxieties connected to his body, and in that light the abstraction of the human form on the comics page takes on new meaning. Gumballs isn’t a retreat from the real world, or precisely a safe space, but it lets him process the messier aspects of his life through a lens he controls. The book never preaches on any subject at a volume louder than respectful assertion, but that control imbues it with some hefty inspirational power.
With the news cycle is moving at an even more rapid pace than usual, quieter stuff slips by even the best of us (and I'm not even in the top 50%), so let me throw you back to June 14th, when The Village Voice posted Steve Brodner's cartoon history of the Trump family. There's some real charm and wit to the illustrations, but the limited text feels disinterested, uninspired--as if the work was made to fit a title.
The infamous Stu Levy was just announced as an upcoming Guest of Honor at Anime Expo. I'd recommend getting in on the ground floor of this tweet, as the responses are only just starting to heat up.
There's a solid block of time devoted to Koyama Press on a recent episode of the Comics Alternative podcast--their full spring catalog, actually.
No disrespect for the graphic novel that is currently collecting reviews as fast as Denzel collects souls in Man On Fire, but the 2018 book i'm most anticipating is starting to appear on sites: Flocks, a Secret Acres memoir by L. Nichols. Here's Optical Sloth with what I imagine will be the first of many laudatory reviews.
If you had been operating under the impression that the Harvey Awards were fully dead, following that debacle a few years ago when their notoriously who-gives-a-shit disorganization had resulted in massive ballot stuffing, well, you happen to be wrong. Despite the fact that the Baltimore Comic Con (the traditional Harvey host) are now the home of a replacement award called The Ringos, the Harveys have risen again, this time, as part of the promotional efforts of ReedPOP. It's the comeback no one was asking for or cared about, but it's here.
