Today on the site, Frank Santoro is back with another of his Riff Raff columns. This time, he writes about a new zine created by Jim Rugg, in which he apparently collages together various panels and images from old '80s black-and-white indie comics to create a new story:
The narrative is: kill, kill, kill. Antiheroes standing on rooftops surveying cities. At night. Speaking to themselves in poor grammar with lots of spelling errors. Deals with the devil. Equipment diagrams and editorial delusions of grandeur. Often on the same page. What Jim did was group certain generic genre moments together and then sequence them as one story. An antihero from one comic will appear early in the sequence and then reappear later and sort of comment on the action that’s taken place in between. The zine reads as one story if you let it, the one story that every B+W explosion comic seems to tell: This is my city and THEY have taken it away from me and I must fight to save myself and my loved ones and I must fight and why doesn’t she understand me but it doesn’t matter because I will fight and by destroying the world I will remake it for her and for us and she will see and THEY will suffer and this is the stark future so GET READY because NEXT MONTH the final BATTLE WILL BEGIN AGAIN!
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—Interviews & Profiles. Now that you've read our own interview with Richard Sala from 1998, you might want to see what he's up to lately. Electric Literature talks to Sala here.
Chris Randle at Hazlitt has a good interview with Simon Hanselmann.
I'm late to this, but here is a conversation between Naoki Urasawa and Hisashi Eguchi about '70s and '80s manga.
Michalis Limnios talks to Bill Griffith.
—Reviews & Commentary. Rob Clough reviews a slew of new minicomics.
Publishers Weekly has a pretty solid list of recommended LGBTQ comics.
While writing about the Fun Home musical, Francine Prose also briefly comments upon Alison Bechdel's original graphic novel.
—Funnies. Boing Boing has an excerpt from the Drawn & Quarterly anniversary book, the first Joe Matt comic in a long time. (Commenters who have never Matt's work before are predictably bemused.)
