Today, Joe McCulloch is here with his usual buyer's guide for the Week in Comics, with spotlight picks from John Porcellino and Dash Shaw.
Sean T. Collins is here, too, with a review of Sophia Foster-Dimino's "Sex Fantasy". Here's an excerpt:
Her line is clear, clean, and precise, ideal for her geometric interpretations of the human face and figure. Her intrapanel layouts emphasize the diagonal, creating a sense of dynamism-in-stasis that largely abrogates the need for panel-to-panel continuity of motion or setting; she can draw what she needs to, and only what she needs to, to get her point across. She repeatedly nails gestures: A panel from issue #1 uses a pair of faces (one upturned and downturned), a blocked-black head of hair, hunched shoulders sloping down, long legs reaching up, and an arm the eye follows downward like a child on a slide to emphasize an outstretched hand gently proffering a much-needed tool as though it's a drawing of the Childlike Empress giving Bastian the grain of sand that is all that is left of Fantasia. Her clothing and prop designs are inventive and singular, yet observed and easy to parse and contextualize. It's hard to be this easy.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—Spending Opportunities. Last Gasp is crowdfunding their fall publishing lineup. And Sparkplug Books has just a couple days left on its Kickstarter, and is just a couple thousand short right now. Both of those publishers are well deserving of your support.
—Reviews & Commentary. David Ulin wrote about Porcellino's Hospital Suite at the LA Times. Ruben Bolling likes the John Severin EC collection. Bob Temuka reviews Gilbert Hernandez's Bumperhead.
—Profiles & Interviews. Prominent book-world interview Robert Birnbaum talks to Roz Chast, and is surprised she's content to identify herself as a cartoonist.
Steven Heller has a profile of Richard McGuire and his upcoming Here at The Atlantic.
Tom Spurgeon interviews Dan Steffan, the comics retailer and filmmaker behind the new John Porcellino documentary.
—History. The New York Times published a bizarrely ahistorical article about New Yorker covers, acting like the shift to topical covers just happened rather than starting way back in the Tina Brown era. Spurgeon takes this in stride like Elliott Gould in The Long Goodbye ("It's okay with me"), and maybe that's a wise reaction, but this is really shockingly ignorant coming from the Times and I can't figure out how the editors let it by.
Finally, if you're Facebook-compliant, Eric Reynolds has your time machine to the Fantagraphics van from twenty years ago.
