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THE BLOG AT THE CROSSROADS
Top 25 Comics, Graphic Novels & Manga: May 2016
Posted: March 19, 2016
By creators from the four corners of the globe, from Inuits in the Arctic to European innovators, another motherlode of sequential delights arrives for your delectation. Among this month’s crop, there’s are biographies of Agatha Christie, James Joyce, Louise Michel and Edvard Munch, exciting projects from British superstars Brendan McCarthy, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill, and Mary and Bryan Talbot, and no less than William ‘Cyberpunk’ Gibson writing his first American comic-book series. I’ve singled out Cigarette Girl from Top Shelf, a 1970s manga which I’ve been looking forward to for quite a while. Read my PG Tips for May 2016 here…
Tillie Walden: That In-Between State
Posted: March 12, 2016
It is hard to write anything about comics’ ‘Future Great’ Tillie Walden without mentioning her age, or rather her youth, a liminal nineteen years. Her first two graphic novels came out last year from Avery Hill Press in London and show that she is still close enough to her childhood and adolescence to genuinely recapture their intensity, yet with a craft and maturity that belie her youth. Read my profile of and interview with her and read her new 2-page comic here…
Best Graphic Novels of 2015: An International Perspective Part 2
Posted: March 11, 2016
In this second round-up from my international correspondents, I am once again hugely grateful to these five European connoisseurs for selecting and commenting on their favourites graphic novels of 2015. The range and brilliance of these books released last year reconfirms what exceptional times we are living through for the comics medium. And let’s hope it’s not too long before more of these creators’ gems get translated into English. In the meantime, explore their new titles and expand your horizons. Read their reviews here…
Charlotte Salomon: Life? Or Theatre?
Posted: February 27, 2016
From 1940 to 1942, between the ages of 24 and 26, the German artist Charlotte Salomon created “etwas ganz verrückt Besonderes” (“something really crazy special”). It was the product of the special, crazy times and situation she found herself in. In 1939, because of the Nazis’ mounting persecution of Jews, Salomon had fled Berlin, where she was the last Jewish student at the city’s art school. She sought refuge in France with her grandparents on her late mother’s side in the region of Nice. On March 4th 1940, she watched helplessly as her grandmother threw herself from a window to her death. Only then did her grandfather reveal the family’s secret: she was the last survivor of a maternal line, all of whom had committed suicide over three generations. When she was eight, Charlotte had been told her own mother passed away from influenza; now she learned the truth, that she too had jumped and killed herself. In exile and solitude, under the long shadows of this tragic heritage and the immediate menace of Hitler’s forces, Salomon would barely eat, drink or sleep to finish recording her family’s histories and her personal experiences in an unprecedented magnum opus in pictures and words. Read my new Article here…
Top 21 Graphic Novels: April 2016
Posted: February 14, 2016
Blutch, Chester Brown, Brecht Evens, Manuele Fior and Jiro Taniguchi - this month brings us yet more remarkable graphic novels from near and far - from the US, UK, Canada, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Brazil, South Africa and The Netherlands. There’s also vintage Krazy Kat dailies by George Herriman, a biography of New Yorker cartoonist supreme Peter Arno, an unconventional autobiographical take on Batman, and an anthology entirely by women gamers. Read my latest recommendations for April 2016 here…
Best Graphic Novels of 2015: An International Perspective
Posted: February 9, 2016
Once a year, I get the privilege and pleasure of asking my international correspondents to review their pick of the best graphic novels and comics from their respective countries over the past year. I am always so grateful to them for sending me their considered choices and their commentaries about them. They never fail to surprise me with the sheer variety and quality of what is being created around the globe. A good many of these works will get little if any coverage in the English language, which makes this annual round-up all the more valuable and revelatory. To me, it’s a handy reminder not to simply sit back and soak up the loud hype and hyperbole about the so-called ‘hot’ creators and ‘cool’ books which we hear too much about, but to stay curious and open-minded and never stop exploring this truly international, transnational medium we love… Read these reviews here…
The Secret History of Wonder Woman
Posted: January 19, 2016
From Michael Fleisher’s obsessively detailed Wonder Woman: The Encyclopedia Of Comic Book Heroes, Vol. 2 in 1976 (re-issued in 2007 & 2010) to Les Daniel’s ground-breaking Wonder Woman: The Complete History in 2000 which first revealed how her creator, William Moulton Marston, lived with both his wife and another woman, our Amazonian princess has been the subject of plentiful research and analysis. As part of her 75th anniversary in 2016, several further fascinating studies have also appeared in the last few years. One study in particular that has garnered much attention and acclaim is The Secret History of Wonder Woman (Knopf/Scribe), in which Harvard historian and New Yorker writer Jill Lepore digs deep into the story behind the superheroine’s unconventional, pro-feminist creator, William Moulton Marston. Lepore kindly answered my questions here… .
My Top Ten Comics Of 2015
Posted: January 1, 2016
Drawing from this year’s overflowing cup of strong, striking, often demanding comics, manga and graphic novels, and books about them, here are my personal Top Tens organised into seven categories. Read them all here…
Pablo Holmberg aka Kioskerman: Re-Entering The Gates of Eden
Posted: December 29, 2015
“The strip format doesn’t belong to newspapers. It is simply a short format and people should do with it whatever they please.” This call-to-arms from Kioskerman, pen-name of Pablo Holmberg, is precisely what the internet enabled him to try when he began his weekly webcomics in 2004. Born in Buenos Aires in 1979, Holmberg avoided using the regular, merchandisable characters and undemanding, repetitive formulas which some cartoonists have traditionally relied on to maintain the productivity and public appeal of their daily episodes. The conventional gag-a-day or cliffhanger narrative of a strip might seem too confining, but in Holmberg’s hands four square images, clustered two-by-two, relate and resonate with each other to become an underlying rhythm and leitmotiv. In their duality and parallelism, the words and pictures in Edén reinforce each other rather than decorate each other. By stretching this apparently simple format to new limits of emotion and depth, Holmberg demonstrates that it offers more than enough space to build up over time into a world of ideas and feelings. Read my profile and Holmberg’s new 2-page comic for ArtReview magazine here…
Top 17 Graphic Novels: March 2016
Posted: December 26, 2015
Graphic biographies fill this month’s list of my recommendations, visualising the extraordinary lives of Thoreau, Turing, Belushi and The Smiths. First-person autobiographical accounts include Sam Glanzman’s diaries of his World War II service on board the USS Stevens and Carlos Giménez’s insights into post-war orphans in Franco’s Spain. On the fiction front, Daniel Clowes serves up his first new graphic novel in more than half a decade in Patience, while Hubert announces the dazzling debut of Flemish wunderkind Ben Gijsemans. There’s plenty more to pique your interest here, such as Jacky Fleming’s ferociously funny The Trouble With Women, but my Top Tip has to be Igort’s triumphal achievement, The Ukrainian and Russian Notebooks, giving voice at last to the unheard and suppressed victims in the Ukraine and Russia in two major albums, now combined and translated into one significant epic of humane testimony. Surely a graphic novel of the year… Read my latest recommendations here…
