THE BLOG AT THE CROSSROADS

Article: Max - Panoptica 1973-2011

Posted: May 1, 2012

Wandering the buzzing streets of Madrid, you can’t believe your eyes at first, when you look up and spot the giant cartoon characters peering at you from behind the soaring columns outside the Cervantes Institute. It’s as if the whole front of the imposing building has been transformed into a bizarre landscape, inviting you to step inside. Panoptica 1973-2011, the exhibition within, has travelled here from Valencia and Mexico City and is scheduled next for a four-city tour of Brazil. It offers a stunning overview of nearly four decades of creativity by Max, pen-name of Francesc Capdevila, whose trajectory mirrors the shifts in the medium from clandestine counterculture to high-profile recognition. Spain has its own vibrant history of comics, or ‘tebeos’, named after TBO, the founding children’s weekly launched in 1917 whose title plays on the phrase ‘te veo’ or ‘I see you’. Born in Barcelona in 1956, Max grew up absorbing both national and imported pop culture. Vivacious humourous tebeos by Ricardo Opisso, Josep Coll, Marino Benejam and other Spanish artists, alongside the animated films of Walt Disney, Warner Brothers, Walter Lantz and Hanna-Barbara, became formative early influences, followed by his discovery of local chivalric hero, medieval knight-errant El Capitán Trueno, and translations of Tintin, Asterix and other Franco-Belgian hits. Read the rest of my new Article on Max here…

Article: PG Previews for June 2012

Posted: April 22, 2012

Hello again, welcome to another round-up of my PG Tips for up-and-coming comics, graphic novels and manga that I am looking forward to. Among the special titles are translations of top-class graphic novels from French, Danish, Italian, Japanese and Balkan comics creators. I’m particularly buzzed that The Red Diary by Teddy Kristiansen, whom I interviewed at the Komiks DK festival in Copenhagen, is finally, finally coming out in English, flip-booked with an intriguing alternate version by Steven T. Seagle. And look out for debut books by promising, precocious Anglophone tyros Kaczynski, Vidaurri, Winterhart & Zettwoch. We’ll have to see how penetrating and uncompromised a job Larry Tye makes of his new Superman biography. And I’ve picked an unpublished Steve Gerber Man-Thing story illustrated by Kevin Nowlan, as this actually sounds hopeful, certainly more so that Marvel’s latest further resurrections of supposedly dead characters and concepts, Phoenix and Captain Marvel. While some myopic publishers can’t stop latching onto Mars Attacks, Pantha, The Bionic Man, Strawberry Shortcake (errr…), or another creaky, unneeded franchise from yesterday, to foist upon us, aren’t you glad that there are people like these below, investing real passion and originality to this amazing medium.  Read my Previews picks here…

Come to the Spring Comica Comiket & After Party April 21st!

Posted: April 17, 2012

This coming Saturday April 21st, if you’re anywhere near central London, there’s really only one place to go it you love comics - the first Spring Comica Comiket Independent Comics Fair! Response to last November’s Comiket at the Bishopsgate Institute was so enthusiastic, we couldn’t wait until November this year to do it again. So we’ve added this Spring Comiket and close to one hundred artists, small presses, self-publishers and quality graphic novel publishers, from the UK but also Belgium, Denmark & France, will be filling not only the Great Hall but two additional lovely rooms nearby. We’re expanding and adding the Comica Cafe and the Panel Borders Interview Room, where you can buy tea, coffee, beer and wine and relax while listening to Alex Fitch and his colleagues from Resonance FM having some informal Comica Conversations with some of the brilliant guest comics creators at the Fair, as well as browsing more tables laden with treats and treasures. And the third new space will be the Nobrow Room, as the cutting-edge publisher presents its biggest, boldest display of its entire lines and other special imports alongside still more exciting exhibitors.

The amazing Drawing Parade line-up is all set from 11am when we open (see Luke Pearson above, from 2011), and will bring the Great Hall stage to life through the day. And best of all, admission is, insanely, entirely FREE. Why? Because we want everyone to discover just how wonderful the best, most creative comics are right now.

But hold on, it doesn’t all end at 6pm. Don’t go home - stick around, maybe grab yourself a bite, and then come back at 7pm for 7.30pm for the Comica Comiket After Party. Here’s your chance to relax and hang out with many of the day’s comics creators and exhibitors and enjoy animation screenings, DJ sessions including Mr. Woodrow Phoenix, and the all-important Comica Bar! And courtesy of SelfMadeHero, sprinkled throughout the evening will be the Lovecraft Cabaret, MC’d by Chris Lackey, host of the H.P. Lovecraft literary podcast with acts including: H.P. Ukelele; SelfMadeHero Screen: The Case of Charles Dexter Ward (short film premiere); The H.P. Lovecraft Quiz with Dan Lockwood and Chris Lackey with prizes; Lovecraft Limbo with prizes; SelfMadeHero Screen: The Call of Cthulhu (short film screening); ‘Draw Something’ Lovecraft with I.N.J. Culbard; plus an extra special guest!

Tickets cost only £6, or £4 discounted tickets for exhibitors, and are available now online through Wegottickets.com, and will also be on sale during the day from the Comica table and of course on the door on the night. Bring your own tentacles! Make a whole day and night of it at Comica Comiket next Saturday, I know I will. Comica - Putting Comics First!

Article: Tom Gauld

Posted: April 15, 2012

From a rusting Gigantic Robot or bored guardians of an endless Great Wall to the Biblical giant Goliath, Tom Gauld’s comics often play with contrasts in scale, between people, objects and ideas, and “between grand, heroic ideas and small, human ordinariness”. There’s also a sweet bleakness to his locations and his humour. “I grew up in rural Aberdeenshire. We weren’t completely isolated, but a mile or so from a small village, so my brother and I spent quite a lot of time on our own playing and bickering. A few of my comics are about two male characters in a wilderness and perhaps that comes from my childhood. The scenery and weather where we lived could be quite bleak, especially in winter, as is often the case in my comics too”. You can almost hear the Highland winds whistling through his remote, dwarfing landscapes. Read the rest of my Article here… and also enjoy his brand-new two page comic (detail above), Skull Collection, created especially for Art Review magazine.

Article: Robert Crumb Interview

Posted: April 8, 2012

Forever tied to cartoon characters such as Fritz the Cat and Mr. Natural, Robert Crumb is too easily pigeonholed as the sex-obsessed taboo-breaker, unchanged since his late-1960s heyday in the underground comix movement. It’s true that Crumb’s role in the iconography of America’s drug-fuelled counterculture was pivotal, yet he remained an ambivalent outsider to that era.

Now sixty-eight and living in the South of France since 1993, Crumb has long shown more multifaceted qualities, from his candid, autobiographical self-deprecation about his lusts and fetishes to his satirical puncturing of smug-liberal and conservative-reactionary tendencies. He also extols the raw vitality of past masters of blues, jazz, country and other popular music through biographical comics, CD covers, card sets and his own music-making. Not forgetting his partnership with his wife and cartooning peeress, Aline Kominsky Crumb, the pair writing and drawing themselves on the same page to commemorate their ‘dirty laundry’ (starting with the two-volume Dirty Laundry Comics series, published in 1974 and 1978, and carrying on through recent regular contributions to The New Yorker).

Crumb is also a serious, studious reader and compulsive explorer of his outer and inner life, devoting four years to adapting the Book of Genesis into comics, published in 2009. The entirety of this magnum opus is part of the first ever major museum retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, opening on April 13th and continuing till August 19th. It will bring together over 700 drawings, sketchbooks and more than 200 underground magazines, arranged chronologically around ‘Crumb’s obsessions: love, hate, fear of women, music, a raw look at the modern world and introspection’.

I caught up with Crumb in his Paris apartment, the night before he was due to fly with his wife to a comics convention in New Delhi at the country’s second Comic Con. Here’s the full free-flowing interview, parts of which were edited and published in Art Review 58, April 2012 with a new one-page comic by Crumb and Kominsky, published in English for the first time and shown below. Read the rest of my Article and this interview here…h

Article: Morgenstadt 2050

Posted: April 1, 2012

Here’s my introduction to a 208-page trilingual print anthology compiling a fascinating collaborative online comics blog, updated weekly, entitled Morgenstadt 2050, otherwise known as issue number 107 of the Moga Mobo series of free comics. This project is being co-ordinated by the enterprising Berlin-based Moga Mobo collective, consisting of Legron (alias Thomas Gronle), Titus Ackermann and Jonas Greulich, in partnership with the Goethe Institute in Taipei, Taiwan. The trio are presenting their German comics alongside contributions from thirteen Asian creators. All of them use comics to explore life in the cities of today and in the not-so-distant future of 2050. Co-ordinator-cartoonist Titus Ackermann informs me that, after its successful debut in Taiwan , their accompanying exhibition of illuminated mini-dioramas set inside a stacked metropolis of cardboard boxes will be touring to Beijing, Nanjing and maybe Shanghai this August and September. Read the rest of my Article here…

Article: PG Previews For May 2012

Posted: March 26, 2012

Welcome back, here’s a round-up of my recommendations for new comics, manga and graphic novels due out during May or soon after, sifted for you from publishers’ advance listings. Highlights this month include: the long-overdue debut in full book form by the remarkable Italian maestro Sergio Toppi; new graphic novels by Eddie Campbell, Jaime Hernandez & David B. (who is among the guests at this year’s BD & Comics Passion festival at the French Institute in London, in association with Comica, on May 24th to 27th); great global comics from Japan, Egypt, Sweden, Belgium and Spain; some classy first-time complete compilations from Gary Panter, Howard Cruse, Jeremy Bastian & Doug Wildey; the surprise return of horror-meister Wrightson on Mary Shelley’s man-made monster; and a massive artbook on Marvel artist John Buscema (I have the bi-lingual Spanish original of this and it is stunning).

I hope I’ve found you one or two treats to look forward to. And by the way, Flemish artist Maarten Vande Wiele is one of the special guests taking part in our live Drawing Parade at the Spring Comica Comiket in London on Saturday April 21st, where the English edition of Paris will be launched. Read the rest of my new Article here…

Article: British Comics Stamps

Posted: March 16, 2012

The Royal Mail is issuing a set of ten stamps celebrating British comics on March 20th 2012, each showing a much-loved character with a cover of the comic they appeared in behind them. Here’s the cover-featured four-page article I was asked to write about these for the March issue of The British Philatelic Bulletin, Volume 49, Number 7, under the title ‘High jinx and spiffing fun!’ and illustrated here with images from the original artwork and comics. To discover much more about British comics, be sure to check out my profusely illustrated, oversized book with Peter Stanbury, Great British Comics: A Century of Ripping Yarns and Wizard Wheezes. Read my article here….

Noam Chomsky Supports Parecomic Documentary Graphic Novel

Posted: March 12, 2012

News in from Japan-based Scottish Sean Michael Wilson, editor of Top Shelf’s excellent AX Anthology, about his exciting new project, Parecomic: Michael Albert and the Story of Participatory Economics. Sean explains that this documentary graphic novel with artist Carl Thompson “... is about something that affects us all: the system we live in - what’s wrong with it, and how we might be able change it for the better! The recent upsurge in popular protest in the USA and around the world shows that people are not happy with the state of things. The Occupy movements show us that many people would prefer a better system, a model that will work for the 99%, not just the 1%.”

Sean explains further: “It’s being published by Seven Stories Press, a social issues NY publisher who put out Michael Albert’s Remembering Tomorrow biography. Our graphic version draws on Michael’s own story, his political ideas and experiences to present a picture of not just one man’s life as a left wing activist, but also wider ideas of anti-capitalism, socialism, anarchism, and what kind of alternative society there is open to us. It’s written by myself, with the close help and permission of Michael Albert. Respected critic Noam Chomsky has agreed to write the intro.”

You can support it as well through Kickstarter to make it into print. To find out more, to watch a video all about it, and to pledge something if you like the Parecomic project, check out here at Kickstarter. Here’s a sample below and you can also read the first four pages online on Sean’s blog. This publication is an ideal vehicle for communicating Albert’s urgent, timely information through the uniquely accessible medium of the graphic novel.

Article: Arvon Foundation Graphic Novel Courses

Posted: March 11, 2012

One of the more significant examples of the many ‘tipping points’ in the continuing progress of comics in Britain was the first time that the prestigious Arvon Foundation piloted one of their intensive residential writing courses specifically focussed on graphic novels in 2006. Since then, Arvon have developed this specialisation into an annual course which has proved hugely popular and productive. This June 25th to 30th at The Hurst in Shropshire (below) brings the opportunity to sign up for their latest Graphic Novels Course with tutors Bryan Talbot and Hannah Berry, herself a student on that very first course and now a successful graphic novelists published by Jonathan Cape, and guest Mary Talbot. Later, from August 13th to 18th, Graham Rawle and Margaret Huber are the tutors for a related course on Text and Image, with guest George Hardie. To find out more about what it’s like to take part in these courses, I have asked two other former Arvon attendees, Katie Green and Paula Knight, to reveal their experiences and how it has affected their comics-making. Read my interviews with them both here…

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