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THE BLOG AT THE CROSSROADS
This Week’s Article: Alan Moore - Storyteller
Posted: July 31, 2011
Writer, artist, historian, critic, anarchist, autodidact, singer-songwriter, screenwriter, performance artist, magician, snake-god worshipper, Northampton celebrity, global cult figure, Alan Moore might seem too multi-faceted to be reduced to such a single signifier as Storyteller, but as becomes clear, weaving words into stories to work their spells on his reader’s consciousness is central to his practice. Read the full article here…
Blog of Extraordinary Gentlemen
Posted: July 25, 2011
Let me alert you to a rather excellent comics site made in Britain, namely Mindless Ones, a self-denigrating but culturally informed reference, of course, to Lee and Ditko’s other-dimensional brawlers, foes of Doctor Strange). Today these panelologists have commenced a fortnight dedicated to the recently released, eminently groovy second volume in Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century, transporting us to the year 1969, available from Top Shelf in the USA and Knockabout here in the UK. Over the next two weeks, Mindless Ones will be running a series of posts celebrating the book’s launch, which will include lengthy annotations and commentary, and an interview with Kevin O’Neill. The first batch is already up by Amy Poodle, Andrew Hickey and ‘Zom’. What better way to impress your fellow LXG readers with your erudition? And be sure to catch Moore & O’Neill on their signing tour, including the grand finale extravaganza at Gosh! this Saturday July 30th, before the shop’s relocation to palatial new premises, appropriately in Berwick Street, as featured in this very LXG volume, in nearby Soho.
This Week’s Article: Supergods by Grant Morrison
Posted: July 24, 2011
Supergods by Grant Morrsion has been garnering lots of column inches, mild misgivings but generally praising critiques, including from me, but something has been nagging at me about it so I wanted to write about it further. How did this book come about? Someone in marketing must have decided that, compared to his fellow ‘Brit Pack’ comic-book scribes Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison was not enough of a household superstar to sell his 400-plus-page autobiography. That said, Morrison has been the ‘revamp guy’ on high-profile, comic-book characters, no more than briefly at Marvel (notably on post-movie New X-Men) but doggedly at DC. So these tenures qualified him to recast his autobiography as ‘the first true chronicle of the superhero’. But how ‘true’? While he brings some fresh readings to the birth of Superman in Action Comics No. 1 in 1938 and the rest of the Forties pantheon, his version of how 23-year-old Clevelanders Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster sold all rights to their creation Superman to National Comics (now DC) for a mere $130, or $10 per page, seeks to downplay any injustice. Read the full article here…
Graphic Short Story Prize 2011
Posted: July 19, 2011
For its fifth year, The Observer/Cape/Comica Graphic Short Story Prize has just been announced, inviting UK residents to submit a four-page comic on any theme, with the winner receiving £1,000 (the runner-up £250) and getting their story published in The Observer Review and on the Guardian and Vintage websites. This Prize has really galvanised the creative comics scene in this country, stimulating more people to try their hand at sequential art to express themselves. It has also led to several fresh British voices having their debut graphic novels published by Jonathan Cape.
Regular jury members Observer literary critic Rachel Cooke, Random House Creative Director Suzanne Dean, Cape publisher Dan Franklin, and me, Paul Gravett, Comica Festival director, are joined this year by the pioneer of UK graphic novels Bryan Talbot, of Luther Arkwright, Alice In Sunderland and Grandville fame, and David Nicholls, acclaimed author of One Day and a writer for film, television and theatre.
You can see the stories of previous winners and entrants here and listen to my conversation with Stephen Collins, winner of last year’s Prize here. The winner and runner-up will be announced as part of this November’s Comica Festival and we’re hoping to exhibit both stories and some of those by shortlisted finalists as well. Further details to follow.
You’ve got about three months, till 14 October 2011, to send in your entry. Entry forms with the full rules and conditions can be downloaded here and you can see how your story will be laid out in The Observer here.
Best of luck to everyone who enters and be sure to send to me a weblink if you also post your entry online so that it can be listed on the Comica Festival website.
This Week’s Article: Previews For September 2011
Posted: July 17, 2011
What comics are you spending your money on this September? DC Comics would love you to buy no less than 52 Number Ones of their entire superhero universe, either print or digital, for a total price of $159.48. It may be interesting to see how Grant Morrison and Rags Morales reinterpret Superman yet again in Action Comics 1. But anyone already following the DC line who feels disgruntled at everything being rebooted for the umpteenth time, why not consider these first issue re-starts not as a “Jumping On” point, but as a handy “Jumping OFF” point? Why not take a leap and take a chance to explore comics at their fullest and spend some of your money on other astounding, enriching offerings? Let me help you to discriminate, in a good way, by shortlisting the comics, manga and graphic novels I’m most looking forward to based on publisher advance listings due to be released in September 2011. Read the full article here…
Jack Kirby Panel Event: Hail to the King!
Posted: July 12, 2011
Jason Atomic, inspired artist and curator of the excellent tribute exhibition Hail to the King!: Artists Pay Tribute to Jack Kirby, originally shown at The Resistance Gallery and currently showing till July 31st at Orbital Comics Gallery, has invited me to host a free panel discussion on the art, life and legacy of ‘The King of Comics’.
Joining Jason and I will be special guests: acclaimed American critic Charles Hatfield, contributor to The Jack Kirby Collector and author of a major new study, Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby, out next February from University of Mississippi Press; David Hine, creator of the gripping Strange Embrace and writer for Marvel, DC, Radical and for Image the inspired Bulletproof Coffin with Shaky Kane; Ilya, artist, writer, novelist, mangaka, published in the UK, US, France and Japan; Mike Lake, co-founder of Forbidden Planet and Titan Books and Kirby collector and connoisseur; and Garry Leach, Marvelman artist, illustrator extraordinaire and lender of some choice Kirby’s original comics pages on Orbital’s walls.
Come and link hands, shout ‘Taaru!’ and summon The Infinity Man himself, Jack Kirby. Read more about ‘The King Of Comics’ here on this very website!
Tickets: Free!
Where: Orbital Comics, 8 Great Newport Street, London WC2H 7JA
When: Friday 29 July 2011 - From 7pm
My Chicago Comics & Medicine Keynote Speech
Posted: July 11, 2011
You can listen to my Keynote Speech, entitled Body Worlds, which I gave at Northwestern University in Chicago on Friday June 10 to open their Comics & Medicine Conference. By way of introduction, I give some background and context on how the medical profession and medical issues have been represented in comics, before charting the blossoming since 1972 of autobiographical comics and the explosion of graphic novels and manga, all related to illness, whether from the perspective of the sufferer, or their family and friends, or of their carers. Many thanks again for this amazing, intense, unforgettable experience, where I also got to meet up again with Brian Fies, Phoebe Gloeckner and Scott McCloud and finally encountered the brilliant John Porcellino and David Small.
L to R: Brian Fies, David Small & PG!
Photo courtesy of Brian Fies
This Week’s Article: Comics Culture in Yugoslavia
Posted: July 10, 2011
I have been aware for some time, thanks to my international contacts and meeting enthusiasts visiting London from abroad, of some of the treasures of Yugoslavia’s comics culture. You too may find some names here who are familiar from their work published in other countries. But this new reference work by Zivojin Tamburic;, Zdravko Zupan and Zoran Stefanovic really blows the lid off of this treasure chest, brimming with a cornucopia of gems. Consulting with about 100 comics critics from the whole of the West Balkans, these three intrepid, discriminating compilers have realised an exceptional achievement in this book, by combing diligently through thousands of pages of comics and comics reviews to distill a captivating alphabet of some 400 artists and writers who have shaped and enhanced not only the comics of their homeland but in several cases the comics of the world. Read the full article here…
1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die
Posted: July 4, 2011
Today, Rich Johnston over on Bleeding Cool has got the world-exclusive first scoop and interview with me about the massive new guidebook to the world’s greatest comics, which I have edited for Cassell (UK) and Universe (US), coming out this October. Read about it first here, and rest assured there will be much more on 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die on this website over the coming weeks in advance of publication. Will your favourites be in there?
This Week’s Article: SVK
Posted: July 3, 2011
Thought balloons have become uncool in comics. Those traditional, puffy cumulonimbus clouds billowing out of people’s brains have all but disappeared from contemporary graphic novels. Instead, these days the thinking process is more likely to be represented by a character’s interior monologue unraveling in a series of rectangular caption boxes. Warren Ellis and D’Israeli do things differently in their latest collaborative experiment. In SVK, they make secret thoughts visible, readable, thanks to a combination of light-sensitive ink illuminated by an accompanying ultraviolet mini-torch. Thoughts light up here as blockish-shaped speech balloons with truncated tails emanating from the head rather than tapering tails from the mouth. In Tom Woodwind they devise a comic character who can read the banal, repressed or sometimes revelatory world inside other people’s minds as text messages all in capital letters straight out of a comic book. Read the full article here…
