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THE BLOG AT THE CROSSROADS
This Week’s Article: Previews For June 2011
Posted: April 24, 2011
David B., Luke Pearson and Jiro Taniguchi are just three of the stellar creators with new books due to be released in June 2011. In today’s Previews article I select more highlights of the new releases that caught my eye. Read the full article here…
This Week’s Article: Lorenzo Mattotti
Posted: April 17, 2011
Lorenzo Mattotti revolutionised comics in 1986 with his visionary album Fires, setting the medium ablaze with possibility and poetry. Today, twenty-five years later, he has become an artist’s artist, one of the world’s most mesmerising illustrators, from children’s books to fashion magazines, from The New Yorker to Le Monde, and an Eisner Award-winning graphic novelist for his 2003 adaptation of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde. Read the full article here…
Launch & Exhibition for Ground-Breaking Indian Graphic Novel
Posted: April 10, 2011
This Tuesday evening April 12th, during the London Book Fair, I am honoured to be invited to the London launch evening for a ground-breaking graphic novel from India entitled Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability from Navayana Publishing, in New Delhi. Writer S. Anand and traditional Pardhan-Gond artists Durgabi Vyam and Subhash Vyam craft a graphic biography of Dr. B.R. Ambedkar (1891-1956), one of India’s foremost revolutionaries, who drafted the Constitution of India. Defying conventional grammar, the writer and artists infuse fresh energy into the graphic idiom through their magical art mounted on an epic scale and interweave historical events with contemporary experiences of untouchability. After the book’s five-city launch in India, the Bhimayana roadshow travels to London on the eve of Dr. Ambedkar’s 120th anniversary, at the Nehru Centre. This has been made possible with the support of the Ambedkar International Mission, UK, and resources of One World Action, London.
The artists Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam will be participating in an invitation-only event which will see author Patrick French, poet Meena Kandasamy and myself speaking about Bhimayana. Following the launch, an exhibition of art work from Bhimayana, including two 8 foot x 5 foot canvases based on the graphic novel, will be on display to the public during the day at the Nehru Centre Gallery on April 13th and 14th - the actual anniversary of Dr B.R. Ambedkar’s birth. Copies of Bhimayana, signed by the artists, will be available for sale at the venue. 14 inch x 22 inch prints from Bhimayana on special art paper will also be available for sale (£25 a piece), as well as T-shirts (£12 each). Navayana will use the proceeds from these items to publish more books opposing the caste system. For further details of this UK tour, please visit this site. And you can read more about this and other recent Indian graphic novels in my Article Indian Comics: A Visual Renaissance.
This Week’s Article: Renée French
Posted: April 10, 2011
No matter how odd, disturbing or horrific Renée French’s subjects become, there is always a beauty to their ethereal, gossamer draughtsmanship. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, French is a fastidious obsessive, whose pencil touches the paper’s surface tentatively, almost tenderly, and coaxes velvety textures inside her tiny panels, often crafted same-size as their printed versions or smaller. Read the full article here…
London’s Bubbling Over with Comics Again!
Posted: April 7, 2011
There’s plenty going on in the wide worlds of comics over the coming days in London. Tonight, I’m off to the launch party for Hail To The King!, a tribute exhibition to the American comic book genius Jack Kirby at the Resistance Gallery. This show runs till the end of April.
Tomorrow night David Blandy is screening his new Hiroshima-inspired artist’s film Child of the Atom at the ICA at 6.30pm with collaborating Manga artist Inko, and Hayley Campbell and Tim Pilcher are delivering their provocative double-bill of comics lectures on Sex, Death, Hell & Superheroes at The Last Tuesday Society.
Superhero multi-media geekfest Kapow! will dominate this weekend at the Business Design Centre near Angel and if you’ve not snagged an advance ticket, you can’t get it on the day but can watch lots of the proceedings on the IGN Network’s hub.
And then next week brings the London Book Fair and I’ll be chairing three different graphic novel seminars, one each day - Monday Graphic Novels as Literature with Dan Franklin (Jonathan Cape), Angus Cargill (Faber), John Harris Dunning (Salem Brownstone) and Kevin O’Neill (League of Extraordinary Gentlemen); Tuesday Graphic Novels for the Boys with Eoin Colfer (Artemis Fowle), Ian Culbard (Sherlock Holmes), Rob Davis (Don Quixote) & Brady Webb (Panini Marvel); and Wednesday The Graphic Novel Renaissance with Sam Arthur (Nobrow), Olivier Cadic (Cinebook), Emma Hayley (SelfMadeHero) & Lizzie Spratt (Walker). These seminars are free but you do have to be registered to attend LBF, sorry it’s not open to all. Hope to see some of you at some of these events over the days ahead.
This Week’s Article: Angouleme 2011
Posted: April 3, 2011
My New Year doesn’t properly kick off till the last weekend in January when I make my annual pilgrimage and battery re-charge to the biggest and best comics festival in the world (outside Asia). Two hours by TGV from Paris, Angoulême lies on plateau above the Charente river in the south west of France. If you’re wondering why this historic city, a former centre of paper-making, has become world-famous as the combined Cannes, Frankfurt, San Diego and Mecca of comics, the capital of the ‘9th Art’, it boils down to timing and politics. Read the full article here…
Time Out Blows Hot & Cold About Graphic Novels
Posted: March 31, 2011
Last week, London listing magazine Time Out included a review of the Tamara Drewe DVD by Carol Barker, who wrote: “...it’s hard to feel sympathy for the characters’ ‘problems’, particularly Tamara’s, who remains as paper-thin as her comic-strip roots.” One wonders if this DVD reviewer has properly read Posy Simmonds’ original graphic novel. If she had, she might have discovered how different it is from the lighter, slighter movie adaptation by Stephen Frears. To give film-goers a happy ending, Frears chose to avoid the tragic demise of one major character and in doing so also omitted a lot of the ramifications about teenage despair in rural England.
This is not the first example of the complex source material in comics being richer and deeper than the cinematic confection brought to the screen. Carol Barker also makes more than a suggestion here that the reason Tamara seems so shallow in the film can be put down to the fact that she originated in a comic-strip, where characters are inevitably “paper-thin”. Read or re-read Tamara Drewe and you’ll find that Posy writes with real depth and subtlety of characterisation.
This week, I’m glad to say, the Books section in Time Out leads off with a whole page by Daneet Steffens covering Hair Shirt and Baby’s in Black from SelfMadeHero and Vignettes from Ystov and The Rime of the Modern Mariner from Jonathan Cape, all of them very positively critiqued and three of them illustrated. More proof that comics can be anything but “paper-thin”.
This Week’s Article: Previews For May 2011
Posted: March 27, 2011
Chester Brown, Dave McKean and Yuichi Yokoyama are just three of the stellar creators with new books due to be released in May 2011. In today’s Previews article I select more highlights of the new releases that caught my eye. Read the full article here…
Exhibition: Pinocchio by Winshluss
Posted: March 24, 2011
Marvel at artwork by the winner of the Angoulême Festival BD of the year, in a warped retelling of Collodi’s classic in English from Knockabout Comics. I’m looking forward to interviewing Vincent Paronnaud (aka Winshluss) for this website and Comic Heroes magazine. His twisted, hilariously bleak reinterpretation of Collodi’s classic scooped the 2009 Angoulême best book of the year prize. Knockabout in the UK and Last Gasp in the US have published a ravishing hardback edition, faithful to the bande dessinée original. He’s making a flying visit to London as he is totally wrapped up now in co-directing with Marjane Satrapi the live-action movie based on her graphic novel Chicken With Plums, due out in France this September. More…
Where: Foyles Gallery, 113-119 Charing Cross Road, London WC2
When: March 29 to April 9, 2011
Pencil It! : Meet Zoom Rockman at Free Comics Evening
Posted: March 24, 2011
I’ve just been reliably informed that the precocious 10-year old cartooning prodigy Zoom Rockman (and yes that is his real name not a pen-name!) will be joining Ilya and me tomorrow night Friday March 25th at the free opening event of Westminster Libraries’ PENCIL IT! season on comics, manga and graphic novels. An avid Beano reader, Zoom publishes his own comic, cannily called The Zoom, and was featured recently on CBBC Newsround and BBC Breakfast as part of a report on the 60th birthday of Dennis the Menace. Can’t wait to meet this future UK comics superstar!
