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THE BLOG AT THE CROSSROADS
Best Online Comics Criticism 2010
Posted: January 20, 2011
My recent article on War Comics: Reinforcing The Military’s Propaganda Machine? has received an ‘honourable mention’ in the selection of the best online comics criticism of 2010 over at the excellent Comics Comics site edited by Tim Hodler, Dan Nadel and Frank Santoro. Many thanks to them for the mention, and I recommend that you check out their other picks of the best online comics criticism of last year.
This Week’s Article: Previews For March 2011
Posted: January 16, 2011
In my Previews article series I highlight the most note-worthy publications due to be hitting the shelves in a couple of months time, and Dan Clowes’ Mister Wonderful is just one of the standout books due to be released in March. Read the full article here…
Joann Sfar’s Spurious Gainsbourg “Graphic Novel”
Posted: January 14, 2011
Some may call me oversensitive, but my tingling “Snidey sense” rarely fails me when it comes to mentions of comics. I was reading Wally Hammond’s review of Joann Sfar‘s Gainsbourg DVD in Time Out #2107 (page 72, January 6-12, 2011). He writes that Sfar is “adapting his own graphic novel”. There is actually no pre-existing graphic novel of Gainsbourg by Sfar to adapt. What there is, is a huge 450-page book of drawings by Sfar but this was published after the movie and compiles artworks, storyboards, sketches, which he made while preparing and directing the movie, but this is not a graphic novel as source material.
Second, and linked to this, I also take issue with the lazy film-reviewer shortcut of using the ‘C’ word and equating almost anything comics-related (even if in this case the film is not an adaptation and the only connection is that Sfar is a graphic novelist first and foremost) with being self-evidently shallow and slapdash, as in this phrase: “The film maintains a comic-strip insouciance showing neither great depth nor over-fastidiousness with the historical record…”. The prejudice seems obvious to me here - the whole comics medium as valid as film, older than and foundational to film, and today easily the equal of film, is reduced and dismissed. Even the consciously awkward, almost sneery use of the term “comic-strip” underlines this snubbing.
I noticed the same error re the graphic novel source of Gainsbourg in Time Out‘s online review by one “BR” who chimes: “Here, the celebrity biopic is given a wild and wicked makeover with the help of director Joann Sfar’s source graphic novel, blending real life, comic book and musical.”
At least somebody out here is watching…
V&A Lunchtime Talks: Ethnicity & Gender In Western Comics
Posted: January 13, 2011
The Victorian & Albert Museum in South Kensington is hosting the third of a programme of free lunchtime lectures on the social history of comics by writer, editor and cultural historian Ian Rakoff. The National Art Library at the V&A houses The Rakoff Collection of Graphic Literature, perhaps the most significant resource on comics, American and international, in the UK.
Ian’s focus next Wednesday January 19th is on Western comics, from strips to comic books, and how they have dealt with ethnicity and gender. Fully illustrated, totally free, held in the fancy Hochhauser Auditorium in the Sackler Education Centre (where the Comica Symposium was held two years ago), it’s sure to be an enlightening way to spend your lunch hour.
This Week’s Article: Moebius & Jean Giraud (Part 2)
Posted: January 9, 2011
This week’s article is Part 2 of my look at the double life the French geniuses of contemporary comics, Moebius and Jean Giraud. Part 1 of the article is avaliable here.
Since 1963, Giraud has made his name illustrating and later also writing some thirty albums about the rugged, rebellious US cavalry officer, Lieutenant Blueberry, crafting one of the world’s most vivid and humane westerns in any medium. However, it would not be until 1968, amid the heady French revolution in adult auteur comics, that his Moebius side would emerge fully-formed as a visionary universe-builder, infusing science fiction with an intense reality and spirituality.
Now 72 and being fêted with the Moebius Trans-Forme in-depth retrospective (running at the Fondation Cartier in Paris until 13 March) he has come a long way since he failed to qualify at art school for the illustration department and was relegated to designing wallpaper.
The video below is one of several fascinating short films posted on Daily Motion featuring Moebius, which are all well worth checking out.
Comics at the Courtauld Institute
Posted: January 7, 2011
Who would have thought it? As further evidence that comics in Britain are literally getting everywhere these days, the illustrious establishment The Courtauld Institute of Art on the Strand in London is hosting a whole-day conference on the interrelationships between Surrealism, Science Fiction and Comics on Saturday January 22nd 2011. Among the speakers will be the acclaimed graphic novelist Bryan Talbot, presenting his two Grandville masterpieces and I will be speaking too. Here’s the abstract of my paper:
Rarebit Fiends, Bizarros and Fat Furies: How American Comic Strips and Comic Books Relate to Surrealism and Science Fiction
My paper will explore the connections and relationships of certain key writers and artists working in the American newspaper strip and comic book mass-market industries with the fields of Science Fiction and Surrealism during the first sixty years of the 20th century. It will also appraise the roles of these mainstream media in disseminating and popularising an accessible form of Surrealism and Science Fiction to a broad public. It will start by examining certain striking imagery in Winsor McCay‘s Dream of the Rarebit Fiend (1904-13) which anticipates the Surrealist film L’Age d’Or from 1930 written by Dalí and Luis Bunuel and directed by Bunuel. Iconic scenes such as those of the cow found in a woman’s bed or a man stuck to the ceiling appeared years earlier in McCay’s work. Starting in the Fifties, editors Julius Schwartz and Mort Weisinger came to DC Comics from science fiction and introduced many writers to the comics medium, resulting in a blend of the populist and fantastical in Strange Adventures and Mystery in Space. These same writers under Weisinger’s tenure on Superman and its related titles created an unprecedented imaginative outpouring, enriching the Man of Steel’s appeal and mythos. Finally, writer-editor Richard Hughes with the deadpan artististry of Ogden Whitney achieved a highpoint in surreal comic books in Herbie, an odd, overweight boy whose lollipops endow him with extraordinary powers as The Fat Fury.
More details and the full programme of the Conference organised by Dr Gavin Parkinson are available here. Tickets cost £15, or £10 for concessions and Courtauld staff and students, and include coffee and reception.
It’s going to be a fascinating, ‘interdisciplinary’ and ‘transmedial’ exchange of ideas and perspectives. I do hope some of you can join me, Bryan and the other speakers and public talking part.
Best Crime Comics is Best Christmas Present
Posted: January 4, 2011
Kev Sutherland, regular contributor to The Beano, recently reported that his two best Christmas presents were The Essential Guide To World Comics by Tim Pilcher & Brad Brooks [I’d also recommend this excellent resource on global comics], and my very own Mammoth Book Of Best Crime Comics.
As Kev explains, this was a 480-page compendium “... which I hadn’t even known existed, though it’s been around since 2008. Apart from The Spirit and Torpedo, I didn’t think crime comics were a genre I had much time for, but this book contains some gems whose existence I’d never even imagined. A British Roy Carson strip from 1953, a Secret Agent X9 newspaper strip by Alex Raymond, and a Bernie Krigstein strip from the TV spin-off comic 87th Precinct from 1962 were particular treats, among many other gems. Paul, where did you begin to find such stuff, and where might a curious reader find more?”
Thanks for the compliments Kev, glad you enjoyed it. And this website is a great place to discover loads more wonderful comics, of the criminal variety or whatever the genre.
This Week’s Article: The Best Of 2010
Posted: January 2, 2011
The turning of the year and a time once more to look back and to look forward, but few comics, or anything really, in 2010 could hope to beat this amazing Saturday night and Sunday morning I spent in Rio de Janeiro, when Melinda Gebbie (left), Kevin O’Neill and other guests of Rio Comicon danced and sang along with hundreds of favela revellers at a huge, loud, joyful carnival rehearsal. Massive thanks to Roberto Ribeiro, Ricky Goodwin, Ana Alexandrino who took this photo, ace translator Carlos Batista, and Edna Lopes from the samba school for making this life-affirming experience possible. So here’s my overview of some of the comics highlights from the Old Year, together with a few comics highlights to look forward to in the New Year. Read the full article here…
This Week’s Article: PG Tips No. 33
Posted: December 26, 2010
Several recent graphic novels literally let us see the inside of another person’s head by harnessing the flexibility of their illustrative styles, their special effects budgets limited only by the author’s imagination, and through the harmonies and dissonances between texts and images.
In the lastest installment of my on-going PG Tips series, I take a look at X’ed Out, the lastest graphic novel release by Charles Burns (famed for his teen-plague masterpiece Blackhole); French-comics master Joann Sfar reimagines the children’s classic The Little Prince; the logic of dreams, and dreams within dreams, suffuses Sleepyheads by Flemish illustrator and stand-up comedian Randall C.; and British cartoonist Brick reappropriates the slur Depresso in one angry man’s struggle through and triumph over depression. Read the full article here…
Season’s Greetings & Happy Holidays!
Posted: December 22, 2010
Click image to enlarge.
Sending you all Season’s Greetings and Happy Holidays with this lovely Sunday newspaper page of Polly & Her Pals, with the charming wordless ‘topper’ of Dot & Dash, both by the American genius Cliff Sterrett from IDW’s wondrous oversized new compendium, perhaps the most ravishing reprint edition of the year, which I’ve shamelessly treated myself to this Christmas.
In Dot & Dash I love the way our pup and kittie marvel as the wintry weather seems to thaw, before it snaps back again, as it looks set to do here in Britain. And as well as enjoying Sterrett’s deliriously distorted designs in the main Polly strip, please do read the Polly dialogue, as her cough wakes up her parents and Paw stumbles about finding a cough drop for her, waking up the whole household. But all we see of these out-of-view shenanigans is the agitated, animated moggie reacting in the moonlight to the hoohah, before it’s ‘Snap!’, lights out and everyone falls back to sleep again. Nighty night!
