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THE BLOG AT THE CROSSROADS
Pulp Festival: Comics Art At The Crossroads
Posted: July 31, 2015
What position do comics occupy today as an art form? All too often, they seem to have been sidelined by galleries, museums and funding bodies. Perhaps it’s symbolic that PULP Festival, which set out in 2014 to reposition comics from the margins to the crossroads with other arts, takes place on the Eastern outskirts of Paris: not far by train but perceptibly distant from the capital’s epicentre. Read my report and enjoy my video tours here…
Sung-hee Kim: Conscientious Korean Cartoonist
Posted: July 21, 2015
Budding South Korean writer and artist Sung-hee Kim began by majoring in international economics to please her parents, until one day the wind wafted a copy of the student newspaper across her path. “I took this as the answer,” she recalls. “I joined the newsroom and became the paper’s editorial cartoonist.” Her true calling had begun. Read my article and interview about her and her new 2-page comic here…
Learning To Read From Comics
Posted: July 12, 2015
During Comica Festival 2014, at the inaugural discussion day S.M.A.S.H. at The Barbican Library, I got talking with two such London schoolteachers who were introducing their young pupils to graphic novels using The Arrival and Mouse Guard. They each kindly agreed to let me interview them about their challenges and achievements in doing this. Read my new Article here…
Books To Read: Best Graphic Novels - September 2015
Posted: July 8, 2015
Rich pickings coming up from September 2015, with something for pretty much everyone. Take your pick from fictionalised biographies of the great artists Bosch and Pascin to unique interpretations of Aesop, Anthony Trollope, Philip Pullman and Jean-Patrick Manchette, from punks in New Zealand to an outed cop in Jamaica, from fearless self-revelations about an abusive relationship or cancer in the family to searing documentaries from Mexico and Iraq, and perhaps the biggest story of all, Jens Harder’s Alpha (above), nothing less than a trilogy on the evolution of our entire planet and species. Scope and ambition aplenty in my carefully selected highlights this month - explore and enjoy! Read all about them here…
Karrie Fransman: Death Of The Artist
Posted: June 27, 2015
Karrie Fransman‘s second graphic novel Death Of The Artist asks whether youthful dreams are inevitably snuffed out by adulthood’s encroaching responsibilities. Assorted deaths big and small, symbolic and real, menace throughout her inventive, insidious psychodrama, whether in the opening photo of the protagonists playing dead on the grass, or that ‘little death’ of an orgasm, or a tragedy which gives the whole project purpose and poignancy. Read my review of Death Of The Artist here…
Woodrow Phoenix: Empathy Generators
Posted: June 26, 2015
Few creators have been stretching the capacities of comics to fully involve the reader as persistently as London-based all-rounder Woodrow Phoenix. From his New Wave roots in Fast Fiction, the UK’s small press scene in the early 1980’s, through such genre mashups as Sinister Romance (1988) or Sugar Buzz (1998), or co-conceiving Nelson (2011, below), a fictional biography told in short stories, one per year, by multiple cartoonists, Phoenix keeps setting himself challenges to refine and re-define the medium, and exceeding them. Read my new article, interview and Woodrow’s new 2-page comic here…
Books To Read: Best Graphic Novels - August 2015
Posted: June 13, 2015
Nordic comics make a splash this month with Sweden’s Kim W. Andersson, Norway’s Benedikt Kaltenborn and Finland’s Tommi Musturi, whose The Book Of Hope makes it as my PG Tip for the top graphic novel of a very diverse and enticing month of upcoming titles. It’s also quite something to look forward to the first graphic memoir from underground legend and Zippy the Pinhead mastermind Bill Griffith. I hope you enjoy investigating the comics, graphic novels and manga selected below - part of my monthly service to help you broaden your reading horizons! Read my recommendations here…
Britain is Guest Country at Munich Comicfestival June 4-7
Posted: June 3, 2015
Eddie Campbell, Rob Davis, Rufus Dayglo, Jock, Dave McKean, Audrey Niffenegger, Mike Perkins, Posy Simmonds and Bryan & Mary Talbot are among those invited to celebrate British comics at this weekend’s Munich Comicfestival. I will be interviewing several of them (in English) over the coming days, and there will be a vibrant exhibition of original art to accompany them. Rufus Dayglo has designed the Tank Girl-themed poster. Come and join us if you can! More details here…
Hervé Di Rosa: The Last Comic
Posted: May 14, 2015
“The great names in comics have affected me every bit as much as the great painters I love.” Growing up in the 1960s, relatively isolated in Sète on the French Mediterranean coast, Hervé Di Rosa got his culture fix from reproductions of fine art in books and from comics. “I saw no difference between them in scale or validity.” Starting to exhibit his art in 1980, Di Rosa with his brother Richard and Robert Combas drew on their passions for both art and pop culture to pioneer the radical French ‘Figuration Libre’ movement in the 1980s. Unlike most earlier Pop artists, who were not necessarily raised on comics, Di Rosa explains, “I don’t cite comics in a superficial way, I incorporate their techniques into my work.” Read my profile of Di Rosa and his brand-new comic here…
Best Comics, Graphic Novels and Manga Coming July 2015
Posted: May 2, 2015
Poetry Is Useless and Pain Is Really Strange! Those are the titles of two of this July’s upcoming comics for your consideration on this Free Comic Book Day! Spain makes a flourish this month too with intriguing books by Joan Cornellà, Santiago Garcia and Max de Radigues, as does Israel with the Hanuka twins and Boaz Lavie on their ravishing graphic novel The Divine. Lots more to explore here, so here’s hoping you find some titles special to you which you can look forward to. To pick one this month, I’ve plumped for Island, the bold project of Brandon Graham and Emma Rios at Image, a ‘comic magazine for comics’ offering 112 oversized original colour pages for the insane price of only $7.99. I have a soft spot for creator-driven/friendly anthologies and Island comes with that tingle, a bit like it’s 1974 all over again when the first Métal Hurlant was about to turn French comics upside down. As these latest PG Tips show, that revolution has not slowed down since and shows no signs of doing so soon… Read my latest column here…
