RSS Feed
Facebook
Twitter
THE BLOG AT THE CROSSROADS
HETA-UMA & MANGARO: 40 Years Of Wild Japanese Graphics
Posted: January 23, 2015
Back in the post-hippy, pre-punk early Seventies in Japan, Yumura Teruhiko (above in a fashion advert) was the trailblazer of a consciously raw, hand-made and apparently craftless graphic style, for which he coined the term ‘heta-uma’, broadly ‘unskilled-skilled’, or ‘bad but good’. Rejecting the period’s empty polish and inhuman perfectionism, ‘heta-uma’ was a much-needed injection of Pop Art Brut. Yumura rejoiced in exuberant scrawling and collage, off-register colouring and Japanised English, often embracing yet subverting imported American ideals from romance comics or muscle-building adverts. Under the mock-Westernised pen-names ‘Terry Johnson’ or ‘King Terry’ from ‘Tokyo Funky Studio’ or ‘Flamingo Studio’, his covers and comics appeared in the monthly manga magazine Garo. Read my report and watch my video about two French exhibitions on underground manga here…
Peter Pontiac (1951-2015)
Posted: January 21, 2015
Sad news in from The Netherlands. The legendary Dutch underground comics visionary Peter Pontiac, pen-name of Peter J.G. Pollmann, died last night aged 63. Pontac should have been far better known internationally than he was, but his comics and graphics were published in Dutch, English, Spanish and Italian anthologies like Modern Papier, Tante Leny Presenteert, Wipe-out Comix, Cocktail Comix, El Vibora, Anarchy Comic, Mondo Snarfo and Puck Comic Party.
Pontiac was the special guest and exhibited at the HIU8, the 8th edition of the Happening Internazionale Underground, in Milan on May 17th to 19th 2002 (poster above). An interview with him ran in an underground special of the Italian magazine The Artist #5 in 2003. His comics were also translated into French along with work by all the other Tante Leny artists in the two-volume anthology Tante Leny Présente from Artefact in 1977 and 1979.
Over on Broken Frontier, there’s a good overview about Pontiac by Bart Croonenborghs from 2011. That year, Oog & Blik published a wonderful 368-page hardback in Dutch of his short comics entitled Rhythm.
His landmark graphic novel about his father’s role in the War, Kraut won the Marten Toonderprijs Prize in 2011. It was included in the guide I edited, 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die, but so far has not be put into English.Forbidden Planet International ran Wim Lockefeer’s commentary on this remarkable memoir.
To the end, Pontiac was still working. His final work, a new graphic novel entitled Styx of de Zesplankenkoorts aptly about death and dying, will probably be published in its unfinished or almost-finished version. Here is an obituary feature on the NRC.NL news site, and here’s a Vimeo video of him talking about his Styx project and showing pages in progress. In it Pontiac says, “If he comes and gets me, I’ve had him, it’s 1-1. But then the book must be finished. Otherwise it’s 2-0 and I won’t allow death.”
STYX of de Zesplankenkoorts from voordekunst on Vimeo.
Best Graphic Novels of 2014: An International Perspective
Posted: January 15, 2015
Comics is a Big World! All too often our terms of reference and our co-ordinates can be rather provincial and blinkered, sticking to what we know. This regular annual survey is one of my favourite features on my website, because it lets me learn about amazing comics I might never otherwise hear about. In several cases, this coverage below is the first, and perhaps only, English-language exposure these comics may get. So join these trusted connoisseurs, members of the team who helped me compile the 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die, as they reveal the best releases of last year in Brazil, Denmark, Germany, Portugal, Serbia, South Korea & Sweden! The cover above (sans text) is from Korporativni pandemonium (‘Corporate Pandemonium’) by Zoran Penevski & Aleksandar Zolotić, published by Besna kobila in Serbia. Read Part 1 of this global survey here…
Dylan Horrocks: All Pens Are Magic
Posted: January 9, 2015
In his solo debut graphic novel Hicksville (1998), Dylan Horrocks envisaged a modest, perhaps unattainable utopia for his chosen medium in the eponymous remote coastal town in his native New Zealand, whose every citizen appreciates the wonders of comics. Hicksville’s symbolic lighthouse brims over with a Borghesian library of masterpieces, including unknown comics composed by Lorca and Picasso.
Horrocks soon found himself hired by New York giant DC to script, but not draw, commercial comic books like Batgirl (#39-#57, a 19-issue run, extract below) and Hunter: The Age of Magic (one mini-series and 25 issues), a dream ticket for some, but for Horrocks a nightmare he had to escape. “It almost killed me as a cartoonist. I was writing in a voice that wasn’t mine and felt trapped in other people’s wish-fulfilment fantasies. Eventually, I lost my cartooning voice entirely, and my lifelong faith in stories and art.” Read how Dylan Horrocks found his way back to comics in his new graphic novel Sam Zabel and The Magic Pen here…
Books To Read: Best Graphic Novels March 2015
Posted: January 1, 2015
Hello again and Happy New Year to you all, may it be your best ever! In fact, 2015 will mark the 10th anniversary of my website and to get things started here are my suggestions for the finest titles to look out for coming out next March. For my personal recommendations this month, eagerly anticipated by me, I have selected not one but two excitingly original graphic novels.
First up, after The House That Groaned, for her second graphic novel, Death Of The Artist (Jonathan Cape) sees Karrie Fransman up her game and take on five different styles, media and personalities, as she reunites with university friends to compare and contrast their creative hopes and fears. Here’s a sneak peak of the book’s brilliant die-cut cover and title page beneath to whet your appetite!
And then Behind The Curtain from SelfMadeHero is a joint graphic memoir by Andrzej Klimowski and Danusia Schejbal, their first collaboration on a story of their own rather than adapting a classic. In it they relate their lives in communist Poland through a period of minor and momentous changes and challenges. My full reviews will follow. Meanwhile, details of these two intriguing, life-enhacing comics, and much more to look forward to, are laid out below for your delectation. Read my latest Article here…
My Best Comics & Manga of 2014: Year in Review
Posted: December 31, 2014
There’s much more to comics than long-form, single-volume graphic novels (much as I really enjoy them and set out my personal Best of 2014 of them from Britain, North America and Europe here…). So in this part of my Year in Review, I’ve picked out my favourite, most interesting superhero-related comics, translated manga and books about comics. Read my PG Tips here…
Enjoy My Complete Kosmopolis Lecture On UK Comics
Posted: December 30, 2014
Last year thanks to the British Council, I was a guest at the Kosmopolis Festival in Barcelona, with Karrie Fransman, Dave McKean, Paul Rainey and Peter Stanbury. I gave a lecture about the developments and current scene in British comics. I’m so pleased to discover that Spanish expert Breixo Harguindey has kindly summarised my speech and provided a complete video of my one-hour, unscripted live presentation Infinite Canvases: 21st Century British Comics for you all to watch. I do encourage you to fast forward the MC’s eloquent seven-minute biographical introduction, if you don’t understand Spanish! The images I am projecting appear cropped and small bottom right, so a bit small but visible, and you can find out more about these creators and their works here on my website, of course.
KOSMOPOLIS 2013 // Llenços infinits. Còmics del segle XXI. Paul Gravett (VO En)
Happy Holidays!
Posted: December 24, 2014
It’s that time of year, so let me thank you for visiting my website, I hope you’ve found it fun and informative. To wish you the jolliest of holidays, I’d like to share with you a French children’s comic I was drawn to at a BD collectors’ fair a few weeks ago in Paris. This is a telling front-cover image of ‘Noël 1914’ in this centenary year of the outbreak of the First World War and the kind of little-known (at least to me) item of comics history that I love coming across.
This eleventh issue of the bi-monthly IMA, L’Ami des jeunes actually dates from December 1955, and ties in to the opening two-page illustrated text story.Thanks to Bernard Joubert, I’ve learnt that this cover signed ‘A.G.’ is by André Galland, an illustrator who died in 1963 and is now largely forgotten. The tale of ‘Noël 1914’ inside is written by ‘A.Y.L.’ , alias A.Y. Lopin, director/editor of the publication. Not surprisingly, his story is highly sentimentalised, as the elderly Breton couple Tonton and Tatie (Uncle and Auntie) reminisce about the little girl Geneviève whom Tonton as a young soldier or ‘poilu’ on patrol found on a farm on Christmas Eve 1914, hiding under her bed, since her parents had been dragged away by ‘les Prussiens’. Geneviève dreams of Santa bringing her parents back and bringing her a doll.
So for Christmas morning, the soldiers make a Christmas tree from three guns and decorate it with candles and on the floor the simple wooden doll that Tonton has carved for her. Geneviève ends up being cared for and raised by the country couple for five years, and the story closes years later with the adult Geneviève paying a return visit and bringing her childhood doll with her.
For all its slushiness, this vignette does demonstrate to its readers that by 1955, those young French adults who had survived the horrors of the First World War would have been in their Sixties, like Tonton and Tatie, and show how the traumas of that conflict continued to echo long after.
Manga Jiman 2014 Shortlist Announced
Posted: December 23, 2014
The Embassy of Japan in London organises an annual competition called Manga Jiman, inviting artists in the UK to submit their comics on a set theme. Once again, The Embassy joined Kiriko Kubo, Ilya, Maya Gartner and myself to select the shortlist of winning entries for this year’s Manga Jiman and the new four-panel comic-strip Yonkoma Manga competitions.
The Embassy has now posted the entries online in alphabetical order by title. The position of each entrant will be announced at an invitation-only awards ceremony in March 2015 at the Embassy of Japan, with the top prize of two plane tickets to Japan! You’ll also be able to see all the entries in a free exhibition at the Embassy through March.
What Are My Top Ten Graphic Novels of 2014?
Posted: December 21, 2014
In an abundant year of veterans’ career highpoints and newcomers’ remarkable debuts, covered in my previous round-ups for The Independent newspaper in April, June, August, and October, I’ve selected my favourite, most interesting reads, all of them works which demonstrate how the medium at its most innovative and individualistic can stretch the multi-layered, visual-verbal experience of comics far beyond mere films on paper. I’ve organised my Year in Review’s Top Tens more or less by creators from/based in Britain, North America and Europe, and you can click on the links to read my reviews and articles about them. Find out what I’ve chosen as my Best of 2014 here…
