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THE BLOG AT THE CROSSROADS
Top Comics, Graphic Novels and Manga Coming August 2016
Posted: June 4, 2016
Rich pickings this coming August. It’s not every month you get original and translated graphic novels from Jules Feiffer, Moebius, Raina Telgemeier, Cyril Pedrosa, Dash Shaw, Nate Powell, Greg Cook, Ben Haggarty & Adam Brockbank, not to mention newcomers like Sarah Lippett and the English debuts of Lucas Varela (a recommended wordless science fiction gem, cover below) and Ezequiel Garcia from Argentina, and Pablo Auladell and a whole anthology of other creators from Spain. Then among the books about comics, throw in a lavish catalogue for a major Steve Ditko exhibition and a nearly 600-page history of pioneering publishers Fantagraphics Books.
Still, for me the standout has to be Black Dog: The Dreams Of Paul Nash, Dave McKean’s dream-life story of War Artist Paul Nash. I think this may be McKean’s most evocative and provocative total masterwork yet, a new highpoint in his already stratospheric creative flow. I was lucky enough to get a front-row seat on May 28th for the world premiere at The Lakes International Comic Art Festival of the intensely moving live multi-media performance which accompanies it. It will performed again this October at Lakes (more details here) and is totally unmissable and unforgettable. Read my PG Tips here…
Top 18 Best Graphic Novels: July 2016
Posted: May 1, 2016
Like the cover above, let me light the way and help you navigate through the teetering towers of comics being published these days. Take a look through my suggestions for upcoming new comics releases out this July and I hope you’ll find some gems to add to your Summer Must-Read List. Maybe like me you’ve been waiting for ages for someone to release all of those searingly powerful Alack Sinner stories into English and this IDW finally does with the first big volume of these New York noir masterpieces. Also out in translation are the almost-1000-page biography of Osamu Tezuka and some top-class bandes desinées.
Making their graphic novel debuts this month are Margaret Atwood no less, as well as Myriad winner Jade Sarson. Forced to pick one, let me recommend from Nobrow Press Geis: A Matter Of Life And Death, first in a trilogy by Alexis Deacon, former winner of The Observer / Cape / Comica Graphic Short Story Prize. Below is a sample page of his luscious artwork, without balloons - a few more sneak peeks are on his blog here… Never stop believing in wonder… Read my PG Tips here…
Asian Comics by John A. Lent: A Book Review
Posted: April 26, 2016
Parochialism has plagued English-language comics studies for decades, as John Lent, editor and publisher of the International Journal of Comic Art, remarks in his introduction to his latest book: “The thinking in many quarters was that comics are an American idiom, and that’s that.” Fortunately, before the internet, a number of landmark books expanded Anglophone knowledge of international comics, blown wide open for example by Maurice Horn’s World Encyclopedia of Comics in 1976 and by Frederik Schodt’s Manga! Manga! The World of Japanese Comics in 1983. Now comes John Lent’s Asian Comics (University Press of Mississippi, Jackson, Mississippi, 342 pages, ISBN 978-1-62846-158-9, hardback, $60.00), the first book-length treatment in any language of comics from almost the entirety of the region. Read my Book Review here…
Top 16 Comics, Graphic Novels & Manga: June 2016
Posted: April 18, 2016
June is busting out all over with very different and intriguing new titles and here are the ones I’m most looking forward to. Standouts for me are The Ghosts We Know by Canada’s Sean Karemaker and the new edition of Worry Doll by Hobart, Tasmania-resident Matt Coyle. What appeals to you the most? Happy hunting! Read my latest PG Tips here…
Aline Kominsky Crumb: Me and Mr Crumb
Posted: April 4, 2016
Aline Kominsky first met Robert Crumb at a party in San Francisco in late 1971. He was 29 years old, shy, scrawny and geekish, and already well on the way to becoming the most influential underground cartoonist of his generation; she was 23, with the sort of rock-hard buttocks and robust legs that could have walked straight out of a Crumb comic. Read my article for The Independent on Sunday Review here…
Top 25 Comics, Graphic Novels & Manga: May 2016
Posted: March 19, 2016
By creators from the four corners of the globe, from Inuits in the Arctic to European innovators, another motherlode of sequential delights arrives for your delectation. Among this month’s crop, there’s are biographies of Agatha Christie, James Joyce, Louise Michel and Edvard Munch, exciting projects from British superstars Brendan McCarthy, Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill, and Mary and Bryan Talbot, and no less than William ‘Cyberpunk’ Gibson writing his first American comic-book series. I’ve singled out Cigarette Girl from Top Shelf, a 1970s manga which I’ve been looking forward to for quite a while. Read my PG Tips for May 2016 here…
Tillie Walden: That In-Between State
Posted: March 12, 2016
It is hard to write anything about comics’ ‘Future Great’ Tillie Walden without mentioning her age, or rather her youth, a liminal nineteen years. Her first two graphic novels came out last year from Avery Hill Press in London and show that she is still close enough to her childhood and adolescence to genuinely recapture their intensity, yet with a craft and maturity that belie her youth. Read my profile of and interview with her and read her new 2-page comic here…
Best Graphic Novels of 2015: An International Perspective Part 2
Posted: March 11, 2016
In this second round-up from my international correspondents, I am once again hugely grateful to these five European connoisseurs for selecting and commenting on their favourites graphic novels of 2015. The range and brilliance of these books released last year reconfirms what exceptional times we are living through for the comics medium. And let’s hope it’s not too long before more of these creators’ gems get translated into English. In the meantime, explore their new titles and expand your horizons. Read their reviews here…
Charlotte Salomon: Life? Or Theatre?
Posted: February 27, 2016
From 1940 to 1942, between the ages of 24 and 26, the German artist Charlotte Salomon created “etwas ganz verrückt Besonderes” (“something really crazy special”). It was the product of the special, crazy times and situation she found herself in. In 1939, because of the Nazis’ mounting persecution of Jews, Salomon had fled Berlin, where she was the last Jewish student at the city’s art school. She sought refuge in France with her grandparents on her late mother’s side in the region of Nice. On March 4th 1940, she watched helplessly as her grandmother threw herself from a window to her death. Only then did her grandfather reveal the family’s secret: she was the last survivor of a maternal line, all of whom had committed suicide over three generations. When she was eight, Charlotte had been told her own mother passed away from influenza; now she learned the truth, that she too had jumped and killed herself. In exile and solitude, under the long shadows of this tragic heritage and the immediate menace of Hitler’s forces, Salomon would barely eat, drink or sleep to finish recording her family’s histories and her personal experiences in an unprecedented magnum opus in pictures and words. Read my new Article here…
Top 21 Graphic Novels: April 2016
Posted: February 14, 2016
Blutch, Chester Brown, Brecht Evens, Manuele Fior and Jiro Taniguchi - this month brings us yet more remarkable graphic novels from near and far - from the US, UK, Canada, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Brazil, South Africa and The Netherlands. There’s also vintage Krazy Kat dailies by George Herriman, a biography of New Yorker cartoonist supreme Peter Arno, an unconventional autobiographical take on Batman, and an anthology entirely by women gamers. Read my latest recommendations for April 2016 here…
