A panel from Adrian Tomine’s most recent book Shortcomings, published by Drawn & Quarterly.
On today’s program of Fresh Air on National Public Radio, Terry Gross will interview the illustrious Adrian Tomine. The program will be available for download HERE once the show has aired.
Drawn & Quarterly’s website offers even more news about Tomine, including new tour dates in Montreal, Cambridge, Providence and Washington DC.
-Sarah Morean
The Last Musketeer
By Jason
Fantagraphics
In this age of cavalier post-modernity, we’ve become largely accustomed to artists who bandy about cultural references with little regard for their significance or where they land on paint-splattered canvases. Scanning a few back cover descriptions of Jason’s work, one could be forgiven for quickly lumping the artist into this category.
Jason’s storylines have, after all, more often than not, been defined by the author’s affinity for the juxtaposition of seemingly divergent pieces of the cultural puzzle. Take The Left Bank Gang, which employs the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce comic artists at the center of a noirish bank heist, or the zombie love story that was The Living and the Dead.
Nevermind the carefree European existentialism of his characters, or the fact that said cast is nearly always comprised of expressionless anthropomorphic animals that might have been drawn by a money-strapped Herge filling in an empty animator’s seat at Disney.
When it was first launched on Act-I-Vate earlier this year, Fishtown was primarily known in comics circles as the Webcomic that won–and subsequently lost–Kevin Colden a 2007 Xeric Grant.
With nearly three-fifths of the story now serialized, Fishtown has amassed a large following based on its own merits, becoming more than simply an asterisk on the history of the Xeric Foundation, thanks in no small part to Colden’s tight pencil work and story laden with teenage drug use, sex, murder, and deceit, inspired by a true story from the artist’s home town of Philadelphia.
We met up with Colden last Wednesday in Manhattan’s lower east side, to talk about Webcomics, his rock ‘n roll career, and some big news in the neighborhood of Fishtown.
[Above, the 13th Apostle of Woodring. Below, the one and only Dispatch]
Read the rest of this entry »
Pinwheel
By Mike Bertino
Tender Loving Empire
There’s not much you can learn about Pinwheel from its cover. Yes, there’s a boy and a girl, but she’s not an ice queen and he never shoots lasers from his eyes. It’s not even about a polar bear (which you’ll find only on the back cover). Pinwheel is about two very different lives with one unexpected thing in common: the script.
Whether this device works or not hinges on the reader’s liberal understanding of the word “family.” A family could define a couple with children or maybe it could mean a bunch of gangsters. At least, that’s the way Mike Bertino plays on the word in his recently released and beautifully illustrated comic Pinwheel.
Midnight Sun
By Ben Towle
Slave Labor
“Midnight Sun is a work of fiction,” Ben Towle is quick to point out at the start of his afterword to this collection of his five-issue Slave Labor series. It’s an important thing to get out of the way at the top of the proceedings. After all, one could be easily forgiven for thinking that the book, a tale of a reporter sent out in search of the survivors of a Antarctic airship crash, is largely a work of historical fact.
It’s mistake which is largely justified by Towle’s next sentence, “This much is fact, though: on May 25th, on her way back from the North Pole, the airship Italia crashed on the arctic ice pack, killing one crewman on impact, stranding nine, and carrying off the remaining six.” The author lists off a few more facts, culminating with the rhetorical, “how much of Midnight Sun is true? If by ‘true’ one means ‘factual,’ then the answer is: ‘not a whole lot.’”
Amado Rodriguez and Bud Burgy, proud editors of the Muscles and Fights line of anthology comics.
January is a pretty dull month for comics conventions. So how do cartoonists get out and see each other? They throw anthology release parties, of course.
[Above, come for Evan Dorkin's lost Eltingville pilot, stay for the Deathklok. Below, viva la Dispatch!]
One stunning graphic novel and Ignatz Award later, Tom Neely may well be remember as 2007’s alternative comics’ rookie of the year. His largely-wordless 180 page debut, The Blot, with one large, splattered stroke, established Neely as an artist with a keen eye for the form’s classic masters, like E.C. Seegar and Carl Barks, and storyteller with strong leanings toward the fantastically absurd, making for one of the year’s most fiercely unique visions.
It’s fitting then, that Neely also saw fit to forgo publishing offers for his debut, opting instead to issue the book himself, a choice that, while exponentially increasing work for himself on the business end of things, also served to give the artist full creative control over the complete package, a decision that helped land The Blot on several year-end best of lists—ours included.
