Think of a City
My image created for the Think of a City invitational series conceived and hosted by Alison Sampson RIBA and Ian MacEwan.
All About Him: Huston’s The Dead
“He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude.” -James Joyce, The Dead Director John Huston’s 1987 film adaptation of “The Dead,” the final short story of James Joyce’s collection Dubliners,...
Boom For Real
Whoever would not understand me would not understand any better the roaring of a tiger. Aimé Césaire I never knew Jean-Michel Basquiat, although we were of the same time and place and had friends in common, but I recognized his abilities the moment I saw his work. I can still recall how his painting resonated...
Tonči Zonjić: The Total Approach
I first noticed Croatian cartoonist Tonči Zonjić only recently, when his work appeared in the Image comic Zero, which is written by Ales Kot and drawn by a different artist every issue. Among quite an interesting and eclectic group of artists, Zonjić’s cover and interior art for Zero #9 stand out as informed and moving...
Antonioni and Buñuel: The Ground of Being
Thematic connections and similarities can be seen between scenes in films by the Spaniard Luis Buñuel and multiple works by the Italian Michelangelo Antonioni. Two of the 20th century’s greatest directors, Buñuel and Antonioni competed for recognition and took turns winning the same awards on alternative years at film festivals. For example, Antonioni’s L’Eclisse competed...
James Romberger Comics
James Romberger’s ecological comic Post York was published in 2012 by Uncivilized Books; it includes a flexi-disc by his son Crosby and was nominated for an 2013 Eisner Award for Best Single Issue. He is currently working on a follow up. In November 2014 Fantagraphics Books published The Late Child and Other Animals, a graphic...
Wojnarowicz’s Apostasy
“Ants are the only insects to keep pets, use tools, make war and capture slaves.” — David Wojnarowicz A Fire in My Belly, a film with a depiction of fire ants swarming over a crucifix, was removed from the Hide/Seek exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian through the intercession of the president...
Exes and Ohs
Jaime Hernandez uses the temporal flexibility of the comics medium to work like memory: moments that are far separated in time recontextualize when put in proximity to each other. He shows that the ways people treat each other resonate unpredictably through their lives. In the world he has built on paper and in ours, passion...
Kirby: Approaching the Threshold
The status of American comics pioneer and creative fount Jack Kirby slipped badly in the space of a few short years in the early 1970s. His highly successful resume at Marvel had led DC to promote his defection to them as their greatest triumph, but their support quickly waned. There was some resentment directed at...
Marie Severin’s Due
There can be no doubt that Marie Severin deserves a book about her lifelong efforts in comics. More recognition than that would be appropriate even if she wasn’t one of the few well-known female practitioners in the last century. One would think that for her essential role as E.C.’s colorist alone, Severin should at least...
Illustrated Wallace Stevens: Madame La Fleurie
I recently devoured two of the excellent collections of Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates assembled by Dean Mullaney and Bruce Canwell for IDW. It seems appropriate to apply my feelings about Caniff’s narratives to a Wallace Stevens poem. The piece shows the difference between illustration and interpretive cartooning. Stevens’ work roils with imagery, but...
“Then Protest!”
François Truffaut’s films are most often analyzed in terms of their cinematic structure and the interpersonal relationships of their stories, and these qualities do account for a good part of their appeal. His films are not considered particularly political in the context of his contemporaries of the French New Wave. However, Truffaut does critique...
Where I’m (Coming) From
Video made after the Charlie Hebdo Massacre of January 7 2015 in Paris, France. Click on the link and turn on the sound: Where I’m (Coming) From
Yearning for Space: a conversation with Tom Kaczynski
I first encountered Tom Kaczynski’s work while delving into the substantial collection of comics-related materials in Columbia University’s Butler Library stacks, where there is a run of Fantagraphics’ anthology title MOME. I very much liked Kaczynski’s deliberately drawn short stories such as “100,000 Miles” and then, when I was lucky enough to get a story...
