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.
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Caniff: Momentum
“The impacts of both pictures and words drive more deeply into human awareness than any anthropologist has yet cared to note.” -Milton Caniff I just read four of IDW’s collections of Terry and the Pirates back-to-back. They comprise one of the most gripping narratives I have seen in comics. They are essential reading for anyone...
Cursing the Darkness: The Last Horrors of Alex Toth
Fear and suspense can be effectively created by the inference of the unknown. What is shown can be less harrowing than what is implied and then forms in the imagination of the reader. The late cartoonist Alexander Toth disliked drawing explicit horror and violence in the style of E.C., what he called “gore-gulping grind and...
Sammy Harkham: Naturalism and Specificity
Sammy Harkham’s Crickets #3 rivals in substance and importance two other comics that were published in a similar format: David Mazzucchelli’s Rubber Blanket #3 and Daniel Clowes’ Eightball #23. Harkham seems to be best known for editing the chameleonic, graphically revolutionary anthology Kramer’s Ergot and he has served his artistic community well with those efforts....
Massive, Eccentric, Ambitious: Anders Nilsen’s ‘Big Questions’
This month Drawn and Quarterly will publish Anders Nilsen’s massive graphic novel Big Questions, a book fourteen years in the making. Nilsen’s previous books have dealt with humans facing the unpredictability of the natural world. In Dogs and Water (2004), a boy makes his way across an expanse of desert to encounter a roaming pack...
Gary Panter: Strip-Mining on Mars
Considered one of the only true punk cartoonists, Gary Panter is a tremendously influential underground cartoonist best known for a ragged, aggressive line and the wildly imaginative formal experimentation in his Jimbo graphic novels. This month Fantagraphics Books will release DalTokyo, a serial comic strip first produced by Panter in the 1980s, now collected in...
