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...
Logical, Believable Ducks
With the December publication of Donald Duck: Lost in the Andes, Fantagraphics will bring the classic comics stories of cartoonist Carl Barks (1901-2000) to bookstores in a comprehensive collection of handsome, durable hardcovers. This first volume is actually the seventh in the series’ complete timeline. The publisher elected to debut the series with stories that...
Frank Santoro’s Timeless Lovers, Lines and Ashes
This month sees the release of Pompeii, Frank Santoro’s historical graphic novel, published by PictureBox. I first noticed Santoro as a columnist at the innovative but now-defunct Comics Comics website. We initially began a correspondence based on his perceptive comments about color in comics, a crucial but probably least understood aspect of the medium. When...
Control Freak: Michael DeForge
Michael DeForge is one of the most striking and popular talents in alternative comics, as evidenced by his two Eisner nominations this year: for Best Single Issue (or One Shot) for Lose #4 and Best Digital Comic for Ant Comic. This month, publisher Annie Koyama’s innovative imprint Koyama Press is releasing the first trade paperback...
The Deceptions of Argo
For the 2013 Best Picture Oscar-winner Argo, Jack Kirby’s Lord of Light artwork was omitted and his crucial role in the CIA’s rescue plot was downplayed and distorted, but that is only a part of the problem with the film. …History cannot be swept clean like a blackboard, clean so that “we” might inscribe our...
Dash Shaw: Pretty Artsy Stuff
New School by Dash Shaw (Fantagraphics Books, $39.99) I find Dash Shaw’s work to be strangely invigorating. I admit I had some reservations when I first saw the daunting heft of his Bottomless Belly Button, with its absurdly extended passage of a man running and profusely sweating, drawn in a style so crunchy that it...
Paul Kirchner’s Apocalyptic Sensibility
First published on The Comics Journal: Paul Kirchner began his career at Neal Adams’ Continuity Associates in 1973 and he later served a tenure as an assistant to legendary cartoonist Wallace Wood. His own surreal, meticulously drawn comics were mostly seen throughout the seventies and eighties in slick magazines such as High Times, Heavy Metal...
