* PictureBox reveals the details about their next release from Yuichi Yokoyama, Garden. Really looking forward to this one.
* Bill Kartalopoulos’s “Cartoon Polymaths” show sounds pretty cool. I mean, Winsor McCay and Paper Rad in one art exhibit, y’know? It opens tomorrow at Parsons in NYC.
* They’re making A Song of Ice and Fire comics. Shrug. It looks like they’ll be done in the typical front-of-Previews mode, which I don’t think will do the material any favors.
* Jeet Heer defends Art Spiegelman. I think it’s a testament to how deeply influential were not just Maus but also the original version of Breakdowns (not to mention his co-editorship of RAW) that what were once hugely groundbreaking works are now deeply ingrained as almost habits of thought in all of art/alt/lit comicdom and are thus undervalued. Heer also points out Spiegelman’s value as a comics’ foremost public intellectual.
* Michael DeForge reminds us (or at least me) that The Believer has had an Alvin Buenaventura-edited comics section for many issues now. Anyone read the mag? How is it? I mean, the February 2011 issue has Jonathan Bennett, Charles Burns, Lilli Carré, Michael DeForge, Matt Furie, Tom Gauld, Leif Goldberg, Lisa Hanawalt, Eric Haven and more, so it seems like it should be pretty great, yet I feel it’s sort of disappearing into the void, at least among comics-critic-dom.
* Speaking of things I’m not reading because I’m a miserly ignoramus, Frank Santoro takes the opportunity of what I think is the conclusion of the Shaky Kane series The Bulletproof Coffin to wax tangential on different modes of serialization in contemporary comics. One of those tangents involves the fate of collections of work that was getting some attention in serialized form, like Coffin and King City. My reading of serialized comics basically hinges on what I can access for free, and my request for review copies for Bulletproof Coffin, King City, Orc Stain, and Morning Glories was turned down en masse by Image, so I can tell you, Frank, I’ll probably be very likely to check out collections of those if I can get my hands on ’em.
* Here’s a nice primer on Mokele-Mbembe, the relict sauropod dinosaur that supposedly roams the Congo basin and is one of my favorite cryptozoological creatures in the world.
* Emily Carroll’s fondness for drawing sessy ladies gets my full support.
* My pal Isaac Moylan is pretty talented.
* Is the latest episode of Axe Cop intentional commentary on the role of women in superhero comics, or is that just a pleasant coincidence?
* I really want to redirect you to Matthias Wivel’s interview with Chris Ware, now that I’ve finished reading it at last. Must-read material. Question now that I’ve read it: Where would Ware be without Richard McGuire’s “Here”?
Tags: A Song of Ice and Fire, Carnival of souls, comics, Game of Thrones, George R.R. Martin, horror, links, real life
I’ve been reading The Believer for some time now, and enjoy it. It’s by the same people who make the quarterly short-story collection McSweeneys that I also subscribe to, except this is a magazine that comes out 9 months of the year (3 issues are bi-monthly), and it is non-fiction articles. I really like it, and if you want a general idea of the kind of material the mag contains try, “Read Hard,” a collection of some of the articles. As for the comics section, it is generally spread out over two pages with comics by all sorts of great independent comics artists and writers, with the focus being humor for some of the comics, and others being really abstract. It’s a great magazine and a good comics section.
I suspect you don’t hear about the Believer comics page — which is pretty much the Arthur magazine comics page moved to a different publication, I think they got two of those out? three? — because it mimics the layout/styles of a newspaper Sunday page, which generally isn’t something that encourages a lot of discussion (aside from snark sites following mostly ongoing stories). Everything falls into either gags, snatches from life or short bursts of surrealism/catchy images… it’s nice to look at, and some people really seem to like the Bennett stuff, but I’m not surprised it doesn’t attract a lot of chit-chat.
About the Song of Ice & Fire comics: you may want to check out the comics adaptations of the stand-alone prequel novellas “The Hedge Knight” and “The Sworn Sword”, not because they’re particularly well done or anything (it’s possible that they are, but I dislike that style so much that I can’t even tell), but just because the original novellas are really hard to find and they’re pretty good stories.
Thanks for the feedback, everyone. David, I knew what The Believer was, I was just curious about how the comics section read, and based on Jog’s description I get the idea now. (Personally I’m just not very likely to buy a prose magazine, so that explains why I’m not talking about it.)
Hob, I’ve had a bitch of a time tracking those down, yeah.