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16 April 2015
[comics] The Masterpiece That Helped Transform Comics and Culture – Books … Dan Clowes talks about Eightball At 25… ‘The funny thing about reading all my comics, but especially those old comics-which I usually avoid like the plague, but when I was putting this collection together, I went back and read every single issue-is that it’s really like a record of your life. Almost everything in the comic is based on something, a joke I had with one of my friends or a real-life experience, and all the characters are based vaguely on people I know… It all feels like reading a diary almost, even though it’s entirely fictional.’
31 March 2015
[comics] 37 Things You Learn From Working In A Comic Shop … what Hayley Campbell learned from working in Gosh Comics in London … ‘Anyone who buys Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose is a total wrong’un, yet on a Tarot week you will absolutely read it on your lunchbreak.’
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30 March 2015
[comics] Astonishing comics that ‘save your game’ when you turn the page … a profile of Jason Shiga’s Comics … ‘Over time, his interactive comics grew more even more complex, including stacks of panels that you read by locking and unlocking different sections with pegs, and others where moveable parts shifted images around in troughs. Although these comics were incredibly clever and unique, each had to be created by hand, turning them into boutique items that were impossible to digitize and difficult to mass-produce. Shiga sometimes created less than a hundred copies of each, limiting their audience to the several dozen readers lucky enough to stumble across his table at a comic book convention. His experiments reached their apex with a comic called Theater Eroika, which involved a series of five overlapping wheels that would spin together to reveal different sequential images. “That one was so crazy that I only made one copy of it,” says Shiga. “I was like, I’ve reached the pinnacle of complexity. This is just insane. This is too nuts.”‘
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20 March 2015
[comics] R.I.P. The Eltingville Comic Book, Science-Fiction, Fantasy, Horror & Role-Playing Club (1994-2015) … Evan Dorkin completes his Eltingville Club series of comics after 21 years … ‘I have a tremedous urge to burn the pages as soon as they’re all scanned. Dressed as a Universal Studios villager, pitchfork and torch. I hope the actual reading experience won’t be as messy as the book itself. There’s a bunch of good gags and some crazy crowd scenes, and some hopefully good shots at comic book behavior. It’s not exactly the ending I’d wanted, I think the first issue works ends the series well enough on its own, but I always wanted to do a “ten years later” story, so, whatever. I can’t wait until it’s all really over and done with, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy.’
19 March 2015
[comics] Art For Art’s Sake: Blade Runner special… the Forbidden Planet blog posts a great gallery of art inspired by Blade Runner. Below: Blade Runner Rachel by KR0NPR1NZ … 
18 March 2015
[comics] Dave Sim Checks Himself Into Grand River Hospital … the creator of Cerebus has been taken seriously ill and hospitalized … ‘Sim checked himself into Emergency at Grand River Hospital in Kitchener this afternoon. He’d been having severe, painful stomach cramps all weekend. He arrived about 2 pm. I checked in on him around 8 pm. He was dressed in a frock, laying on a bed, hooked up to a saline drip. I asked if he’d ever been in Emergency before. He said no, never. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he refused the painkillers they offered him.’
25 February 2015
[moore] Huge Alan Moore interview from Mustard comedy magazine … Alan shares another theory on who Jack the Ripper might be: ‘In our local paper there was a report about a man called Mallard who believed that Jack the Ripper was a member of his family from the Doddridge Church area of Northampton. His somewhat slender grounds for this theory were that a father in the family had committed suicide and one of the sons then moved down to London and was working in a slaughterhouse in the Whitechapel area during the time of the murders. Not the most convincing theory, but I was quite taken with this story because my mother’s maiden name was Mallard and her family lived around the Doddridge Church area. So in answer to Matt’s question, I’d say that after all of my researches, it turns out that Jack the Ripper was probably my granddad. It’s funny how these things work out, but what can you do?’
23 February 2015
[comics] Dan Clowes Portrait by Drew Friedman … go look at this wonderfully done portrait of Clowes by another cartoonist.
19 February 2015
[comics] Nick Abadzis remembers Brett Ewins who sadly died this week … ‘Brett Ewins and Steve Dillon gave me my start in comics as a creator. I’d worked for Marvel UK and Fleetway before I worked for Deadline, but it was Brett and Steve who looked at my portfolio and saw some potential there and gave me a chance as a cartoonist. Brett found a loose, lanky stick man I’d hidden at the back of all the other drawings and asked if the character had a name. He didn’t, but the two of them read the two-page strip and laughed. I can still hear Brett saying, “Yeah, we’ll have this. Can you give us two or three pages of this every month?” They paid fifty quid a page. Later, the name Hugo Tate attached itself to the character, and Brett and Steve gave me more pages as the strip became more popular.’
17 February 2015
[comics] When did the comic-book universe become so banal? … Jonanthan Jones on comics … ‘American cartoonist Chris Ware is considered a brave, modern artist. But how, exactly? With his puppet-like people, isolated in minimalist Edward Hopper-style scenes, his comics are easy to decode once you ‘get’ his style. The studied melancholia of his drawings is unconvincing as visual art, because it all looks so contrived and rigid. His art is basically a set of tics and mannerisms. Yet Ware is the best graphic novelist of the moment – so if he is a cut-price Paul Klee, we should be concerned about the genre. The work of many graphic novelists looks as if they took the same college drawing course; all have learned that good graphic art communicates information. In a comic, this advances the story, but such a functional approach undermines true art…’
15 February 2015
[comics] New Yorker Covers You Might Have Missed … a gallery of astounding Chris Ware magazine covers.
6 February 2015
[comics] The Quotable Alan Moore … a collection of Alan Moore quotes … ‘Eventually you’ll use everything. You usually put them in some kind of code unless you’re doing a straightforward biography. There’s things I did like ‘A Small Killing’. The central event in that was a boy burying some bugs in a bottle. I did that when I was 8 or 9 and it haunted me. In ‘Big Numbers’ the writer was me, not exactly, but there was enough experience. I borrowed voraciously from my friends lives, sometimes that can feel a bit dodgy. These people, they’re your friends and they’ll pour out details of their lives and part of your brain is this cold vampiric thing writing it all down to use later. I can’t help it I’m a writer.’
23 January 2015
[moore] Twenty-two comic books Alan Moore was looking forward to in 1988 Part 1 | Part 2
19 January 2015
[moore] Why has Nick Griffin ripped off the ‘V for Vendetta’ logo for his new party? … Life imitates Alan Moore again… ‘We attempted get in touch with Griffin to get a comment on this and he told us to ‘do one’ and accused us of being part of the ‘zonist media’.’
17 January 2015
[moore] Poet has first book published thanks to old school pal Alan Moore … ‘The book includes a seven page foreword by Alan in which he says Dominic’s “words speak of an almost-gone emotional reality, a since subsided proletarian warmth, an honesty entirely unafraid of sentiment, a great clarity of the heart.” In Spring Lane School there is a noticeboard displaying laminated pictures of Alan and Dominic to encourage the pupils which they are both very proud to feature on.’
12 January 2015
[comics] Paul Gravett interviews/profiles Dylan Horrocks … ‘I remember when photocopying machines became plentiful (and cheap) in the 1980s, which led to a blossoming of the small press, mini-comics and zines. It felt like a revolution. But the internet takes that to a whole nother level. Not surprisingly, many publishers and retailers are struggling to adapt, but the main thing for me is the explosion of new and incredibly diverse artists who are embracing comics and are taking them in countless new directions online. Living in a tiny country at the bottom of the world, I’m especially conscious of the possibilities opened up by the internet to empower previously marginalised artists and writers: not just in terms of nationality, but also gender, sexuality, ethnicity and more. Not that everything’s peachy, of course. Governments and corporations are doing their best to bring the internet under their control, and things are changing quickly. Interesting times… The other huge change in comics since the days of Pickle is the rise of the graphic novel. Twenty years ago, the idea that comics would be regularly reviewed in classy literary journals and nominated for major book awards seemed as utopian as Hicksville. I still find it hard to believe. And I still love finding some strange little hand-stapled mini-comic at a local zine-fair… .’
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11 January 2015
[comics] Legendary Cartoonist Robert Crumb on the Massacre in Paris … ‘Liberation called me and said, “Crumb, can you do a cartoon for us? About what you think about this, you know, you are a major cartoonist, and you live in France.” So I thought about it. I spent a lot of time thinking about it. I’m doing the dishes, or whatever, I was thinking, “What should I do for that cartoon… ” I had a lot of ideas. Other people come up with these, you know, clever cartoons that comment on it, like… This one guy did a cartoon showing a bloody dead body laying there, and a radical Muslim standing over him with a Kalashnikov, saying, “He drew first!” Stuff like that. That’s good, that’s clever, you know, I like that. But, me? I gotta like, you know, when I do something, it has to be more personal…’
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10 January 2015
[comics] Dylan Horrocks on Depression, Magic Pens and Tasteful Comics Porn … interview with Dylan Horrocks on his new comics Sam Zabel and the Magic Pen … ‘The book is partly a kind of experimental laboratory, where I create a series of situations fraught with moral complexity and then see what happens when I drop certain characters into them. Every now and then, I try taking a clear position, to see how that feels. But I always tried to undermine, question or challenge those positions at the same time – by surrounding them with the very pleasures they were condemning, or by allowing a sense of unease to creep over the reader. I wanted to build a big, fun, slightly-dangerous adventure playground, where I could play around and push my own limits, even if things got a little scary at times. Hopefully a few other people will enjoy playing there too, and if we’re lucky we might learn something about ourselves and each other. Well, that was the idea. But I’ll settle for getting a few laughs. The central question, in a way, is asked out loud by Sam halfway through: “Do we bear a moral responsibility for our fantasies?” The book sets out to have a conversation about that question.’
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5 January 2015
[comics] Ed Brubaker Looks Back At Batman Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 … Brubaker is interviewed by Chris Sims … ‘I was at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and [DC Executive Editor] Mike Carlin was there. He had been reading the flats of Scene of the Crime when they were coming in because he was a fan of Michael’s – my whole career is based on editors being fans of artists that I’ve worked with. So Mike Carlin came to me and said “Why don’t you try and write something for the DCU?” And I said “I don’t think I have any ideas for superheroes.” [Laughs] This is fifteen years ago, and I can look back on it now and it’s funny that I would’ve said it, but at the time, I really didn’t think I could do anything like Batman, and he said “Well, if you can write a mystery comic, you can write Batman.” So he just insisted that I do something, and I went home and sat around trying to think of a pitch for a one-shot, and they were still doing Elseworlds at the time, so I pitched Gotham Noir. Which was how I ended up getting hooked up with Sean Phillips, too.’
1 January 2015
[comics] Happy New Year … 2000AD Prog 451 cover for The Ballard Of Halo Jones by Ian Gibson … 
25 December 2014
[xmas] ‘Jingle Bells, Batman Smells-‘ 
21 December 2014
[comics] The Sensual Santa … ‘Be a Sensual Santa! It’s Contagious!’
14 December 2014
[comics] Judenhass … Dave Sim’s comic about the Holocaust is now available in the public domain. Download from the Judenhass website or Sequential.
12 December 2014
[space] NASA’s Other Peanuts Traditions … a look at the history between NASA and Charles Schulz’s Peanuts … ‘NASA asked Schulz for permissions to use his two famous characters as call signs for the [Apollo 10] mission, something the artist considered a highlight of his career. Some of Schulz’s friends brought up the “what ifs” – what if the mission failed and a crew of dead astronauts was forever synonymous with his characters? Schultz replied simply that if the astronauts could risk their lives on the mission, he could risk his characters. Charlie Brown and Snoopy became semi-official mascots for Apollo 10, even though they weren’t included in the official mission logo. People brought Snoopy dolls in to NASA to lay on top of the crew’s simulators. Apollo 10’s LM is still flying. The crew burned all the LM’s fuel after rendezvousing around the Moon to send it into a wide solar orbit. British astronomer Nick Howes is trying to find it.’
4 December 2014
[comics] Graphic Novels for People Who Aren’t into Superheroes … Great list of comics to look up if you fancy a graphic novel or two (or three or four).
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28 November 2014
[comics] Demon … check out this compelling new webcomic from Jason Shiga. Recommended.
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26 November 2014
[comics] Alan Moore’s Southern Comfort … Pádraig Ó Méalóid post scans of an obscure early Alan Moore comic for 2000AD and explores if it was rewritten … ‘So, decide for yourself: is this the work of the greatest comics writer of our time? Or is it only partially his, or has the art been changed so much from his original script that it has got lost under there?’
24 November 2014
[comics] Canadian cartoonist Seth Interviewed … ‘I try not to worry too much about meaning with what I’m doing, because I think meaning is accumulated or accrued from just doing it. It builds up its own meaning. I think that might be the bad legacy of modern art, the concern about ‘what does it mean?’ I don’t think that’s important to the artist. The artist kind of knows what it means, but it’s up to other people to determine that.’
20 November 2014
[moore] Alan Moore’s Brought To Light On YouTube … Alan Moore performs Brought to Light, his history of the CIA. … ‘This is not a dream.’
19 November 2014
[comics] Steve Ditko Doesn’t Stop: A Guide To 18 Secret Comics By Spider-Man’s Co-Creator … a guide to the the semi-obscure comics that Steve Ditko has produced over the last few years … ‘The Avenging Mind may be a 32-page comic book, but the vast majority of its space is occupied by Ditko’s prose. That’s right. Steve Ditko has a reputation for being an inscrutable recluse, but the hardcore fan knows that he’s published tens of thousands of words’ worth of essay communiques with the outside world. (Plus, he’s in the phone book.) In 2002 a number of these articles were collected into Avenging World, a 240-page codex arcana of words, drawings and comics, all dedicated to detailing the artist’s deepest thoughts on art and life — heavily informed, as you’ve heard, by the works of Objectivist fountainhead Ayn Rand. Avenging World is the Ditko bible. It is not easy reading — due in no small part to Ditko’s determination to isolate, highlight, whittle down, specify his terms in a synonymous manner across strings of repetitive declarations, as if to foreclose on the possibility of ambiguity by stating every possible legitimate variation on a thought. Nevertheless, everything Ditko is “about” is contained therein. And fundamental to Ditko’s worldview is the notion that art should serve not as an idle distraction, or a mirror of its times, but as an active inspiration to the betterment of humankind.’
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3 November 2014
[comics] Wonder Woman’s Secret Past … the fascinating true story of Wonder Woman’s origins … ‘The much cited difficulties regarding putting Wonder Woman on film-Wonder Woman isn’t big enough, and neither are Gal Gadot’s breasts-aren’t chiefly about Wonder Woman, or comic books, or superheroes, or movies. They’re about politics. Superman owes a debt to science fiction, Batman to the hardboiled detective. Wonder Woman’s debt is to feminism. She’s the missing link in a chain of events that begins with the woman-suffrage campaigns of the nineteen-tens and ends with the troubled place of feminism a century later. Wonder Woman is so hard to put on film because the fight for women’s rights has gone so badly.’
30 October 2014
[comics] Take 3 panels: Tintin: The Castafiore Emerald … a look at 3 panels from one of the greatest comics ever published Herge’s The Castafiore Emerald … ‘The humour in The Castafiore Emerald is key; the mystery/adventure secondary for a change, and this is one of the more overt panels which makes that tone apparent. Here the Captain’s fears and irritations are manifest in dream form: Bianca and the parrot she gifted him amalgamated into one being, while he’s naked and vulnerable in the front row at the opera, with all the little tuxedo-ed parrots (birds of Bianca’s feather) looking seriously on. This is how the Captain sees Bianca: all puffed out plumage, screechy, essentially rather ridiculous. Herge was woefully inadequate when it came to the inclusion and representation of female characters in Tintin, and there is a reading of Bianca here that doesn’t help his case: a demanding, diva of a woman who schemes and tricks him into a non-existent engagement, the first of which he learns when reading a newspaper. However, essentially Bianca is what we would today term ‘fabulous…”
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25 October 2014
[comics] Batman’s Greatest Escapes … A collection of Batman’s best disappearing acts from Comics Oughta Be Fun.
24 October 2014
[comics] The Secret History of John Constantine … a look at the past and future of John Constantine … ‘Bissette claims he asked Moore to let him create a character that looked like Sting. The series’ editor, Karen Berger, told me it was Totleben, who had been wowed by Sting’s portrayal of a possibly demonic con-man in the 1982 film Brimstone and Treacle. Moore told The Comics Journal that he granted the artists’ wishes just for the hell of it. And so a nameless Sting-esque character popped up in a crowd shot in Swamp Thing No. 25. That could’ve been the end of it. But Moore saw the potential for “something more than that.” Moore had been mentally toying with the traditions of English mysticism (though he was still a few years away from identifying as a practitioner of magic). But he was also fascinated by cartoonist Eddie Campbell’s character Dapper John, an archetypal English “wide boy” – a man who takes unreasonable chances and gets by through resourcefulness and smooth talk. He decided to do something previously undone: craft a wide-boy mage.’
15 October 2014
[comics] Netflix unveils first look at new superhero series Marvel’s Daredevil … ‘Daredevil certainly feels like it has potential. Even though existing shows like Arrow and the recently launched Gotham have already staked out street-level superhero territory, there’s a richness to the character, who wrestles with Catholic guilt over his vigilantism, and a confidence to the execution that suggests Daredevil could cross over to non-comic fans looking for a stylish crime story.’
14 October 2014
[comics] Alan Moore Talks About His Influence Upon Comics … ‘I mean, I’d like to think that if I’ve shown anything, it’s that comics are the medium of almost inexhaustible possibilities, that there have been… there are great comics yet to be written. There are things to be done with this medium that have not been done, that people maybe haven’t even dreamed about trying. And, if I’ve had any benign influence upon comics, I would hope that it would be along those lines; that anything is possible if you approach the material in the right way. You can do some extraordinary things with a mixture of words and pictures. It’s just a matter of being diligent enough and perceptive enough and working hard enough, continually honing your talent until it’s sharp enough to do the job that you require. I hope that if I had any sort of benign legacy at all, that that would be it, but I don’t know, I think that my legacy, some days, like I say, I think that my legacy is more likely to be a lot of humourless snarling, sarcastic psychopaths, but that’s just on my black days, pay me no mind.’
4 October 2014
[comics] Marvel by Moebius. … a gallery of Moebius’ wonderful view of various Marvel characters.
30 September 2014
[comics] Nine Comic Books About Jim Gordon And Gotham City Police … a list highlighting some interesting Batman comics … ‘Gotham Central – While the series has great stories like “Soft Targets” and and “Half a Life” — and while the entire series delivers the gritty-crime-in-a-superhero-universe feel that the show aspires to — Gotham viewers will probably be most interested in checking out “Unresolved” (Gotham Central #19 – 22 and handily available in paperback), a story that focuses on Harvey Bullock. At the time, Bullock had been kicked off the force in disgrace after taking the law into his own hands, but the unfinished business of a brutal case involving the Mad Hatter and the Penguin pulls him back in and shows just how far he’s willing to go in the pursuit of justice.’
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29 September 2014
[comics] Trash! … an early, little-remembered Alan Moore fumetti comic from 1982.
19 September 2014
[movies] How ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ Went From In-Joke to Blockbuster … on the comic book origins of the TMNT franchise … ‘The Turtles literally started out as a joke. Co-creators Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird were comic-artist wannabes when they spent a November 1983 evening doodling the masked, weaponized reptiles to entertain themselves. Each adjective in Turtles’ title represented a hot superhero-comic trend at the time – mutants were the stars of Marvel’s Uncanny X-Men; DC’s New Teen Titans had teenage protagonists; and future Sin City impresario Frank Miller had stuffed his groundbreaking run on Daredevil full of ninjas. By throwing it all together atop a funny-animal framework – which, from Carl Barks’ Donald Duck to Steve Gerber’s Howard the Duck, had long been a route to comic-book gold – Eastman and Laird simply obeyed the Spinal Tap doctrine of cranking it to eleven.’
13 September 2014
[comics] The Moon Knight Portfolio … another gallery of art by Bill Sienkiewicz and Christie Scheele from 1983.
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7 September 2014
[comics] Bill Sienkiewicz’s Moon Knight … gallery of art from Sienkiewicz’s mid-80’s run on Marvel’s Moon Knight.
6 September 2014
[batman] XombieDIRGE: ‘I can take you as far as Blüdhaven, after that your on your own.’ 
5 September 2014
[comics] The Unlikely Rise, Fall, And Rise Again Of “Viz” Comic … profile of Viz from Buzzfeed … ‘Some of the best-loved characters have changed in line with society. Student Grant, a nerdy university stereotype, began to feel outdated. (“They’re customers now,” says Dury.) Roger Mellie was just a sweary TV presenter; now he’s a way to satirise recent media scandals (at the time of writing Ian Botham’s Twitter account has recently posted a picture of an erect penis, and Thorp and Dury are going to have Roger’s do the same). Others remain a constant: Sid the Sexist is still yet to lose his virginity, and Fru ‘T’ Bunn remains a sketch about a baker who makes his own sex dolls…’
30 August 2014
[comics] Dave Sim And Gerhard: Aardvarks Over The UK … Dave Sim interviewed during a tour of the UK in 1993 … ‘The original idea for Cerebus was simply to do a more interesting comic book. I wanted to do something that had adult values applied to it, as opposed to just doing something along typical comic-book lines. You know, “let’s do a superhero ‘cos they’re selling okay”. And the further along I’ve gone, the more I’ve tried to do something that makes me happy, something that is satisfying to me. I enjoyed superheroes the same as any twelve year old, when I was twelve, but I’m almost forty now, so I put things into Cerebus that I’m interested in now!’
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