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4 November 2011
[comics] Art Spiegelman: ‘Auschwitz became for us a safe place’ … Art Spiegelman on Maus and MetaMaus. .. ‘The shock of Maus, and the source of its great and enduring power, lies in Spiegelman’s absolute refusal to sentimentalise or sanctify the Survivor, in this case, his father. During the war, Vladek lost his six-year-old son, Richieu, poisoned by the aunt to whom his parents had sent him for safe-keeping, in order that he might avoid the gas chambers; he lost most of his extended family, and he endured months of the most appalling fear and hardship in Auschwitz-Birkenau and, later, Dachau. But unimaginable suffering, Spiegelman wants us to understand, doesn’t make a person better; it just makes them suffer.’
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2 November 2011
[comics] A STRONGER LOVING WORLD .. the Moment Of Moore I’ve been waiting most of the year to post! ‘Midnight, November Second.’
28 October 2011
[comics] Charlie Higson’s list of favourite comic books and graphic novels … ‘I grew up on Tintin and Asterix, and for many people in the UK they are the only graphic novels they are aware of. The French call this style of pure, clean, solid artwork la ligne claire, and it’s a style that works brilliantly for kids. I used to lose myself for days in the detail of these pictures.’
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27 October 2011
[comics] Dan Clowes interviewed by the Onion’s AV Club … ‘The Death-Ray really should have been a graphic novel to start. I have no idea why I did it as a saddle-stitched comic, other than I just couldn’t bear to stop Eightball somehow. It just seemed like, “How can I end Eightball?” I remember when the Hernandez brothers first ended Love And Rockets, thinking, “How could they do that? It’s the end of an era!” [Laughs.] So it was really more about that, not being able to move on. But it really makes no sense as a magazine, and it’s just so unavailable to so many people. I really want people to read the book, and bookstores never sold an issue of Eightball because nobody knew what it was.’
21 October 2011
[comics] V for Vendetta masks: Who’s behind them? … ‘Anybody watching coverage of the demonstrations may have been struck by a repeated motif – a strangely stylised mask of Guy Fawkes with a moustache and pointy beard. Wikileaks founder Julian Assange arrived at the Occupy London Stock Exchange protest to make a speech wearing one of these masks. He took it off, reportedly at the insistence of the police.’
19 October 2011
[comics] How could they do this to Tintin? … another negative look at Speilberg’s Tintin Movie – this time from Nicholas Lezard … ‘As it is, the film has turned a subtle, intricate and beautiful work of art into the typical bombast of the modern blockbuster, Tintin for morons, and the nicest things one can say about it are that there’s a pleasing cameo of Hergé himself in the opening scene, the cars look lovely, indeed it is as a whole visually sumptuous, and (after 20 minutes or so of more or less acceptable fidelity; and the 3D motion-capturing transference of the original drawings is by far the least of the film’s problems) it usefully places in plain view all the cretinous arrogance of modern mass-market, script-conference-driven film-making, confirming in passing that, as a director, Spielberg is a burned-out sun.’
18 October 2011
[comics] The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret Of The Unicorn – Review … a disappointing look of Speilberg’s Tintin film: ‘…while the big set pieces are often exuberantly handled, the human details are sorely wanting. How curious that Hergé achieved more expression with his use of ink-spot eyes and humble line drawings than a bank of computers and an army of animators were able to achieve. On this evidence, the film’s pioneering “performance capture” technique is still too crude and unrefined. In capturing the butterfly, it kills it too. What emerges is an array of characters (puffy, moribund Haddock; opaque, inexpressive Tintin) that may as well be pinned on to boards and protected by glass.’
12 October 2011
[comics] Kids Say The Stupidest Things: The Wit And Wisdom of Naughty Children … Children who kill – in their own words by Evan Dorkin … ‘Murder Isn’t That Bad. We All Die Sometime.’
11 October 2011
[comics] It’s 1969, Ok? … Kevin O’Neill interviewed by Pádraig Ó Méalóid … Kevin O’Neill: It’s a pity we couldn’t have used Marvelman, ‘cause I always liked him when I was a kid, I thought he was a fantastic character, but it’s… it’s one of those characters that is now almost toxic, anyone who touches Marvelman, it’s like a curse, you know, you just want to pass it straight on, which is a terrible state of affairs for the character to end up in.
Pádraig: As I said, I’ve researched the thing in enormous detail for the past several years. The book was going to be called Poisoned Chalice, because both Alan and Neil refer to it as a poisoned chalice in different interviews I saw, and now I find that my own curse of Marvelman…
[Earlier I had mentioned to Kevin that the book I’ve written on Marvelman is now without a publisher, as MonkeyBrain Books, who had contracted to publish it, were taking a break from publishing, at least for the time being, leaving it without a home for the moment.]
Kevin O’Neill: Isn’t that weird?
25 September 2011
[comics] Snowball 99 … a tumblr dedicated to Howard Chaykin … 
24 September 2011
[comics] William Gaines testifying On Behalf Of Comic Books In the 1950’s: ‘Jimmy Walker once remarked that he never knew a girl to be ruined by a book. Nobody has ever been ruined by a comic.’
21 September 2011
[momentOfMoore] How Alan Moore Introduced Himself To American Readers… ‘When he is an old man, he will look like the evil twin brother of Father Christmas.’
20 September 2011
[comics] Why We Will Read Cerebus … another attempt to evaluate Dave Sim and Cerebus … ‘[Dave Sim] is a very smart man, and even at his worst he expresses his (often completely illogical) ideas with such forceful conviction that you cannot help imagine yourself in some kind of personal dialogue with him. After reading 300 issues of Cerebus, the reader feels / believes / thinks that he or she knows Sim. Tim Callahan is right to stress the fact that Cerebus is “as autobiographical as any comic book ever written.” That is precisely why it is so hard to separate the man from the work. It’s not just that Sim’s ideas permeate the book, it’s that Sim permeates the book, to the point where any discussion of the book inevitably devolves into a discussion of Sim himself.’
19 September 2011
[comics] Brannon Costello Interviewed By Tom Spurgeon … interesting interview discussing Howard Chaykin – Costello has just compiled a book of interviews with Chaykin … ‘I’d also argue that Chaykin was the most successful of the design-oriented mainstream artists up until the mid-1980s to use design not just for dramatic effect but also to develop a set of themes or even an ideological worldview. And I think the fact that Chaykin continues to work steadily in the mainstream, using pop comics as a vehicle to explore new angles on his recurring themes and obsessions in his own voice and with a great deal of craft, is remarkable. He’s not the only creator of his era still doing that sort of work, but he’s one of a few, and certainly one of the most prolific.’
14 September 2011
[comics] The V for Vendetta mask: a political sign of the times … ‘More than 100,000 [V For Vendetta] masks a year are now being sold.’
8 September 2011
[comics] Bargain Bin #6: Alex & Droogs … What If Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange was a comic book? 
31 August 2011
[comics] Masked Anonymous Protesters Aid Time Warner’s Profits … ‘The mask resonates with the hackers because it was worn by a rogue anarchist challenging an authoritarian government in “V for Vendetta,” the movie produced in 2006 by Warner Brothers. What few people seem to know, though, is that Time Warner, one of the largest media companies in the world and parent of Warner Brothers, owns the rights to the image and is paid a licensing fee with the sale of each mask.’
29 August 2011
[comics] Grant Morrison on the Death of Comics … a non-standard interview with Morrison – well worth reading if you follow his work … With comics, the quality now is better than it’s ever been, there are more people now who are really good at what they do, doing what they do. Everything’s available for free, I think that’s the real problem, nobody wants to buy it anymore. One comes out, you see it immediately online and you can read it. That’s the way people want to consume their information, the colors look nicer. I think that’s more the problem, but that’s a problem for everybody, it’s not just for comics, everyone’s going to start feeling that one.’ — Morrison discussing the death-spiral of superhero comic books
25 August 2011
[comics] A post on Scans Daily revisiting the first issue of ROM Spaceknight from 1979 … ‘ROM SPACEKNIGHT issue 1 gives us all of the pieces of the story that will span nearly 80 issues. It starts out like a 50s sci-fi monster movie, only the strange being from outer space is actually here to help humanity, but because of his foreboding appearance and the ambiguity of his actions (and the general suspiciousness of folk in the Marvel universe), he’s believed to be a rampaging monster. Meanwhile, the enemy he has hunted for two centuries appears to be regular people, due to their shapeshifting abilities. An everyman human meets the “alien monster” and the beginning of a friendship is formed, and we learn the broad strokes of ROM’s origin: a highly advanced culture, with little to no martial presence took a great chance on an untested and dangerous technology, leaving its defenders with diminished “humanity” that they will always pine for.’
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28 July 2011
[comics] Alan Moore Takes League of Extraordinary Gentlemen To The ’60s … yet another wide-ranging interview with Alan Moore … ‘My position on punk was that I loved the music and I wanted to be involved in it. But unlike some of my associates, I wasn’t going to go out and get my haircut or spiked up. This was their generation, they were all much younger than me, and they deserved to explore it in their own way. Of course, I found out later that John Lydon was about, what, eight months younger than me! [Laughs]’
27 July 2011
[comics] Annotations to League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume III Chapter Two, a.k.a. Century: 1969 … The Latest League Annotations from Jess Nevins … ‘Panel 2. If “Hot Chicks” is a reference to anything I’m unaware of it.’
25 July 2011
[comics] Grant Morrison: My Supergods From The Age Of The Superhero … Grant Morrison Chooses His Favourite Superhero Moments … On Marvelman: ‘There are beautiful sequences where the superheroes are escorting Thatcher out of No 10 and she’s sobbing helplessly: suddenly there’s this new power that bombs can’t stop, weapons can’t stop. The whole last issue is this fabulous liberal fantasy of what the good guys would do if they got in charge and got rid of all the bastards! I like it much more than Watchmen; it was a real triumph for lefties everywhere!’
17 July 2011
[comics] Tugging Your Coat … Mike McMahon’s got a blog! … ‘I love Joe Pineapples, a real pleasure to draw. Wonderful piece of character design by Kev O’Neill.’
15 July 2011
[comics] The Artists’ Artist: Graphic Novelists … with contributions from Peter Kuper, Bryan Talbot, Posy Simmonds, Ariel Schrag, Martin Rowson and Lynda Barry. On Chris Ware: ‘Chris Ware is an American cartoonist whose work is so unusual that some hesitate to call what he is doing “comics”. When I read his work, I get a Wright brothers feeling of being in something big, right as it’s being invented. Eventually we will know what to call what he does, but for now “graphic novel” is all we have.’
4 July 2011
[comics] A Moment Of Moore [ Twitter | RSS Feed] … six months of daily Alan Moore posts – check out the Archives … ‘Every Damned Link.’
1 July 2011
[comics] Excerpt from “Irredeemable: Dave Sim’s Cerebus” … part of a longer-form essay in Comics Journal #301 … ‘Sim may well be a wackjob or an acid casualty, but he is also, I would argue, one of the greatest living cartoonists.’
25 June 2011
[comics] Garen Ewing: from a Golden Age to a rainbow orchid … missed this when it was first published: comic creator Garen Ewing interviwed by Mondoagogo … ‘One of my very favourite comics was, and is, Charley’s War, but I’m not certain that I feel particularly influenced by Pat Mills – but I’m sure it must be there in the mix to some degree. What child that grew up in the 1970s and went on to make their own comics doesn’t have Pat Mills in there somewhere?!’
22 June 2011
[comics] Mike Sterling: ‘I’m still kind of weirded out that I just saw a major Hollywood movie that featured Kilowog as a character. This is not the future I was expecting.’
18 June 2011
[comics] “When I first heard about virtual reality I thought: is there any other kind?” … Alan Moore interview from the New Statesman … Moore on Books: ‘I accept that things change and that the future of reading might be in the form of a Kindle or an iPad, but somehow I tend to think that the book is perfectly adapted. It’s like a shark; sharks haven’t evolved in millions of years because they don’t need to. They’re really really good at being sharks I think the same is true of a book.’
7 June 2011
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25 May 2011
[cartoons] Steve Bell On 30 Years Of Political Cartooning At The Guardian … ‘Nick Clegg, a rather poor clone of Cameron, who in turn is a tribute act to Blair, who is himself channelling Thatcher. And who was she channelling? Her father, Alderman Roberts, the grocer of Grantham town? Winston Churchill? Adolf Hitler? Beelzebub? Who can say?’
24 May 2011
[comics] The AV Club Interviews Chester Brown … AV Club: Is there some reason so many cartoonists have such idiosyncratic political and social views? Peter Bagge is a libertarian as well, and Steve Ditko is an objectivist, and R. Crumb has his odd open marriage, and then there’s whatever Dave Sim’s got going on.
Chester Brown: [Laughs.]
10 May 2011
[comics] Howard Chaykin, Time and Time Again … Douglas Wolk On Howard Chaykin … ‘Chaykin’s ’80s comics are the work of an artist pushing himself savagely hard–especially Time2, an ambitious, densely packed 1986-1987 project that encompassed a one-shot comic book and a pair of slim graphic novels before vanishing.’
6 May 2011
[comics] How 2000AD artist and MS sufferer John Hicklenton chose to end his life … …he decided to finish the battle on his own terms. Even when we went to Dignitas,” Lavis recalls, “it was, ‘I’m pulling the pin on the hand grenade. I’m murdering MS. It’s not murdering me.’”
30 April 2011
[comics] CR Review: Paying For It … another review of Chester Brown’s latest autobiographical comic this time from Tom Spurgeon … ‘There’s a jittery undercurrent to Brown’s work that shimmies to the surface at odd and unexpected times, a queasy energy unlike anything else in comics. That noted, it’s always enormously fun to read Brown, and Paying For It proves no exception. There’s little I can write that will ever do justice to the enormous visceral pleasure that can come with spending time in Brown’s version of reality.’
29 April 2011
[comics] Moment Of Moore: A Wedding Blessing From Alan Moore … ‘I hearby bless your wedding, and all who sail in her.’
28 April 2011
[comics] ‘Dark Knight Returns’ Page Up for Auction … ‘The original artwork for the splash page from issue No. 3, which features Batman leaping through the skyline along with his new Robin, Carrie Kelley, the first female to hold that role, is up for bidding at Heritage Auctions. The bid is currently at $100,000.’
13 April 2011
[comics] Chester Brown’s Paying For It Reviewed … the first review I’ve seen of what will likely be the most controversial comic of the year … ‘The social cues he seems unable to pick up on, the rituals he is congenitally incapable of performing, the years and decades of accrued guilt and sense of failure he built up from missing out on potential romantic or sexual relationships, the elaborate and to-him draining emotional quid pro quo of sex within the context of the few relationships he was able to enter into and maintain (that’s the context in which he really “paid for it”) … all of that disappeared the moment he told his first whore “Uh, I’d… like to have vaginal intercourse with you.” (“Yes, that’s what I really said,” he assures us helpfully in the “Notes” section.)’
9 April 2011
[comics] A Comic Book Lover’s Guide to Going Digital … some interesting pointers for managing digital comics … ‘For the record, I don’t mean by any of this that you should ditch paper comics altogether. I understand that for many fans, nothing beats the feel of paper, the accumulation of a big collection, and the pride of having gotten that issue “way back when it first came out”. I think both paper and digital comics are great, and have their time and place-and while I have pretty much switched to digital entirely, I in no way think everyone else “should”. I do think maintaining a digital collection, whether replacing or on top of your existing collection, is a great idea.’
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7 April 2011
[comics] His Face All Red … I really can’t recommend this scary webcomic enough. Go read it… 
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