I didn't know my uncle, but we shared an alma mater. A few of the journalism professors there held him in what seemed to me then and now a mix of admiration and affection well worth achieving in one's public life.
* Anna et Froga: Qu'est-ce qu'on fait maintenant?, Vol. 2, Anouk Ricard (Sarbacane)
* Le Chateau de l'aurore, Osamu Tezuka (Cornelius)
* Chronokids, Vol. 2, Zep, Stan & Vince (Glenat)
* Doraemon, Le Chat venu du future, Vol. 8, Fujiko.F.Fujio (Kana)
* Les Enfants d'ailleurs: Le Maitre des ombres, Vol. 3, Bannister & Nykko (Dupuis)
* Ernest & Rebecca: Mon copain est un microbe , Vol. 1, Bianco and Dalena (Le Lombard)
* L'Envolee sauvage, Vol. 2, Galandon and Monin (Bamboo)
* La Fille du savant fou: L'Equation inconnue , Vol. 3, Mathieu Sapin (Delcourt)
* Gully: Les Vengeurs d'injures, Vol. 1, Dodier and Makyo (Dupuis)
* Jacques le petit lezard geant, Libon (Dupuis)
* Ludo: Qu'as-tu, Kim ?, Vol. 7, Bailly, Mathy and Lapiere (Dupuis)
* Nana, Vol. 18, Ai Yazawa (Delcourt)
* Le Petit Prince, Joann Sfar (Gallimard)
* La Rose ecarlate: J'irai voir Venise, Vol. 4, Patricia Lyfoung (Delcourt)
* Sardine de l'espace: Pizza Tomik, Vol. 7, Emmanuel Guibert (Dargaud)
* Seuls: Le Clan du requin, Vol. 3, Vehlmann and Gazzotti (Dupuis)
* Sillage: Monde Flottant, Vol. 11, Morvan and Buchet (Delcourt)
* Titeuf: Le sens de la vie , Vol. 12, Zep, (Glenat)
* Trolls de Troy: Trollympiades, Vol. 11, Arleston & Mourier (Soleil)
* Zblucops: Le Pays des courgettes volantes, Vol. 5, Bill and Gobi (Glenat)
The Latest I Have On S. Clay Wilson
Someone named Rebecca Wilson sent out an e-mail a couple of days ago that bounced around quite a bit indicating that underground comix great S. Clay Wilson is improving a bit, and able to speak to people that come in to see him. She reiterated this on a Comics Journal message board thread. If true, and I have no reason to doubt it isn't, this would be the best news so far concerning the injured cartoonist.
Random Comics News Story Round-Up
* this article about how Jonathan "Zapiro" Shapiro doesn't shy away from ridiculing Nelson Mandela seems a bit like a puff piece in terms of building a certain Zapiro brand, but I almost always find articles about South African politics and Zapiro interesting.
* am I reading this correctly? Moebius has announced a sequel to Arzach for 2009? That seems like a fairly major announcement, even if the results fail to get over with the intended audience.
* there needs to be a lot more industry analysis where the conclusion is "Shove it up your ass." Not just comics: all industries.
* should more be made of the massive English-language market for graphic novels potentially available in India? Not in a "I'm going to design a bunch of concepts to make big hits" way, but more in a "I'd like to sell my fine, existing books to another audience" way? Hasn't Jeff Smith hit with enough iterations of his work that we should all be following him around a bit and at least looking at everything he does?
* this color guide for DC Comics drawn by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez also offers up the classic 1970s-1980s DC superhero "look."
* this is like finding out there's a restaurant that serves nothing but pigs in blankets.
* I don't know if I'm reading this correctly, but it seems to be suggesting that Posy Simmonds is working on a detective story, maybe even a Sherlock Holmes story? The other way to read it seems to me as suggesting her work is like that kind of work, and I'm not seeing it. If this were a day other than Friday, I'd probably delete this whole entry. But today I am proud to bring you a bunch of statements strung together that are not news.
* finally, the longtime mini-comics reviewer Shawn Hoke has been reviewing over at Size Matters again, and weighs in on several unique comics and comics-related handmade works such as the one discussed here.
The latest in NBM's re-packaging of Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim's various Donjon fantasy series combines two 2004 books from the stand-alone Monstres line. If I'm keeping all of my Donjon series straight, Monstres is the one for stand-alone story with a range of guest artists to be placed at any point in the wider Donjon timeline. These are placed in the Zenith era, the one in the far future as relative to the main series. Luckily, the books also comment upon one another, with overlapping plotlines told from different perspectives, and having them together make for an enjoyable reading experience in and of itself.
We follow two characters as they come to immediate terms with Terra Amata becoming a mini-universe of floating island: the foolish and aggressively violent Herbert the Red, and the fiendish, somewhat reluctantly but effectively violent Grand Khan. Unlike the Dungeon stories in their original series, these stories take place in a mish-mash of post-apocalyptical literature and fantasy stories that fail to provide the easy avenues for satire available to the authors in the more staid, traditional settings. There's an appealing but somewhat disorienting anything goes quality. It's hard not to appreciate the lack of sentimentality here: many fantasy stories are conservative in that they posit an idealized form of the present as the long-term status quo by story's end. The constant threat of personal and widespread destruction makes for a lot of uniquely funny moments among survivors whose peccadilloes and desires have taken on extinction-level drama. At the same time, comedy that arises from manic situations can be wearying after a while, and I think that's the case here. I find these stories super-entertaining, but I can see why people might not extend to them their heart. Heck, I'm having a hard time judging their quality beyond that immediate reaction.
I should also mention the thing I enjoyed most about this particular volume as compared to others: Stephane Blanquet drawing monsters. Blanquet has an almost intimidating clarity to his line here. If most comics are chalklines on a wall, Blanquet's looks smooth in the way that only applying finisher might be able to manage. His creatures look hostile to the touch, like they might sting in the way certain frogs do when you pick them up. They don't bleed, they emit blod that curdles like so much red slough. I find myself reading the story and then going back to start at it a bit, the way I usually do with Blanquet. While a few of the art choices Sfar and Trondheim have made haven't been all that inspired, this one was, and makes a solid reading experience -- these are almost always dense comics, that encourage your grappling with them -- that much more involved.
I'm not exactly sure how it escaped my attention, but Nate Beeler of the Washington Examinerhas won 2009 Clifford K. and James T. Berryman Award for Editorial Cartoons from the National Press Foundation. Beeler is 28 years old, and has been with with the Examiner since 2005. His work has a classic contemporary feel, meaning that it has the same general "look" of a lot of the best and most successful editorial cartoonists of the last three decades.
Past winners include Steve Breen, Stuart Carlson, Jim Morin, David Horsey, Ann Telnaes and Signe Wilkinson -- a fairly powerful line-up of recent Pulitzer Prize winners -- and it wouldn't be surprising for Beeler to move into their company in the next few years.
Longtime comics writer, comic book editor and all-around booster of the medium Stan Lee was among the 2008 winners for the 2008 National Medal of the Arts earlier this week. Here's a great and probably well-traveled photo of Lee receiving the honor. A transcript of the event can be found here. Here's the NEA profile on Lee. And here's a page with another photo. He's positively beaming.
The Association des Critiques et Journalists de Bande Dessinee has announced its 15 finalists for its Prix de la Critique 2008. Unless you're completely hopeless at the roots of language, you probably figured out -- or maybe you already knew -- that the ACBD is the French-language market's major writers about comics group. It looks like they narrowed down the list below from this pre-selection list of 95 books. Among the titles available in the states represented here are Alan's War, Tamara Drewe and Castle Waiting. That may be all of them, in fact.
* La guerre d'Alan T3, Emmanuel Guibert (L'Association)
* Chateau l'Attente, Linda Medley (ca et la)
* Le gout du chlore, Bastien Vives (Casterman)
* R97: les hommes a terre, Christian Cailleaux and Bernard Giraudeau (Casterman)
* Shutter Island, Christian de Metter after Dennis Lehane (Casterman)
* De Gaulle a la plage, Jean-Yves Ferri (Dargaud)
* L'heritage du colonel, Lucas Varela and Carlos Trillo (Delcourt)
* Tamara Drewe, Posy Simmonds (Denoel Graphic)
* Le roi des mouches T2, Mezzo and Michel Pirus (Drugstore)
* Spirou, le journal d'un ingenu, Emile Bravo (Dupuis)
* Martha Jane Cannary T1, Matthieu Blanchin and Christian Perrissin (Futuropolis)
* Matteo T1, Jean-Pierre Gibrat (Futuropolis)
* Il etait une fois en France T2, Sylvain Vallee and Fabien Nury (Glenat)
* Le reve de Meteor Slim, Frantz Duchazeau (Sarbacane)
* Tout seul, Christophe Chaboute (Vents d'Ouest)
* am I reading this correctly? Moebius 
