Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* I guess I could be coming to this super-late, but it looks like du9 underwent a major redesign.

* Robert Stanley Martin takes a look at Robert Crumb by era.

* Alice Quinn talks to Chester Brown. Someone at ActuaBD.com talks to Jackie Estrada. Brigid Alverson talks to Makoto Tateno.

* the Pikitia Press blog spotlights a 1930s cartooning annual sort of book.

* there is a reasonably massive comments thread underneath this David Brothers article about comics-focused media coverage of Before Watchmen that's sort of like any ten-minute snippet of a vintage Hong Kong actioner for the seriousness and slightly outsized quality of the rhetorical violence involved. I think it's great to have these issues out, although I have to admit the role of press and professionals as enablers/moral agents are the two least interesting aspects to me of the village of issues that have spring up around this icky project.

* your time may be better spent staring at this really cool Spain Rodriguez piece of art, which I believe is also a print you can find for purchase. One of the pleasures of looking at Spain's art is the way he filtered classic adventure comics strips in a way that's both more ludicrous in the depiction and more serious in the consequences. That's a tricky balance that defines a lot of what I like in the underground comix. S. Clay Wilson gets deserved praise for the way he treated sex and violence in his work and how that gave other underground artists permission to follow their muses into whatever awful place they might wish to go, but Spain's comics that use these elements seem more potent to me in terms of seeing them now. I also enjoy this particular image for the way it lacks a central, organizing focus -- except for maybe the young woman at bottom center, who resists being seen and then can't be unseen.

* Ng Suat Tong on Ikkyu. Rob Clough on some more mini-comics. Andrew Shuping on Saga #2. Richard Bruton on Chick & Chickie, The Wolf Man and Halcyon And Tenderfoot #1. Katherine Dacey on The Apartments Of Calle Feliz.

* the problem with publishing from scratch is publishing from scratch.

* well, that's awfully cool-looking.

* I don't know that I ever linked to Brigid Alverson's report on being one of this year's Eisner judges.

* finally, the cartoonist Michael Kupperman is one of the funniest New Yorkers, but you probably already knew that. That guy could have retired after "Black Godfather Of The Ants" and still make my list.
 
posted 2:00 am PST | Permalink
 

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