Random Comics News Story Round-Up

* if I'm reading this correctly, the Leclerc family has started a foundation devoted to modern art and comics, which may involve the employment of the family's massive collection of original art and a building/some property they're currently not using.

* the artist -- and comics author -- James Romberger has written a long post about the failure to properly credit comics illustrators as authors of the work they're helping create.

* every year when CR's randomly selected Jack Kirby art tribute goes up on the King's birthday, there's one panel or one sequence that ends up blowing me away. As I recall, last year it was this weird three-panel sequence of people leaving Darkseid behind done in a way that made Darkseid look like a divorced dad watching a station wagon full of kids heading back to their mother. This year it's a single panel from I believe the first Hulk adventure where Kirby has the monster lurching off into the distance at story's end. The choice to have the Hulk pitch forward in the second panel instead of continuing to rumble square-shouldered and Tor Johnson-style towards the horizon is inspired. You get this sense of the monster hurt, suffering: he looks like Lawrence Tierney leaving the scene of a horrifying car accident, not some super-powered body-builder raging off into the night. But the anger is there, too, a fury that makes arms and legs work when they maybe shouldn't. It's easy to understand why Rick Jones would want to follow him: the Hulk looks totally jacked up. Hell, I want to follow him. Kirby communicates most of this with a choice or two of what he's going to show and then a few lines on that left leg to really plant it in the ground. Compare that to the end of the last Hulk movie where with all of this history available to them and tens of millions of dollars we get a CGI cartoon doing parkour through the rubble, and if you're like me you'll shake your head in amazement at the unmatched original. Long live the King of Comics.

* the writer Chris Mautner suggests how to read Harvey Pekar.

* the artist Frank Santoro writes eloquently about the value of naturalism in comics art.

* not comics: Stephen Frears' adaptation of Tamara Drewe is opening up in theaters sooner rather than later this Fall. Advance word is that it's an art-house crowd-pleaser; I hope this means that the book will be a presence in shops through the Fall shopping season.

* Paul Gravett profiles Viz.

* finally, the critic Richard Bruton talks enthusiastically about the late Mike Parobeck, a very talented early practitioner of the "cartoony" style of mainstream adventure comics making and someone worth seeking out in quarter bins and back-issue sales if you like that kind of art and that kind of story.

 
posted 3:00 am PST | Permalink
 

---

 
Daily Blog Archives
November 2019
October 2019
September 2019
August 2019
July 2019
 
Full Archives