The Book
#117 Words and Pictures: Art and Competing Visualities in Comics
Referring to comics as “art” has long been problematic for a host of reasons – their mass production, their varied content and audience level, their lateness in arriving to the literary field and the canonical ...
#116 Sparse Art: Meditations on a Line-Drawn Life
My favourite comic artists these days: Simone Lia; Brian Lee O’Malley; Chester Brown; Jeff Lemire; Sarah Leavitt. In webcomics I love Kate Beaton; xkcd; Dinosaur Comics. These are the artists and authors of the books ...
#114 What Does It Mean to Draw a Picture of Something? Comics, Art and Warren Craghead
“In life, the visible surface of the Sperm Whale is not the least among the many marvels he presents. Almost invariably it is all over obliquely crossed and re-crossed with numberless straight marks in thick ...
#108 Coming of Age (or Not) in Mats Jonsson’s Hey Princess
Coming of age stories are as much about the zeitgeist and spirit of place as they are about the age of the focal character or memoirist. These narratives concern a person’s transition to adulthood at ...
#104 Adapting Adaptations: First Publishing’s Classics Illustrated
I’ve always had a fondness for comic book adaptations, both of film and of literature – I find that there’s often a fuzzy line between media, particularly when they’re visual, and sometimes I enjoy the ...
#102 Darwyn Cooke: Adaptation as Personal Aesthetic
Darwyn Cooke is a well-known comics author. He’s recently published the third in his series adapting Richard Stark’s Parker and just wrapped up the six-issue run of Before Watchmen: Minutemen. What’s striking about Cooke’s work ...
#101 Adapting the Wolf Man
I have ambivalent feelings about comics adaptations of works of literature. Freud says that while ambivalence involves feelings of love and hate, it really means hate. That is, whenever we say we are ambivalent about ...