As I mentioned, I have been posting over on Instagram about graphic novels and comics in my library. Here’s a list of what I’ve discussed this first month. The Minotaur’s Tale by Al Davison Kling Klang Klatch by Ian McDonald and David Lyttleton Orchid by T. Edward Bak, Gabrielle Bell, Ben Catmull, Kevin Huizenga, David Lasky, Lark Pien, Jessie Reklaw, …
Moving makes you realize how many books you have. I’ve been reading comics since about sixth grade. I haven’t kept absolutely everything I’ve ever bought, but I have a lot of it. And most of this stuff is not in print anymore. I keep thinking that I should donate it all to a library or start one of my own. …
2019 The Lost Cause of Poetry came out. The digital version came out in September. “Lounger” was released on Tapas. Then later I also released it on Webtoon. Tony Ez Esmond wrote a review of “Defrost” on Never Iron Anything! I went to both TCAF and VanCAF one weekend after the other. I started to do Inktober this …
Alay-Oop, William Gropper NYRB reprinted this book this year, but it was originally published in 1930, the year after Lynd Ward’s God’s Man and the same year as Otto Nuckel’s Destiny and Milt Gross’s He Done Her Wrong. So it comes out of that tradition of one-image-per-page wordless books. Alay-Oop is a love story that begins in a circus, but …
Soma Frictional Games I like sci-fi horror and the initial videos of Soma looked really cool. But while I was excited to play the game, I was also wary. Frictional games are hit-or-miss with me. I liked Penumbra: Overture and Penumbra: Black Plague had some great moments, but Penumbra: Requiem was a disappointment and Amnesia struck me as overwritten and silly rather than …
As with many other folks associated with comics, Tom’s death shocked me and is taking some time for me to process. While I only met Tom once and so wasn’t by any means close with him, he has been a presence in my entire comics career. And it’s been a complicated presence. I created my first mini comic in 1996. …
After I sounded so confident, I ended up quitting my Inktober participation. Basically, I realized I was spending what time I had on drawings for Inktober instead of working on my comics. I decided I wanted to put my spare time to the most important task. So here’s the last three Inktober drawings that I did: But that means …
My initial feeling about Inktober was that I already drew in ink so I didn’t need a month devoted to it. Even so, I would post a few things every year half-heartedly. This year though, I decided to do the whole thing, using prompts and the whole deal. I’m really busy with work right now, so it’s been kind of …
I’m still figuring out how to describe “Lounger.” A post-apocalyptic dark comedy? A contagion drama? An anti-Walking Dead? Like Beckett rewriting Camus’s The Plague (I wish…)? If you have a suggestion for how to describe it, I’ll take it. Anyway, you can read it at Tapas or at Webtoon.
Martin Vaughn-James, The Cage; 1975. Like many graphic novels that were published before the term even existed, such as Miné Okubo’s Citizen 13660, Martin Vaughn-James has created a work that is more akin to a picture book than a comic book. By this I mean that neither Okubo nor Vaughn-James uses multiple panels on a page and both set the text separately …