Comic Books
Comics have a good chance of surviving ecological disaster. Unlike, for example, blue-chip video art, there may be a place for hand-drawn sequential graphics after floodwaters recede.
Lee Lai is an artist from Melbourne, Australia, currently living in Tio’tia:ke (known as Montreal, Quebec). Her comics and illustrations are part fiction, part memoir, part emotional journalism.
Future St. is set in an America in which homosexuality has triumphed over heterosexuality, cloning has replaced sexual reproduction, and California has seceded from the mainland United States to form the gay male state of “Clonifornia.”
This visual narrative, arranged into a scroll format for online viewing, is the first chapter of Tammy Nguyen’s fiction Primate City—a duet of artist books that draws upon a 1969 US military intelligence proposal to modernize Danang City.
There’s never been a richer time for graphic novels in all their genre-bending permutations: memoirs and literary adaptations, documentaries and short-form collections, histories and abstract pieces.
While the art-world pendulum predictably swings back and forth between a taste for abstraction and an embrace of figuration, some artists remain steadfast in their pursuits. Such is the case with James Esber, whose work has long sought to merge these seemingly opposed tendencies.
“A lot of times I end up turning on the camera on my computer and playing something out, and pausing it and seeing what tonal or emotional nuances are there that I can work with.”
Magpies, comics, paradoxes, and the spirit of disruption.
Amid the cacophony of collage, there is also, here, a baseline of story marching on: again and again the soldiers, the trucks. Isn’t it a natural impulse to want to follow that line?
Raymond McDaniel on the mythology of comic books and the super-hero narrative in his book of poetry Special Powers and Abilities.
Writer Zadie Smith and graphic novelist and illustrator Chris Ware spoke at the New York Public Library on December 11, 2012.
America is still probably the strangest, funniest, and saddest thing to appear in a Daniel Clowes story, but the hero of his new graphic novel, The Death-Ray, comes close.
Daniel Clowes, renowned comics artist, talks about his newly reissued The Death-Ray and his distaste for superheroes and wrestling.
For the last five years, Robert Crumb, the father of underground comix, has been laboring over a graphic retelling of the first book of the Bible.
The notion of secret identity is celebrated cross-culturally; worldwide, the entertainment and service industries exploit its implicit escapism, that very human urge to live out something beyond the ordinary, out of the grasp of the everyday.
