With certain cultural products you can tell how much you’re going to love them based only on a few key words from their description. City of Spies is a good example of this phenomenon. Words and phrases mentioned in relationship to the graphic novel include “World War II spy tale”, “intrigue”, “espionage” and “German conspiracy”.
Written by Susan Kim and Laurence Klavan and illustrated by Pascal Dizin, the book combines super-precise illustration with shiver-inducing mysteries, historical atmospherics and a cast of amiable, adventure-hungry characters. To be honest, we’re fans of anything that involves the kid detective genre and/or having hunches, so this book is the answer to our most fervent prayers. It doesn’t hurt that the tale has also been likened to a Tintin book directed by Hitchcock. Dream team!
Wish we knew how to say enthusiastic things in German, but alas! Gotta do it in English. Thomas Wellmann is a comics maestro who recently released Der Ziegensauger, a 100-page comicbook adventure in his signature style. (This is where the “wish-we-could-speak-German” urge kicks in really strongly; for now we’re gonna rely on a heavy visual exegesis plus basic dictionary for our reading strategy.)
Book aside, Wellmann makes nutty/awesome fantasy illustrations and game designs and more. His sketchbook/zine Schulheft is one of our all-time favorites: an intimate, prettily-produced pocket of sketchy joy.
There’s something vaguely Henry Darger-ish about Maarten Donders’ art and illustrations. Not in a weird reclusive sense, just in the sense of having a seriously unleashed imagination and a knack for fantastical colors and comics-influenced imagery.
Donders has lent his style to record covers and 140 Hits in Art, a book in which 140 artists illustrate one of their favorite songs. Donders chose Earthless, “a heavy psychedelic band who play facemelting jams.” We’d say the artist fits the subject perfectly.
Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Fabulas Panicas comics are surreal, goofy, and never less than gorgeous. The Chilean artist’s strips from the late 1960s have been scanned and collected here for your browsing pleasure.
The comics cover such topics as ambitious microbes, bearded dudes, anthropomorphism, love, ferocious lions and trees— a wide range but to be expected from a comic book writer who also happens to be a scholar, mime, actor, composer and psychotherapist!
Anyone with an ideologically confusing adolescence won’t want to miss Vanessa Davis’“Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon”, a coming-of-age bat mitzvah tale rendered in comics (sample line: “My party didn’t have a theme, but we did have kind of a mean-spirited caricaturist.”)
Vanessa inked, colored and captioned a comics column for Tablet magazine for a little over a year, gathering a loyal base of fans along the way. In an interview with Jim Linderman she discusses that column as well as Archie comics, the influences of female cartoonists on her work, and her desires to decorate pots, design wallpaper, and more!
Keep yourself updated on Vanessa’s adventures and work here. We can’t wait to see where she’ll go next.
Holy ketchup! Can’t believe we’ve waited so long before sharing The Rumpus with y’all. First things first: the name! Yes, it connotes images of wild Max rumpus’ing with the Wild Things, and maybe that is intentional. Maybe not. In any case, it’s an appropriate moniker for an internet magazine devoted to assembling and evaluating the most piquant arts and culture available to the world.
The San Francisco-based joint was founded by Stephen Elliott as a solution, partly, to what he thought was a certain blandness spreading among internet publications. “The Internet was supposed to diversify content,” Elliott said in a 2009 interview, “and it did as far as blogs and very specific pages. But for magazines it’s had the opposite effect. All the major online magazines are focusing on the exact same stories.”
“We try to introduce people to art they might not have heard of,” Elliott sez in the same interview. “Our target audience is smart temps. We update at least 10 times a day. Our original features and interviews tend to be around 1,500 words, intelligent content you can read while your boss is focusing on something else.”
The Rumpuscovers everything: books, comics, art, film, and other stuff relevant to keeping us on our toes. It is frankly wonderful, to be frank.
If you yearn for epic weirdness, dangerous hilarity, acerbic psychedelia, and simply genius storytelling, 1-800-Mice is for you. Matthew Thurber’s serialized comic book is a fantastical journey through a world where messenger mice engage in corporate espionage, hapless zinemakers may or may not hold the key to Valhalla, and sinister sentries seek answers that only open more questions. Think Thomas Pynchon by way of L. Frank Baum, with a dash of Lynchian wit. By means of what wizardry we’ll never know, Thurber conducts the symphony of this exponentially complex tale with astonishing grace. Each unexpected fold in the narrative reveals a brief glimpse of the mutant origami Thurber seems to be constructing.
The scattered scenes in the “trailer” above (which bear no relation to the actual content of 1-800-Mice), offer a brief taste of the comic’s kombucha and embalming fluid-soaked bewilderment. For the whole experience, pick up a copy of 1-800-Mice #4 from your local weird comic book shop– or Thurber’s web store– and seek out the back issues for more clues to the epic mystery!
The only thing better than enthusiasm is enthusaiasm + talent. Katherine Roy is an exemplar of both— a cartooning machine whose Caterpillar Tales celebrates the adventures and struggles of its namesake hero. Roy is a natural storyteller (she released her first childrens’, A Kid’s Guide to Boston’s Freedom Trail last year) and a zippy cartoonist. She also maintains a nice little blog cataloging her art experiments and assorted daily thoughts. Just delightful.
Robert Crumb is possibly the only person could take a segment of text that has been translated into *literally* every language and somehow make it fresh. His version of the The Book of Genesis takes its text straight from the King James Version of the Bible and presents it, in Crumb’s words, as “a straight illustration job” with no liberties taken. Thus we get Adam and Eve, Sodom and Gomorrah, Cain and Abel and the rest of the stories covered in the first fifty chapters of the Bible, all fleshed out in classic Crumb form. There are brawny babes, hairy dudes, a wild-eyed God and many excellent depictions of lust, fury, temptation and agony.
Two things makes themselves clear upon paging through the book. One: the subject is perfectly matched to Crumb, whose signature has long been a fascination with both the fiery and foolish elements of human behavior. Two: these are stories that everyone should know, not necessarily as elements of a religious instruction but as damn good yarns in their own right. Like gummy vitamins, Crumb’s Book of Genesis is a delicious way to stuff yourself with vital nutrients.
Art objects that are labeled “enigmatic” are oftentimes one of two things: totally amazing or utterly head-scratching. In rare situations—let’s call it the intersection of metaphor and reality—they can be both things at once. Folks, it’s not easy! Souvlaki Circus homes in on the target. Amanda Vähämäki (of The Bun Field fame) is the author of the magnetic little collection co-created with Michelangelo Setola and lovingly produced in a pocket-sized volume with a silkscreened canvas cover. The mostly-wordless assemblage of pencil drawings explores man vs. nature themes with humor and delicacy, resulting in bubble-like epiphanies for those who choose to study the pages carefully.
Needless to say, the Finland-born Vähämäki also has the rad distinction of a triple-umlautted last name. So as you can see, there is nothing not awesome about the artist.
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