I was at TCAF – the Toronto Comics Arts Festival – this past weekend and wanted to share this photo of my favorite purchases. There is wonderful work by Leigh Luna (who I spoke with a bit and is awesomely nice!), Andy Warner, super-talented, super-friendly Boston-area artists Braden Lamb and Shelli Paroline (who also draw the comic book version of Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time), and the wonderful Aya Kakeda (that’s all her work on the top row – remarkable talent and such a nice person). We also traded children’s books with Aya and got a copy of The Hole In The Middle, which she illustrated.
I highly recommend TCAF as a wonderful way to discover what’s happening on the ground in the world of the narrative arts – great festival in a great city!
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The road to Planet of the Apes became a reality the moment they handed Mikki the Chimpanzee a camera. Now his work is expected to sell “for more than $100,000 in auction.” This must be great news to all the photographers who either get paid peanuts for their work or just have to watch as artists appropriate their images, stick them in a gallery, and let the money rain down on them — the artists, I mean, not the photographers.
Might I suggest photographers start wearing gorilla suits when they do their work from now on? At least if they expect to get anywhere.
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Sacco is known for his in depth work in Palestine and Bosnia, but this collection of shorter works allows readers to get a wider view of the grim world that Sacco has chosen to document.
In the Caucasus, Sacco spends time with Chechen women trying to survive the refugee camps which Russia is eager to force out in order to declare the problem solved. Sacco’s narrative darts between the reality of life in these camps and the nightmare of the experiences that brought the women there, adding up to a harrowing, depressing and angering piece.
In his Iraq pieces, Sacco documents the trials of American soldiers and their harsh lot in wartime, as well as that of torture survivors attempting to sue Donald Rumsfeld for the horrific treatment.
Sacco goes to his native country, Malta, to investigate the influx of African refugees that has created a nightmare of crowding and animosity between the desperate people trying to escape horror and death, and the small country that cannot handle what has descended upon them.
In India, Sacco visits lower caste villages that are beyond bleak. So poor and beaten down are these people that they have given up caring about any human rights they deserve. They survive by raiding rat holes filled with foraged grain. It is a shocking existence perpetuated by the corruption of the higher castes in charge.
As with any of Sacco’s work, the stories he tells will make you cringe and cry, and he does this with clarity as he explains the history and context on a larger scale that leads to the horrors you witness.
It’s reality as too many Americans are unaware of it, but so much of the rest of the world cannot escape. Sacco, in the tradition of the greatest journalists, is on the side of the little guy, and is determined to present the individual stories with dignity and compassion.
His success is greater than many print journalists, and his form of graphic storytelling adds layers that they could never capture. If there is one graphic novelist who should be mandatory reading in American high schools, it is Joe Sacco, an important voice beyond his chosen medium. The Voyeurs and July Diary by Gabrielle Bell (Uncivilized Books)
Autobiographical comics can be difficult for newcomers to the form to warm up to. So often the work of people who document lives they’ve barely lived, they can function as therapy that the world gets to peer in on. Lots of people undergo therapy, but their sessions aren’t necessarily interesting to listen in on.
Gabrielle Bell is one of those who transcends any fears you might have about the form – or, at least, this is as good as it gets, and if you’re open to the idea of spending some time with a self-deprecating, pseudo- hermit who isn’t always good at communicating, then you’re half-way there. The key to good autobiographical comics is perhaps to make the personal experience universal or ,if not that wide-reaching, at least wide enough to go beyond the creator and give the reader something to latch onto. Bell does that, emerging in her work as an Every Artist. There’s a lot to identify with.
In “The Voyeurs,” Bell offers a compilation of beautiful cartoon journals created over a several-year period that document the dichotomy between outward success and inner assurance that she is nothing but a loser. As she travels with boyfriend and creative collaborator, film director Michel Gondry, and attends the media event known as Comic Con in San Diego as their special guest with all expenses paid, it seems like fate has tossed magical glitter around her life. Yet, she’s the same person she ever was, the person who doesn’t like to leave her apartment for days, the person who is convinced she needs art lessons, the person who obsessively draws at any moment of the day, regardless of what is going on or where she is. As a cautionary tale for a creative person seeking success, Bell’s book is a must-read, stressing that success changes your itinerary, but not your soul.
Not meaning to, but functioning well as a postscript to “The Voyeurs,” her short book “July Diary” is a 31-day experiment that saw Bell do a diary comic a day for July, 2011, the year following the end of “The Voyeurs.” Here, the trappings of Bell’s life are much more down to earth- she even goes on a day-long temp job plugging and unplugging computers – and it’s a good source of context for readers of the previous book. Any creative person will probably be able to identify with Bell’s frustration at the challenge she has set out for herself, even going to far as to argue about it and justify the whole thing in within the content of her actual project. Truthfully, procrastination is as important a part of the creative process as massive self doubt, and Bell manages to translate her experience in a way that’s both singular and familiar, and will make you laugh.
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My article on awe-inspiring children’s book writer and illustrator Peter Sis runs in today’s paper, but there’s plenty of the interview that was not included there that I thought was worth sharing.
We spoke quite a bit about the perception of his work from editors and art directors early on, and, shall we say, an almost institutional short-sightedness in regard to work that did not fit into a comfortable place in the market. Sis stressed the importance of finding someone who gets what your work is about and helping you communicate that essence briefly and effectively.
Sis: I found out also that it’s very important that you meet somebody who’s your editor or who understands what you’re trying to say, because I think when you just have 10 minutes to show your idea and make a proposal and make some sort of dummy of the project, it’s very difficult to say this is who I am. This is why, if I have a student now, I say don’t be afraid to show who you are because it takes time. For a long time, I couldn’t do anything of my own just because I would always be told it doesn’t have any connection to the culture here.
Me: Your books do have a flavor that stands out as different. The quality lends itself to making the books meaningful to parents as well as children, and maybe that creates a connection as they experience the books together.
Sis: I would hope so. That’s what I hear from some people. Some people say, what age group is this for, this is not for my four year old. I did some of those books for little kids and then I realized if it’s for a a really little kid then they at one point get bored with it, put it aside and never look at it again.
I like the idea that I have these different layers in the books. Some parents and some kids love the idea that they were discovering the different layers together, and they said we can go back to the book and find another layer. It was almost like it would be a spacious book, like it had three dimensions. But I don’t know much about this feeling, I didn’t really speak to people about this. It was true especially with the book I did about the bed. There was another book about Charles Darwin but that was different. That wasn’t spacious layers that was layers of history.
Me: Are you concerned that any of this is changing with the coming of ebooks?
Sis: I don’t know how much all this is changing with the electronic world. I’m just finishing a book and wondering if it’s going to work still with that age group or if it will move more down, just because the older kids are so much now into electronics.
I can’t really tell because I used to watch this with my own kids and now I can;t watch it anymore, since they grew up. I would see them with Game Boy, but also reading, and I would see them using Facebook or iPhones, but only sporadically. I can see that they are not going to get completely trained by it. It’s very hard for me to say how this will somehow transfer to books and to people who read books. Will people still want to have this parent child experience where they would be reading stuff together.
Me: Given your background in animation, there may be a way for you to approach the new electronic media bringing book work and animation work together.
Sis: That’s what I’m thinking about. It would be fantastic to find that connection, because I was trying for years to find something back in animation. I think this would be great, but I also have to be very careful because I think now is still the time when lots of people want to get into this new thing just because they think it’s money. They’re trying to come up with very basic ideas just to get their foot in the door. I think it will be an interesting media once it’s being used responsibly, but at the moment it’s a little it like the wild west, I think, it’s like loads of people would be approaching me and my friends and say we will do this for little kids and before they go too bad they can color this and color that and that seems to be some very basic and … very much now it seems to be about who controls the market.
I would love to use some of those things that were so magic when I used to do cut out animation and it was frame by frame. My whole life, I look at the books as the films I couldn’t do as films. Now it would be like making it again as a film, but I think I would need some really technical minded person.
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A Quebec native, Castree’s autobiographical work of growing up dysfunctionally and the toll it took on her emotionally and physically manages to combine the fury of the moment with the peace of hindsight remarkably and amiably.
Young Goglu is the result of a romantic pairing that barely existed in any real sense of the term, and her parents time together is one of two people willfully inching away from each other while their child watched on confused. Her father absent much of her life, Goglu is dependent on her mom to fill in the familial gaps, but she’s such a mess that the aloof moments are swapped out with too much attention, especially while drunk.
Castree chronicles Goglu’s awkward visits to other people’s houses with her partying mother in tow, her anxiety as a child, her antagonistic relationship with her mother’s boyfriend, her loneliness, and her own descent into excess — as well as attempts to reconnect with her father and the strange victories and failures in those experiences.
In lesser hands, this could be a whiny work, but Castree’s presentation of her circumstances is so honest, so charming, and so instilled with a great humor and an ability to take small episodes into places of larger meaning that it could function well as a lesson in how to do a graphic memoir.’
William and the Lost Spirit by Gwen de Bonneval and Matthieu Bonhomme
Author de Bonneval and artist Bonhomme take a classic approach to the boy quest fairy tale genre with European flair.
Following the death of William’s father, a feudal lord, his sister Helise runs away from home, convinced he still lives. William is unhappy with his present situation — his mother has promised herself to Sir Brifaut, a power-hungry creep who sees opportunity in the needy widow.
William eventually takes off on his own quest to find his sister, an adventure that has him journeying along with a wayward knight and encountering such creatures as the legendary Blemmyes, whose faces are in their torsos.
There is a low key, almost philosophical tone to the book, and anyone seeking the high energy of big screen fantasies will probably find this a bit cerebral and perhaps too traditional. The French creators manage to keep it fresh and cliche-free, though, and kids who like a bit more meat to their stories should love this book.
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The above image comes from a great series of work by Canadian photographer Jonathan Hobin (the subject of an article here at Vice.com) that features disasters and tragedies reenacted as child’s play. This is his 9-11 recreation — there’s also an image of the death of Prince Diana, Jim Jones and his Kool Aid, the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the atrocities of Abu Ghraib, the duplicities of Obama, and more. Not for the faint of heart, I guess.
This cartoon by Lauren Purje on Hyperallergic spawned a whole other entry about possible answers to the art criticism that any given work in question is something that a kid could’ve a created, thereby it is not so impressive. My favorite is “i could have done that + but you didn’t = modern art,” but there are lots of great zingers there that artists might want to file away for just the right moment.
I’m very happy to be able to say that this Spotify playlist comes from ex-Books cellist, video artist, composer Paul de Jong! Here’s an interview with Paul, so you can get to know him better ….
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Nemo: Heart of Ice by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill
After years of more heady and abstract diversions involving the Victorian era super team, Moore and O’Neill return to a more agreeable nuts and bolts presentation that highlights Captain Nemo’s daughter, Janni Dakkar, and crosses that with Citizen Kane — literally, since Charles Foster Kane is the instigator of the mad plan to gain revenge on Dakkar for robbing him.
That plan results in a showdown at the South Pole, with Dakkar retracing her father’s steps in an attempt to move past piracy as a way of life, and a pair of nefarious adventurer/inventors, including Tom Swift — here Swyfte — under Kane’s hire in hot pursuit, not to mention some dangerous and odd monsters.
The whole thing is wrapped up with an in-depth report from Hildy Johnson, main character of The Front Page.
The main story, meanwhile, brings in specific characters and elements from books by H. Rider Haggard, Jules Verne, Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen series has always been part parlor game — name the obscure Victorian lit character and the book of origin — and it descended into an incredibly abstract and, at times, hard to access version over time. With Heart Of Ice, simplicity returns — you don’t have to know any of the clever backgrounds and in-jokes in order to enjoy a fairly straightforward adventure with philosophical undertones, and so this is a welcome return to form.
The challenge of the League of Gentlemen books — and one that they rose to originally — was to mix the headiness in with the pulp and transcend both forms. The scales tipped to the side of headiness for awhile there, but with this title, the balance has returned and Moore offers an accessible introduction to his incredible world for those who might not have encountered it.
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I spoke to Cesar Alvarez from The Lisps in today’s paper about the bands performance of Futurity at Mass MoCA tomorrow night – you can read that here. It’s a steampunk roots-rock musical! Trailer above! Music below!
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Cooley‘s song cycle about extinction is available for listening and purchase. Earth Day may be a better holiday for reflection and planning than celebration, and Cooley’s Xmalia is good soundtrack for that.
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The Voyeurs and July Diary by Gabrielle Bell (Uncivilized Books)
