Showing posts tagged books
comicsispeople: “Compelling interplay between Red-Handed‘s crafty and credulous throws shine on the work’s more enduring moments, such as when Kindt lends unlikely tenderness to an exchange between an aging pickpocket and his mark on a crowded subway train, or to a heist man’s recounting of his convictions to a new lover, set against a Hawaiian sunset. Each encounter is framed in extremes, so that micro scenes drawn from on-the-ground perspectives of townspeople swiping a store marquee’s letters can render the cast comically pint-sized. Evocative closeups, on the other hand, signal for reader restraint. It’s practically hypnotizing when Kindt brings someone to the fore in this novel.” (via Comics Creator Matt Kindt’s ‘Fine Art’ | PopMatters) View high resolution

comicsispeople:

“Compelling interplay between Red-Handed‘s crafty and credulous throws shine on the work’s more enduring moments, such as when Kindt lends unlikely tenderness to an exchange between an aging pickpocket and his mark on a crowded subway train, or to a heist man’s recounting of his convictions to a new lover, set against a Hawaiian sunset. Each encounter is framed in extremes, so that micro scenes drawn from on-the-ground perspectives of townspeople swiping a store marquee’s letters can render the cast comically pint-sized. Evocative closeups, on the other hand, signal for reader restraint. It’s practically hypnotizing when Kindt brings someone to the fore in this novel.”

(via Comics Creator Matt Kindt’s ‘Fine Art’ | PopMatters)

(Reblogged from comicsispeople)

Brown, blue, and gold in graphic novel ‘Babble’

Comics artist Bryan Coyle drafts recollection and current day settings in a new, visually striking graphic novel called Babble with the use of powerful aesthetic shifts. Read my PopMatters piece on this book.

Poor Charles Dexter Ward

Action-packed comics don’t often owe to depictions of characters sifting through moldy correspondence, deciphering archaic language, and unlocking mantras typically reserved for cellars or graveyards. Read my piece on H.P. Lovecraft’s/Ian Culbard’s The Case of Charles Dexter Ward for The Comics Journal.

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Comics journalism from the Congo

After a six-week trip to the Congo in 2010, reporter David Axe developed a long magazine article that would eventually serve as a script for Army of God: Joseph Kony’s War in Central Africa, a work of graphic journalism. Illustrated by Brooklyn, New York-based comics artist Tim Hamilton, Army of God tells the story of the Lord’s Resistance Army rebel group, a morally corrupt militia that has moved into northeastern Democratic Republic of Congo and has terrorized the people of the region after having been chased out of Uganda by the Ugandan army in 2005. Read my feature on Army of God at PopMatters.

Claustrophobic horror in Hannah Berry’s ‘Adamtine’

Following the perpetual rainstorms that soak the private investigator who mopes through her debut, 2010’s Britten & Brülightly, Hannah Berry’s Adamtine is a smaller, slimmer volume. It’s a modern tale and is far more claustrophobic than Britten‘s somber murder mystery, which is told in the shadows of towering buildings or from directly above, as if we’re monitoring restaurant meetings from light fixtures in the ceiling. Read more of my piece on Berry’s new book at PopMatters.

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New evidence undermines “facts” in Capote’s ‘In Cold Blood’

New evidence from the Kansas Bureau of Investigation calls into question some of the claims made in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. From the Wall Street Journal:

In researching “In Cold Blood,” Truman Capote received first-class service from the KBI and Mr. Dewey, its lead detective on the case. Mr. Dewey gave the author access to the diary of 16-year-old Nancy Clutter—her final entry logged only moments before two strangers invaded her home in late 1959 and murdered her, her brother and her parents. Mr. Dewey opened the KBI’s case file to Mr. Capote. He pressured press-shy locals to cooperate with the author and granted him extraordinary access to the killers. Mr. Dewey even helped Mr. Capote, a New Yorker with no home in Kansas, obtain a Kansas driver’s license.

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For a 1966 Esquire story called “Mr. Bad News,” Gay Talese profiled New York Times obituary writer Alden Whitman. When the writer follows Whitman to a Carnegie Hall concert, attention is averted from the orchestra pit to a distinguished concertgoer’s facial features and more, a momentary occupational hindrance. “Whitman made notes on such details,” reported Talese, “knowing that someday they would help bring life to his work, knowing that masterful obituaries, like fine funerals, must be planned well in advance.” Read my PopMatters post on obituary writing and audacious Eisner Award winner Daytripper, an official selection at The Angoulême International Comics Festival this year.

For a 1966 Esquire story called “Mr. Bad News,” Gay Talese profiled New York Times obituary writer Alden Whitman. When the writer follows Whitman to a Carnegie Hall concert, attention is averted from the orchestra pit to a distinguished concertgoer’s facial features and more, a momentary occupational hindrance. “Whitman made notes on such details,” reported Talese, “knowing that someday they would help bring life to his work, knowing that masterful obituaries, like fine funerals, must be planned well in advance.”

Read my PopMatters post on obituary writing and audacious Eisner Award winner Daytripper, an official selection at The Angoulême International Comics Festival this year.

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One reason why LeDuff alienates some journalists is that he gets involved with his stories, like a pissed-off George Plimpton reporting from hell. From the opening pages, it’s clear Detroit will be no different. It opens with a story about LeDuff being robbed at a downtown gas station. He ends up pulling a gun: “I bent into the car, reaching for the glove box latch. There was a 9mm inside. Not mine. It belonged to a reporter who had forgotten to store it in his desk on his way to a press conference. He had asked me in the parking lot to hold on to it and I laughed about a journalist carrying a concealed weapon. Correspondents don’t do that even in war zones, I told him.
“Motor City Madman (on journalist Charlie LeDuff’s memoir.” Bill Shea, Columbia Journalism Review.

Sean Ford’s strange and beautiful ‘Only Skin’

The woods in Sean Ford’s comic Only Skin border a simple, recognizable American town. There’s a post office and a diner. Members of the community amble about, fill up at the local gas station, and nod knowingly at each other on the empty streets. At night, they experience strange dreams and file into council meetings to sound concerns about neighbors who have recently gone missing in the forest. Read more of my piece on Only Skin at PopMatters.

NYT, NPR, PW sift through 2012’s comics

The New York Times sifts through some 2012 graphic novels/trades and offers a respectable holiday gift guide. Picks include Jeff Lemire’s The Underwater Welder (one of my favorite books this year) and Darwyn Cooke’s Parker: The Score, about which I’ll agree with writer George Gustines that if you’re into really stylish heist/crime stories, then the three-volume set “belong(s) in everyone’s library.”

Glen Weldon recounts a popular year for comics at NPR, and suggests that his list of 2012 picks consist only of those books that “flew under the radar.” 

Undoubtedly this is a must-see list that culls several books with which I am unfamiliar, but I don’t think that on any planet whatsoever could a book marketed by behemoth DC Comics ever be considered to have “flown under the radar.” (Take note, also, of an interesting back-and-forth in the comments section.)

Publishers Weekly has a “2012 Best Of” up that features Chris Ware’s Building Stories but is separate from the staff’s picks for “Best Comics,” which includes Gabrielle Bell’s The Voyeurs. I finished reading The Voyeurs not long ago, and I really dug it — smart, funny, sad…just great writing and authentic intimacy. The Comics Journal has a great piece on Bell’s pacing, the book’s “clarity of tone,” and more.