Nate Powell’s breathtaking sketches for a now-dormant Sam Cooke graphic biography (via Locust Moon Comics). Would love to see this come to fruition. Last year, I wrote for PopMatters about The Silence of Our Friends, a graphic novel about 1960s-era civil rights tensions that Powell worked on with Mark Long.
Via Locust Moon Comics, Philadelphia
“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.”
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.
While different creators have added new layers of mythology to the character, the best writers know that Swamp Thing is driven by one fundamental principle: Nature is scary. The world of plants is alien to mankind, and in that unknown there is plenty of potential for fear.
The AV Club’s Oliver Sava on Swamp Thing.
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.
In the March issue of Harper’s (not online), writer Charles Bock discusses FX’s animated series Archer. Bock blogged about Archer for the magazine’s newly redesigned website, citing the show’s roots in underground comics like Mad, EC’s horror stuff, and the work of Robert Crumb.
(In Archer’s) mixture of the crude and whimsical, it goes well beyond anything The Simpsons or even South Park has attempted. (Let’s be honest: filtering everything through childhood and using crude animation also dilutes South Park’s kick.) This isn’t to suggest Archer’s sensibility is entirely sui generis. By my reading, the show’s tone arises from an ancestor older than either of those shows: comic books. And not the ones involving radioactive spiders.
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.
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.
My knowledge of small press comics publishers is very limited — good news, though: Broken Frontier’s managing editor Andy Oliver has an insightful “best-of” digest of UK small press comics, which is built-out with a great deal of links to publishers and more. At Thirteen Minutes, the reliably sharp Justin Giampaoli has his own “best-of” comics list that highlights some of the year’s bold titles from Image, Oni Press, and more (see Giampaoli’s small press, mini-comics list too). Comics Bulletin’s “best of 2012” graphic novels spotlights more than a couple of really smart books. I also dug the new “try something new”-themed column from Matthew Rosenberg at Forbidden Planet’s “The Daily Planet” — we share an enthusiasm for Ed Brisson’s Murder Book comics.
Scene of the Crime isn’t as rich with the noir-ish doses of shadow that would flood Ed Brubaker stories in the years to come — such as Gotham Central, Criminal, and Fatale — but this late 1990s four-issue DC/Vertigo miniseries in some sense birthed the universe of grifters, drug runners, and unlucky bar flies who populate those scripts. Read the rest of my new PopMatters piece about Brubaker’s noir comics and Scene of the Crime.
