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
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.
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.
“Next, Stearn visits an apartment on Central Park, in a ‘very respectable building’ where the management thinks the girls are models in the Garment District. Here, high-end call girl Jane sits chain-smoking and stroking a Pekingese in her lap, telling of her days making $1,000 a week. She fell in love with one of her Johns, a boy who ‘sent me so many flowers the place smelled like a funeral parlor.’ But that didn’t last. ‘Love, schmove,’ she says, ‘who knows about love?’”
“Sisters of the Night,” Jeremiah Moss on a “grassy, musty” 1956-era reporting-driven book on NYC prostitution, The Paris Review
Publishers Weekly reports that award-winning artist and comics writer/graphic novelist Nate Powell will be drawing March, a black-and-white graphic autobiography of Georgia U.S. Congressman John Lewis, to be released from Top Shelf sometime in late 2014/ early 2015.
John Lewis is a former chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, an activist organization that took momentous steps to strengthen and expand the American Civil Rights Movement during the 1960s. Nate Powell illustrated another black-and-white graphic work about the SNCC and a 1967 riot at Texas Southern University called The Silence of Our Friends — I wrote about the riot and The Silence… for PopMatters earlier this year.
Beneath new $1.8 million-dollar surveillance cameras installed to assist the fractured police force in Camden, New Jersey, suburban neighbors flood the city’s popular narcotics market at sixth and York streets, even while the sun shines. The corner marks just one of “perhaps a hundred open air drug markets, most run by gangs like the Bloods, the Latin Kings, Los Nietos and MS-13,” wrote Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges in The Nation magazine in late 2010.
For PopMatters, I wrote a short preview piece about poverty and crime in Camden, NJ and its place in a new book called Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt from journalist Chris Hedges and reporter/comics artist Joe Sacco.
By the time he was readying to swap a death penalty sentence for leads about where he’d buried his victims, serial killer Gary Ridgway was facing 48 counts of aggravated murder. The highly religious Navy veteran targeted female prostitutes and eventually estimated killing 60 women in total, choking them and leaving their bodies in a wooded area of southern Seattle. Read my new PopMatters piece on Ridgway and Green River Killer, the Dark Horse graphic novel for which Jonathan Case won a Stumptown Comic Art Award in April.
Even against its meticulously detailed backdrop, the discussion at the center of Cleveland unravels quite slowly, much like the cross-city stroll that Harvey Pekar takes between its pages. It’s one of the final projects that pioneering comics author and graphic novelist Pekar worked on before his death in 2010.
Illustrator Joseph Remnant’s inks suit Pekar’s vibrant character sketches and nuanced geographical composites well, with delicate cross-hatching and facial expressions that conjure strong emotional reaction. Remnant shines in his representation of Pekar’s beloved city, from carefully drawn building facades to marvelous and tangible depictions of worn corners in “Kay’s” three-story bookstore. For a great discussion of this book, writer Jillian Steinhauer has more at The Forward. Recommended.
