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.
The folks at Vol. 1 Brooklyn were kind enough to feature my recent PopMatters post on Gay Talese over at their website. Back in March I wrote about Talese’s South Jersey roots and that crazy outline for his famous Esquire story.
Vol. 1 Brooklyn produces original fiction, literary-minded events, blogging, features, and thoughtful criticism. Check ‘em out.
James Burke, New York City, 1960 | Via Days Gone By
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.
“Suckers,” a new crime webcomic at Trip City, moves fast—Eric Skillman’s narrative packs three panels in per page at most, with only a handful of pages going live online for each installment. That’s a lot to sort out in such quick chapters, but it’s done well. Read my short post on “Suckers” at PopMatters.
Think Tank, a new Top Cow comic series about a scientist who works for an actual defense contractor, couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time. The first issue even references drones, the unmanned aerial vehicles that the U.S. Air Force and CIA have been deploying for decades, but have never before been as common a component of our foreign policy than they are in 2012. By April of this year, President Obama had ordered five times as many drone strikes as George W. Bush had in office. I wrote about Obama’s drone program and its timely mention in Think Tank for PopMatters.
Some of the Web’s discussion on the major development in Batman #10 from Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo (links will contain spoilers).
Michael Stewart at PopMatters:
By now, the rabbit is out of the hole. The dark visage Bruce Wayne sees in the reflection of his city is nearly his own, plus or minus variations in the gene pool. Snyder dug deep into the annals of Batman history to find his person to undercut the confidence of the Dark Knight.
Oliver Sava at The Onion’s AV Club:
Greg Capullo turns in consistently excellent work that strikes the same balance of superhero action and character-driven horror as Snyder’s scripts. Compared to a lot of the other old-school Image artists working at DC right now, Capullo has a stronger ability to capture a distinct tone in his artwork. There’s an emphasis on clear storytelling instead of flashy visuals, although he has no problem turning out dynamic splash pages.
David Uzumeri at Comics Alliance:
It all fits in very snugly with everything Snyder’s done in the run so far — hell, everything he’s done in any Bat-book, since James Gordon, Jr. claimed to be a similar “dark mirror” to Dick Grayson at the end of Batman: The Black Mirror. Since Snyder began work on the Batman titles, the Waynes have been taking a more active role in Gotham and how it’s run, through not only Batman Incorporated but also urban renewal initiatives.
See more panels from the week of 6/17/12 at 4th Letter.
When Ray Bradbury saw lions on the big screen during a 1924 Lon Chaney film, he envisioned them at the terrifying center of “The Veldt,” an early tale he authored about an automated home, complete with a room that virtually recreated an African veldt. I was assigned to read “The Veldt” in a grade school books discussion group, and it would stay very close to my heart in the years that followed.
In 2010, PopMatters published “Ray Bradbury Wrote Me Back,” my essay about experiences I’ve had with Bradbury’s work, and the effect that his stories have had on me through adulthood. Not long after I filed that piece, I visited Italy and was compelled to write about him again, specifically about his love of open public space.
Bradbury’s short stories are rich with affecting characters, ideas, and what many have called his “lyrical” imagery. I hope that over the weekend, some readers here will take a Bradbury book to bed or on a long road trip. And who knows? You might find that Ray’s words stir in your heart for many years to come.
For PopMatters, I wrote a short post about the iconic setting of one of my all-time favorite films, Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window.
Friday Listening
“I wrote ‘Open Source’ on my mother’s baby grand piano,” Collin “Calmer” Palmer explains. “That set the tone for what was to become the Past Is Present EP.” Incidentally, the artist’s mother was more involved in his creative nurturing than that—as a child in Pennsylvania’s Andrew Wyeth country, Palmer accompanied her at the same piano, where she captivated him with selections from the songbooks of Claude Debussy, Bach, and more. Read more of my 2009 feature on Calmer at PopMatters.
PopMatters published an essay from me yesterday about racial tensions in 1960s-era Houston and how the time period figures into a new graphic novel called The Silence of Our Friends. Sit-ins and marches in Houston, Texas back then meant enormous physical risks for volunteer activist groups like the Freedom Riders and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee that were challenging the status quo. When tensions rooted in a heavily segregated community eventually exploded at Texas Southern University in 1967, the SNCC found themselves at the center of the pot. Creators Mark Long, Nate Powell, and Jim Demonakos explore this era in The Silence of Our Friends. Click to read my PopMatters feature.
