Tag: graphic novels

A notorious mind-weirding origin story

Cultural journalist, author, and all-around nice guy Jesse Jarnow has a new column at Aquarium Drunkard—in its debut installment, he has some characteristically smart stuff to say about cartoonist Brian Blomerth and his vibrant graphic novel Bicycle Day:

The most accessible of the new batch of psychedelic books–and surely the most gleeful–is Brian Blomerth’s Bicycle Day (Anthology Editions, $30.00). A gorgeous graphic novel, it depicts the most notorious mind-weirding origin story of them all—Albert Hofmann’s 1943 lab accident that unleashed a world-changing technicolor superpower. Blomerth’s rendering Hofmann’s invention of LSD in Basel, Switzerland in the years surrounding World War II is lush and overflowing, a welcoming color-swirl that will almost surely beckon repeat dives. A stunning visual rendering of Hofmann’s discovery, Bicycle Day winks to R. Crumb, Yellow Submarine, the Grateful Dead, and numerous comix conventions, unfortunately including a hyper-buxom depiction of Hofmann’s assistant, Susi Ramstein, the first woman to take LSD.

Read Jarnow’s whole column here. And as Jesse and I share a great deal of common interests, I reviewed Blomerth’s new comic for The Los Angeles Times in June.

The new adult comics revolution

comics guido crepax fantagraphics

At The Comics Journal, Derik Badman writes about Italian comics artist Guido Crepax and his popular character Valentina Rosselli, whose strip was first serialized in a monthly adult-aimed comics magazine called Linus in the mid-1960s.

Hyperallergic’s year in comics

Outside of emailing with friends or some argumentative text messages, I don’t really do the “Best of” thing. I’ll probably post “the best” writing that I’ve read here at my site as I’ve done in years past, but I never really feel as if I’ve consumed enough of anything over the course of a year (other than pizza) to tell you that one thing is better than the other. I can always tell you that I liked something, so there’s that, right? That said, it was nice to have been asked to contribute to Hyperallergic’s “Best of 2018: The Top Ten Graphic Novels,” particularly alongside the brilliant writers involved. Here’s critic Dan Schindel:

Comics writers and artists are often better equipped to tackle contemporary events and issues before anyone working in any other medium, and many graphic novels that came out this year demonstrate this perfectly. Both the anxiety and tentative sense of possibility that comes from living in deteriorating liberal democracies, climate change, and changing paradigms around sex and gender are all on display in everything from superhero series to indie comics. All these ideas and much more are explored in these titles, which represent some of the most innovative art and sharpest writing to be found in 2018.

My selection was Michael Kupperman’s All the Answers. I wrote at length about All the Answers earlier this year and went to Parsons recently to see Kupperman talk about his very moving memoir. It’s worth a read.

See the whole Hyperallergic feature here. All the writing I’ve done at Hyperallergic is collected here, and it is inclusive of my 2018 work.