The picks of the week from around the web.
The Guardian: “The Unwanted”. Joe Sacco on African refugees in Malta in the first installment of a 48-page reportage that originally ran in the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Harvey Pekar. The death of the pioneering comics writer this week elicited some fine journalism around the web: Tom Spurgeon’s obituary, […]

The passing of pioneer comics writer Harvey Pekar yesterday made me go back and reread some of his earliest collaborations with R. Crumb, published in his self-published American Splendor #1-4 in 1976-79. The beginnings of a remarkable body of work, they are emblematic of Pekar’s originality and importance as a writer, and as good a […]

Meanwhile over at TCJ main, I have a review up of David Prudhomme’s critically acclaimed musical romance Rébétiko.

For this month’s column over at the Hooded Utilitarian, I’ve dug into the Rackham archive to re-present in English a piece I wrote on Quino’s comic strip masterpiece Mafalda back in 2005.

The picks of the week from around the web.
The New Yorker: “The Mark of a Masterpiece”. David Grann talks to and examines the colourful career of Peter Paul Biro, the art forensics man who has participated in the authentication of the pretty, so-called Leonardo drawing that surfaced out of nowhere last year. Pretty amazing reading, […]

Ovre på det nye danske tegneseriesite nummer9.dk har vi netop postet en rundbordsdiskussion om de tre første bind i tegneserien Valhalla, i anledning af den nye samleudgivelse fra Carlsen. Udover undertegnede deltager chefredaktør Erik Barkman og Aben Malers Steffen P. Maarup. Check hele herligheden her.

The picks of the week from around the web.
Rolling Stone: “The Runaway General”. Without question this week’s most exposed piece of journalism, Michael Hasting’s article on the now deposed Gen. Stanley McCrystal, is well-worth spending time with if you only read the summaries. It does much more than convey the disparaging one-liners that lost him […]

My second DWYCK-column, on comics criticism and Hergé, is now up over on the Hooded Utilitarian. Check it out.

“Like the attacks by Al Qaeda, the disaster in the Gulf was preceded by ample warnings – yet the administration had ignored them. Instead of cracking down on MMS, as he had vowed to do even before taking office, Obama left in place many of the top officials who oversaw the agency’s culture of corruption. […]

The third Comics and Beats event in Copenhagen, hosted by the Danish Comics Council and the venue Vega took place last night. Cartoonists Ib Kjeldsmark, Cav Bøgelund and Mikkel Sommer improvised live with markers to the tunes of DJ TribleMe, while Bunker denizen and council chairman Thomas Thorhauge kept them on their toes as the […]

Undertegnede og Thorhaugen optræder nu på Nummer9s web-TV-kanal med et par interviews udført af Cav Bøgelund og Tue Søttrup under tegneseriefestivalen Komiks.dk, til festen fredag aften. Bogmærk kanalen — der kommer meget mere, fra en masse forskellige danske tegneseriefolk.

Just paying respects to one of the great illustrators of comics, one of the masters of texture. The above story, “Food for Thought”, drawn in collaboration with Roy Krenkel for EC’s Incredible Science Fiction (full story available here) is a case in point: though never a great naturalist, Williamson brings the alien world to teeming […]

By Andrew Firestone

A great man once said, “It is no small thing to make a new world.” And he’s only really half-right. It is a rather small thing to make a new world in one’s head. It is an entirely larger accomplishment if one delivers on the artistic and philosophical promise of this new world.
So […]

The past week-and-a-half or so has seen David Mazzucchelli’s Asterios Polyp debated and dissected over at the Hooded Utilitarian, with discussions shooting off in a multitude of directions, amongst them the words-image binary in comics and the potential of comics as literature and the development of comics through modernism to the present day.
Today I’ve […]