The picks of the week from around the web.
Jane Meyer, “Covert Operations”. New Yorker piece on the oil billionaires Charles and David Koch and their bankrolling of the libertarian cause, and currently the Tea Party movement. Fascinating reading on the workings of private enterprise in American politics.
The Imp. All four issue of Daniel Raeburn’s fanzine […]

The picks of the week from around the web.
Li Se on the proposed South African media bill. As good a critical overview as any I’ve read on the ANC’s latest media clampdown in disguise.
Sam Lipsyte on Wilson. A fine review of Dan Clowes’ latest comic. One of the few I’ve read that seems […]

Over at The Comics Journal I now have a review of the book-of-the-year candidate by Nadia Raviscioni up. Go, read.

For those in the Copenhagen-Malmö region, I recommend checking out the exhibition Mutant Pop, now open at the Loyal Gallery in Saltimporten, Malmö. It is curated by Joe Grillo (it’s his work above) and Laura Grant of Dearraindrop and includes work by a host of talented artists, amongst them Mat Brinkman, Brian Chippendale, Ron Regé […]

“Think, for example, of Northrop Frye. Frye’s is now a name that you never hear mentioned but which was then everywhere. CS Lewis, who is now famous for fairy stories, was then famous for being a scholar. Tolkien too was famous for being a scholar, not for elves and so on. There is no prestige […]

Over at Hooded Utilitarian, my monthly column this time is an extended piece on the art historical antecedents of cartooning, with special focus on Robert Crumb’s adaptation of Genesis, and with reference to Bruegel and Rembrandt, plus a bonus discussion on the different meaning-making properties of text and image.
I hope you’ll check it out, […]

“I have been taunting the Reaper into taking a free scythe in my direction and have now succumbed to something so predictable and banal that it bores even me. Rage would be beside the point for the same reason. Instead, I am badly oppressed by a gnawing sense of waste. I had real plans for […]

The picks of the week from around the web.
RSA Animate: David Harvey breaks down in simple terms the financial crisis from his perspective, accompanied by some great instructional white-board cartooning (above).
Amoeblog: Billyjam interviews hip hop legend Krs-One in depth, on the occasion of the release of his new book The Gospel of Hip Hop. As […]

I now have a review of Judith Forest’s remarkable autobiographical comic 1h25 up over at TCJ.

The inimitable ‘Li Se’, in whose “extended network” I find myself, has finally opened the floodgates and is committing to writing the kind of intellectual effluvium that people in said network have come to appreciate in conversation over the years. Written on the principle, appropriated from Charles Bukowski, of ‘not trying’, it is blogging as […]

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, […]

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, […]

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