Today, Gaston LaGaffe walked into the Dupuis offices exactly 50 years ago. Mayhem ensued…

Congrats on the day, Franquin! Hope you’re having a great time in the grave, maestro!
Above: Gaston in 1968.

Efter sidste uges genoplivning af den gamle BLÆK-ballade mellem Henrik Rehr og undertegnede (her og her), har de involverede parter per privat korrespondence efter bedste evne fået mast bøffen. Rehr har sendt følgende udtalelse til offentliggørelse, og vi replicerer nedenfor.
I forlængelse af en email-udveksling med Matthias Wivel og Thomas Thorhauge er jeg blevet opmærksom på, […]

Got my first Žižek experience yesterday. I was simultaneously impressed and underwhelmed. My only exposure to his work until today had been through the plethora of other authors citing him these days, and through a friend who enthusiastically appreciates his iconoclasm and originality, and also does a killer impression of the man. I have been […]

Contrary to large parts of the comics intelligentsia who dismiss it by default, and the masochistic fans who dis it but keep coming back for more, I do not want to dump unreservedly on Marvel’s Civil War. Sure, it is easy to make fun of, what with its ineptly handled attempts at political allegory and […]

Just thought I’d take a little time out to plug a couple of good folks back home, in the Deekay. First and foremost, there’s Big Hungry Joe, the newly formed old times orchestra. They play American folk music with enthusiasm and brio, and they have an album coming from Danish comics publisher Brun Blomst. In […]

For the past weeks, our very own cartoon crisis, here in the academic bubble of Cambridge, has been rolling. In the first week of February, the Clare College newspaper Clarefication put out a special satirical issue entitled “Crucification” that amongst other things printed one of the Danish Muhammed cartoons, which last year had people going […]

My grandmother asks:
DO YOU KNOW THIS IMAGE?

And does it remind you of something?

Shortly after 11 September 2001, my grandmother, Eva, discovered what she thinks might be a sign of Osama bin Laden’s ingenuity, and even perhaps the pictorial inspiration for the atrocity he had overseen. To thus refer to one of the great images of […]

Der er heldigvis andet at hente end tungeknuder, krumspring og udenomstale på Comic Zone Seriejournalen disse dage. Selveste Simon Petersen har for nylig postet seneste udgave af sin klumme, hvori han kommenterer Rackham.dks lukning. Han skriver:
“Så er Rackham.dk lukket ned, og det er grund til at flæbe over det tab. En meget stor del af […]

Henrik Rehr svarer på den rejste kritik:

Punch drunk? Måske? Anyway, her er min post der kommenterer betalingsspørgsmålet:
Igen, det fremgik af konkurrencebetingelserne og alle deltagere har derfor indsendt sine bidrag velvidende at det var tilfældet. Naturligvis kan man godt mene at avisen burde ha’ betalt bidragsyderne for publiceringen, men på den anden side er fire striber […]

Some interesting stuff has come our way from a variety of comics scholars recently, with more to come. Firstly, there is Bart Beaty’s long-awaited book, Unpopular Culture - Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s, on the new wave of auteur comics that helped transform the French-language comics market through the 90s , and […]

Som Metabunkerens læsere vil erindre, fik det hæderkronede danske tidsskrift STRIP! for nylig et eller to borgerlige ord med på vejen, udbasuneret på den velkendte vulgære og ufølsomme facon, af denne skribent. I omtalen blev Thomas Bergers anmeldelse af Jakob Stegelmanns bog Verdens 25 bedste tegneserier undtagelsesvist rost, og det fik Stegelmann til tasterne. Hermed […]

When Argentinian cartoonist José Muñoz received this year’s Grand Prix at the comics festival in Angoulême, he stated that he considered it as much a recognition of his friend, countryman and collaborator Carlos Sampayo, as of himself. It would indeed be hard to imagine one without the other. Though they have both worked independently of […]

I recently read two very moving books, both classics of World War II-literature. One was Italian chemist Primo Levi’s relentlessly frank first-person account of life in the camps, If This Is A Man (aka. Survival in Auschwitz, 1947), the other was the collected letters and diary entries of young Danish seaman and resistance fighter Kim […]

Responding to the recent post about Lichtenstein, Metabunker-denizen Andreas Gregersen writes:
“Cambell is right (no?):
But yes, a lot of the anonymous stuff is probably more skilful.
Was RL a greater “recontextualist” (cf. “the essence of the exercise” noted in Campbell’s piece) than Johns, Rauschenberg and/or Warhol? And: When the critics talk about the craft of RL’s work, […]

Eddie Campbell is totally on point in a couple of posts (here and here) concerning Roy Lichtenstein’s use of comics imagery in his paintings, and does his best to rub out the old bugbear, fueled by the inferiority complex comics fans often habour on the behalf of their preferred medium, that Lichtenstein was a plagiarist. […]