Reporting live from the Angoulême festival: Saturday is here and its been a busy day. Crowded as usual, negotiating the often tight exhibition spaces and lecture theaters can be trying, but is certainly worth it. We started the day at the new comics center, which I must say is amazing. Under new directorship and with […]

Reporting live from the Angoulême festival: The rain didn’t keep people away. Friday has been fairly busy, with the exhibition areas and tents filled as usual with a broad, heterogenous audience. I spent the day taking in various exhibitions and browsing the exhibitors’ tables in the alternative tent, ending my day of programming by […]

Here we are! The FIBD is now alive and somewhat kicking. Thursday was somewhat drizzly and we didn’t manage to take in a whole lot of it, since we arrived and got installed somewhat late. Today looks promising though — time to take in some of the fine-looking exhibitions, I think, and the cruise for […]

The picks of the week from around the web.
London Review of Books: “The Darwin Show” Steven Shapin examines the phenomenon that was the Darwin year, the multifarious contexts in which Darwin takes centre stage these years, as well as the man and his work in this bravura effort.
David Bordwell: “Kurosawa’s Early Spring”. A reluctant if […]

Since this year’s Angoulême festival is fast approaching and yours truly will be reporting from there at TCJ.com as well as here, where I’ll be joined by Thorhauge, I figured it was the time to collect last year’s coverage is one place, just to get everyone warmed up a little. So without further ado:
Criticism:
Book of […]

One of the grand old men of Franco-Belgian comics, Jacques Martin just died at age 88. One of Hergé’s most important assistants through the 1950s and 60s (notably on the South Sea Sharks and Tintin in Tibet) and one of the pillars of Tintin Magazine, he acrimoniously struck out on his own in 1972 to […]

“one reason there are so many dead in Haiti is that agriculture in the countryside was no longer providing a livelihood for Haitian peasants; they moved in the thousands to the capital, they built shanties on the sides of canyons; all gone now. I won’t go over the arguments against globalization for countries like Haiti […]

As the more assiduous comics internauts will already have noticed, I took part in the recent selection of the year’s best comics criticism hosted at The Hooded Utilitarian. Run by Ng Suat Tong, it was put together by a panel that also included head utilitarian Noah Berlatsky, cartoonist and commentator Frank Santoro, and the critic […]

Just like Yale University Press’ disgraceful censorship of Jytte Klausen’s book on the Muhammed cartoons, it seems the august Metropolitan Museum in New York is set to muddy the waters of history by pulling from their display ancient images of the prophet, made by Muslims and considering not putting them back on display once the […]

Forlaget Fahrenheit udgiver i morgen den første manga for voksne på dansk, Jiro Taniguchis Min fjerne barndomsby. Det fejres med en reception i Thimers Magasin, Tullinsgade 24, København, kl. 16.30-18.00. Oversætter Mette Holm vil sige et par ord om arbejdet med oversættelsen og forlægger Paw Mathiasen om selve udgivelsen af en japansk tegneserie. Mød op […]

For this year’s wrap-up season, Paul Gravett repeats last year’s great idea of asking comics connoisseurs and professionals all over the world to write a few words on the year’s most notable comics from their respective country. He graciously asked me to talk about the best in Danish comics, so my selections appear in part […]

All right, now my Continental Drift column on Moebius’ Hermetic Garage is back up over at the new TCJ.com. Above is an image which I talk about in the essay, but which for some reason did not make it into the printed version in The Comics Journal #300. I’ll do my best to actually post […]

As per tradition over at rapspot.dk, us contributors have curated our annual awards show for our favorite hip hop music of the past year, plus miscellaneous foolishness. Although I can’t say many of my personal favourites made it to the final list, it’s still a pretty great compilation of quality hip hop music released in […]

I just briefly wanted to pay homage to the recently passed master cartoonist. Possibly the most recognisable caricaturist of the past 40 years, Levine has come almost to incarnate the discipline, especially with his withering cartoons of the main players in the Nixon administration and of other unsavoury world leaders of that era.
Contrary to […]