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Bruegel, Rembrandt, Crumb and Cartooning
Extended Hooded Utilitarian piece on R. Crumb’s Genesis and the cartoon tradition.
Interview: El-P & Aesop Rock
Click here to read our 2003 in-depth interview with two of New York’s finest.
One Flew Out of the Cuckoo’s Nest — Comics Between Old and New
A survey of comics and cartoon history in parallel and opposition to that of the fine arts.
On Comics History and the Canon
A selection of writings on comics for use by teachers, students, and people otherwise interested
Worlds of Difference
Essay on role-playing games as a formative experience, in honour of passed D&D creators Gary Gygax & Dave Arneson
New Yorker Cartoons: A Legacy of Mediocrity
A deadening force at the heart of the art form, smothering the field in bourgeois mediocrity
A Certain Tendency in French Comics
Click here to read the extended Metabunker debate on the current (problematic?) state of nigh-mainstream French comics.
Continuous Creation — Titian’s Nuova Natura
On Titian’s aesthetic of the unfinished and Renaissance notions of the subjective.
Fabrice Neaud interviewed
An interview with cartoonist Fabrice Neaud on autobiography, reality and risk in making comics about life
Sowing the Wind — Nadia Raviscioni’s Vent frais, vent du matin
Autobiography has been such a defining direction in comics’ new wave of the last 20 years, its innovation so consistent, that it is mystifying still to hear repeated the cliché that most of these new ‘indy’ comics proffer little more than solipsistic tales of melancholy and masturbation. If one considers the work, it is hard to find actual justification for this reactionary attitude—at best it describes a very brief period in the mid-90s, when the genre was dominated by that Canadian foursome of Julie Doucet, Chester Brown, Seth, and Joe Matt, and it may have served to describe some of their since-forgotten imitators of that time, but it is otherwise almost wholly inaccurate as a characterization.
It makes even less sense in a European context, where autobiography was established early on as a kind of proving ground for innovative cartoonists and continues to be at the forefront of progressive comics. Continue reading ‘Sowing the Wind — Nadia Raviscioni’s Vent frais, vent du matin’