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Bruegel, Rembrandt, Crumb and Cartooning
Extended Hooded Utilitarian piece on R. Crumb’s Genesis and the cartoon tradition.
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Interview: El-P & Aesop Rock
Click here to read our 2003 in-depth interview with two of New York’s finest.
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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.
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On Comics History and the Canon
A selection of writings on comics for use by teachers, students, and people otherwise interested
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Worlds of Difference
Essay on role-playing games as a formative experience, in honour of passed D&D creators Gary Gygax & Dave Arneson
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New Yorker Cartoons: A Legacy of Mediocrity
A deadening force at the heart of the art form, smothering the field in bourgeois mediocrity
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A Certain Tendency in French Comics
Click here to read the extended Metabunker debate on the current (problematic?) state of nigh-mainstream French comics.
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Continuous Creation — Titian’s Nuova Natura
On Titian’s aesthetic of the unfinished and Renaissance notions of the subjective.
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Fabrice Neaud interviewed
An interview with cartoonist Fabrice Neaud on autobiography, reality and risk in making comics about life
Soul on Fire
This review is was originally published in Danish at Rackham in 2004 and is reprinted here as a supplement to the short essay Yvan Alagbé’s comics that I’ve just published over at The Comics Journal.
The French-Belgian publishing structure Éditions Frémok, or FRMK for short, has now been in the game for ten years, initially separately, as Belgian Frémok and French Amok, and since 2002 together. They have managed one of the most consistent and challenging publishing programs in avant-garde comics. They have unerringly emphasized the boundary-breaking, the experimental, and often fine arts-oriented comics by some of the most innovative creators in Europe, people such as Thierry van Hasselt, Olivier Marboeuf, Dennis & Olivier Deprez, Stefano Ricci, Silvestre, Kamel Khélif, Vincent Fortemps, Michael Matthys, Dominique Goblet, Martin tom Dieck, Nabile Farès, Aristophane, and the Dane Søren Mosdal.
Their publications are unequivocally high art and as such expose themselves to criticism on two flanks. One is the risk of pretentiousness and postulated profundity, the other is the inevitable comparisons with other forms of visual art, comparisons which tend to put this kind of sequential painting to a disadvantage. Unsurprisingly, FRMK’s publication history is one of precarious and not always successfully negotiating these difficulties, but the fact that they persist is entirely to their credit. It is refreshing to see somebody uncompromisingly asserting their belief in the potential of the medium to fathom the wide expressive range that has traditionally been the domain of other media. Continue reading ‘Soul on Fire’