Webcomics
Artist GG has started serializing a new strip at The Comics Workbook titled A Mysterious Process. The first 11 pages are already up. I love that the dialogue looks like subtitles from old b&w french movies.
Not quite webcomics, but Heather Benjamin posted a bunch of sketchbook pages on her Tumblr page this week.
Frank Santoro posted his new comic (which i *think* debuted at CAB) Morgan on his Tumblr. It is loosely based on an Arthurian poem, if i am reading the description right. You can also purchase a print copy from Copacetic Comics.
Configurations by Aidan Koch.
Winterbreak by Michael DeForge. DeForge does really great winter/x-mas themed comics.
Interviews
“CF: I realize this might be an impossible question to ask, but why is it that the manga that you want to read has those aspects, no story or anything, like that war comic?
YY: It’s very difficult to describe, but in my personal life I don’t respect human feelings. I’m very far from human society, I’d rather appreciate natural phenomena. I’m very interested in understanding how a bird might see things. I want to delete the human feelings because the reader wants to emotionally take sides with one particular person and I’d prefer they remain neutral. That’s why I don’t want to produce a scene where people feel sympathy with a particular person.”
“MH: What is your drawing process like? Perhaps this is an echo of the question above, but some of your drawings feel traced- giving the sense that there if a referent just off the page. I think it’s the simplicity of some of your linework.
AK: I love drawing from life or from references. I think it’s interesting to appropriate or reconstruct material. I mean, you have to be careful and considerate about what and how you work with anything pre-existing, but I’m interested in the way anything can be re-contextualized. I feel like, again, the Internet has totally transformed this for us, and our ability to see the various ways you can visually connect anything to build new meanings and conversations. In some ways this relates to comics in terms of how you place material on a page or in a space, things automatically begin to inform each other depending on the panels and sequencing. Simply by placing images together in an order or over a series of pages, we naturally interpret this as narrative. Therefore, the craft is in how you select those images and where you place them to evoke whatever feelings you want to give your reader.”
“Sontag: I don’t write because there’s an audience. I write because there is literature.”
Derf Backderf interviewed on Robot Six. In a few years i feel like the death of the alt-weeklies is going to be a bigger deal than is generally acknowledged right now. Especially with younger cartoonists, since webcomics, like blogs, don’t have the constraints of deadlines or the permanency of print.
Essays
Julia Gfrorer on Aidan Koch’s Configuration. The opening section comparing tarot cards to comics panels, and how one reads a narrative into them, is one of my favorite pieces of comics writing this year.
For all the “controversy” Fuckitor got this year, based largely off a few stray panels posted in a Santoro column and the creators less than well worded response to the criticisms of those panels, i think this review by Greg Hunter is what was needed to kind of kill that book. Or at least my vague interest in flipping through it.Being problematic isn’t a very big problem for me, being boring though is.
The last paragraph of the piece is particularly good:
“Excess isn’t always easy—it’s probably exhausting sometimes—but it requires a drive separate from talent or good ideas. Fukitor has excess in abundance and little else to distinguish it. This is a work that peddles exercises in genre secondhand. This is a work that, convinced it’s a rebel, behaves like a bully.”
Misc.
Michel Fiffe is running a subscription drive for issues #19 - #24 of COPRA . If you act fast you also get a free screenprint. COPRA is the best monthly alt-comic coming out, in addition to being the best super-hero monthly coming out. But the latter isn’t very hard.
Uno Moralez dropped the GIF of the year.
RIPExpo has posted the audio to each of the panels they conducted. I was in attendance for the Andrew White lead discussion on Poetry Comics which i can attest to be worth a listen.
I lost who drew this image, but it's from the Raymond Pettiobon / Josh Bayer talk at CAB. The passion with which old punks hate Regan is something I strive for.
Ines Estrada released her year end list of both comics and events which occured to her. You can read it here.
