cherry valley forever
Show & Tell
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
@theartofmadeline
Cosimo Galluzzi
Love Begins
almost home
we're not kids anymore.
PR's Tumblrdome
Stranger Things
★
sheepfilms
No title available
Kaledo Art
DEAR READER
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
noise dept.
h
Origami Around
KIROKAZE
seen from Argentina
seen from Türkiye
seen from Uzbekistan
seen from India
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from South Africa
seen from Tunisia
seen from Russia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Indonesia
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from Panama
seen from Malaysia
seen from Canada
seen from Russia
seen from Poland
@dominicumile
At Hyperallergic, wrote about 1950s horror comics and the extensive moral panic that killed them off. Specifically, I looked at two new/reissued archival collections of comics from the period: Four Color Fear and Jay Disbrow’s Monster Invasion. Go have a look, eh?
After visiting her native country in 2001 to see relatives she thought were long dead, Vietnamese American artist Thi Bui jettisoned her grad school assignments and instead began recording her family history. A lush black, white, and rust-toned graphic autobiography called The Best We Could Do: An Illustrated Memoir would follow a decade and a half later, the product of countless hours of interviews, transcription, drawing, and a crucial exploration of the refugee experience in this era of expressly unconstitutional efforts to halt immigration into the United States. My new Hyperallergic piece on @thibui‘s book is online now.
I’m hoping to post about a 1967-era recording once monthly this year. Here is a bit about The Velvet Underground’s “All Tomorrow’s Parties” as well as some notes on what I’ve been reading, which includes some magazines and Noah Van Sciver’s recent comics.
Chicago artist and author Emil Ferris's My Favorite Thing is Monsters is a knotty, richly drawn graphic novel that blends memoir, pulp horror, detective fiction, and historical drama. Read my new Chicago Reader piece on the book.
My writing in 2016
I looked back on a year’s worth of writing about comics and other books -- my work in 2016 appeared at Hyperallergic, in the Washington City Paper, Chicago Reader, and at my site. Thanks for reading.
Ben Katchor published a self-contained volume of Julius Knipl in 1991 under the title Cheap Novelties: The Pleasures of Urban Decay. Over the years — and again now, on the release of its 25th-anniversary edition from @drawnandquarterly — the book has been deemed a “graphic novel.” It’s not, and the distinction is important; Knipl’s serialized sidewalk-chess matches and 50-cent cups of coffee are as lost to history as flattening out and soaking in your Sunday newspaper’s full-color comics section is. Read my new piece at @hyperallergic.
The collapse of Rana Plaza, an eight-story commercial building outside Bangladesh’s capital city, in 2013 killed more than 1,200 workers, and most of them died while producing clothes for some of the world’s lowest wages. The garment sector’s deadliest accident owed to dubious construction permits, abusive labor policies, and more systemic problems. A heavily footnoted, absolutely depressing but crucial comics series reported by award-winning writer Anne Elizabeth Moore and drawn by artist collective @ladydrawers explores the industry and how our apparel purchases affect its majority-women workforce.
My new piece at @hyperallergic is here.
Print’s Michael Dooley rounds up tributes and loads of art for a piece on comics creator Darwyn Cooke, who passed away last weekend. Cooke’s adaptations of Donald Westlake’s ‘Parker’ books are masterpieces -- also worth a read is Tucker Stone’s piece and lengthy interview.
In March of this year, an email newsletter called The CoJo List launched that aggregated a wealth of recent comics journalism which had run in places such as Pacific Standard, Foreign Policy, the New Yorker, and more.
At my site, I wrote about The CoJo List. It’s edited and published by @joshpkramer and @emdemarco -- go follow those folks and check out their great work.
A new exhibit features “an extensive collection of photographs, films, architectural models, and more from Playboy magazine’s inception in 1953 through the 1970s.” See Karrie Jacobs’ piece for Architect magazine.
Back in April, I previewed for the Washington City Paper Chester Brown’s appearance at @politicsprose, where he discussed his new collection of comics that focuses on sex work in biblical stories. The book is out now from @drawnandquarterly.
My recent reading includes Don Heck’s old horror comics, Nick Drnaso’s new @drawnandquarterly collection, and World Literature Today’s international comics issue.
Set just before the Eisenhower years—the sudden prosperity and primary-colored beauty of which would come to imbue Douglas Sirk’s melodramas of female imprisonment—it’s the story of a seemingly impossible love affair between two women, unfolding at a moment in time when the American Psychiatric Association considered lesbianism to be a mental illness. Carol is based, admirably closely, on Patricia Highsmith’s notorious, semiautobiographical novel The Price of Salt; the austerity and uncertainty of the period are grounded in Phyllis Nagy’s sober, refined script (eighteen years in development) and enlarged by Lachman’s immaculately restrained and meticulous artistry. The secret of the grain engendered by the choice to shoot the film on Super 16mm (as their previous collaboration for television, Mildred Pierce, had been) lies not only in its capacity for period evocation but also in its conjuring of mood: it sprinkles a layer of dust over the fading world of bourgeois trophy wife Carol (Cate Blanchett) and the young shop assistant and aspiring photographer Thérèse (Rooney Mara), whose eyes first meet across a crowded department store floor. These are characters striving for love and excitement against a backdrop of boredom and restriction, and the images themselves—inspired by the mid-century everyday photography of Helen Levitt and Ruth Orkin—effortlessly and unforgettably evoke a society that is pining, and pulled corset-tight.
Critic Julien Allen writes about the magnificent Carol at Metrograph
Concise write-ups on a handful of comics from @danielelkin include work from Throwaway Press, Oily Comics, and Ninth Art.
Collectors Weekly on the "vigorous global marketing effort to fill (Canada's) vast, uninhabited spaces with people."
In a world where cable sitcoms often deal in melancholy and rage, it offers something zany, warmhearted, and sweetly liberatory.
Smart and funny piece from Emily Nussbaum on the smart and funny “Broad City.”
More nature drawing from Jillian Tamaki, please -- her recent comics at Hazlitt are worth a look.
I wrote about her work last year for the Chicago Reader.