What I like best about Austin English’s Windy Corner Magazine is that it seeks to clarify the artist’s relationship with memory and the narrative that we form from our memories, and how this is different from nostalgia. That theme was...
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Reading Chris Cilla’s The Heavy Hand, I felt a tremendous sense of déjà vu. Each page felt like one I had already read somewhere, even though I hadn’t. One reason it may have felt so familiar is that The Heavy...
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If Red Eye, Black Eye was K. Thor Jensen’s version of a comics senior thesis, then his short story collection Cloud Stories was his PhD. dissertation. The former had all that young cartoonist energy, for good and ill, especially as a work...
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K. Thor Jensen’s Red Eye, Black Eye (Alternative Comics) is the work of a young cartoonist. That is literally true, as the book was published in 2007 after being serialized online, but the tone and content is very much of a man in his...
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One reason why I love comics is that I occasionally run into a creator producing art that would only work as comics. I prefer not to use reductive terms like “pure cartooning”, but I have a great appreciation for many artists who...
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It is interesting to consider what Annie Goetzinger, “la grande dame de la bande dessinée”, chose as the last two projects of her life. After many years serving as the illustrator for most of her projects, she wrote and drew her last...
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Something I’ve noticed as a recent trend in comics is a style that somewhat trades in primitivism or outsider art on the surface, but in reality is a sophisticated integration of word and text. The plastic qualities of text are not...
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Eleanor Davis’ first book was Stinky, which was released in 2008 by Toon Books. It won a number of awards and deservedly so, because it’s brilliant on any number of levels. What’s interesting about her kids’ and YA books...
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Revisiting another Sparkplug classic, here’s my original review of Julia Gfrörer’s debut book, Flesh and Bone, from 2010. Julia Gfrörer’s Flesh And Bone takes fairy-tale and folk legend tropes and both turns them on their heads...
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Writing a children’s book that both children and adults can enjoy is a tricky proposition. Aim too far over a kid’s head to reach an adult, and you risk alienating the target audience. (And at $12.95 a pop, this is an expensive risk...
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One reason why Eleanor Davis is such an intriguing cartoonist is because her output is so unpredictable. While she has explored everything from science fiction to kid lit to satire and beyond, there is a constant theme running through them...
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If Chris Ware were to do a book aimed at preteens, it might look a little like The Secret Science Alliance. As a long-time fan of Eleanor Davis (I still vividly remember the micro-mini-comics vending machine she brought to SPX), I was stunned to...
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