Department of Mind-Blowing Theories
Department of Mind-Blowing Theories is the latest collection of Tom Gauld’s cartoons. I’ve loved his literary-themed comics, because they’re funny and smart. (Drawn & Quarterly has put out two previous collections, You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack and Baking With Kafka.) There are plenty of cartoons out there about family life, for instance, but Gauld really emphasizes the life of the mind, whether it’s writers and their solitary pursuits or gags that require knowledge of literature (or at least […]
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This Year’s Eisners Need to Be Redone
With no in-person San Diego Comic-Con this year, the Eisners are still taking place virtually. However, there have been a lot of questions about how the voting took place. In short, it was shut down just before the deadline ended due to “an anomaly” which turns out to be some voters being able to access the data of others. It was reopened, for a complete revote, but it seems that some people who heard about the problem and thus didn’t […]
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Tokyo: Day by Day
In another time, Tokyo: Day by Day would be an amazing guidebook to use to prepare for a visit to one of the world’s most vibrant, exciting cities. These days, it’s more of a wish book and a reminder of what it was like to be able to travel. Either way, the book promises “356 Things to See and Do!”, and it provides. Each day is a page that highlights a restaurant, a unique store, a museum (for snowglobes! or […]
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Keith Knight’s TV Show Has Release Date, Trailer
There’s going to be a TV show based on the life and work of cartoonist Keith Knight, whose cartoons I’ve admired for a long time. His best work, imo, is The K Chronicles but he also had a more traditional newspaper comic strip, The Knight Life, and the editorial-style (th)ink. Woke stars Lamorne Morris (New Girl) as Keef, a cartoonist whose worldview is changed (he starts seeing things talk to him) after a racist police encounter. It will have eight […]
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PR: What Not to Do: Make Packaging Too Clever
There are different levels of review and marketing lists, you know. From bottom up, so to speak, there’s the press release only, which means you don’t have enough audience or rank highly enough to actually see the product. They only expect you to reprint their promotional copy as “news”. In terms of actually being able to have an opinion on something, there are digital copies, which cost nothing and more often these days, are time-limited, so they expire. There are […]
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Cassandra Darke
Thank goodness we have global internet commerce, because it’s the only way I can keep up with the work of one of my favorite artists, Posy Simmonds (Tamara Drewe, Gemma Bovery). I think someone mentioned on Twitter that she had a new book out at the end of last year, so I eagerly ordered Cassandra Darke. The title character is thoroughly unpleasant. She used to run an art gallery with her ex-husband, whom she feels wronged by, until her cheating […]
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Dash Returns as Kickstarted Graphic Novel
Y’all know I rarely do this, because I still have conflicted feelings about crowdfunding and its risks. But I like Dash, which can be reductionally described as “the gay hard-boiled detective comic”. The most recent out was issue #5 in late 2018. (They say issue #6 has come out, but Diamond has it listed for August, so … keeping up with comics is hard.) Now, they’re Kickstarting the collection. Written by Dave Ebersole and drawn by Delia Gable and Vinnie […]
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Thanks, Mike, for Sticking Around — Blogging About Blogging
Mike Sterling, of Progressive Ruin and Sterling Silver Comics, put up a post recently that brought back all kinds of memories. He looks at long-time comic bloggers (a group I am privileged to be part of, having run this site for over 20 years, although I like to think of it as a combination blog/website, since “blogging” feels as a term a little more self-indulgent than I aim for). Mike has been going over 16 years himself, and he’s unique […]
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