Trees is due out in May, from Image Comics.
Showing posts with label Coming Soon To A Spinner Rack Near You. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Coming Soon To A Spinner Rack Near You. Show all posts
Coming Soon to A Spinner Rack Near You: The Wicked and the Divine
Jamie McKelvie, Matt Wilson (via Kieron Gillen's tumblr, via ComicsAlliance). The series debuts in June.
Coming Soon to A Spinner Rack Near You: Seconds
Seconds, Bryan Lee O'Malley's follow up to Scott Pilgrim, is due in July. Mosey on over to io9 for some art.
Coming Soon to A Spinner Rack Near You: Ms. Marvel
The new Ms. Marvel series, coming out in February, is to be written by G. Willow Wilson and drawn by Adrian Alphona and will feature a new character, a shape shifting Muslim-American teenager named Kamala Khan. Today's announcement came by way of a New York Times article:
The creative team is braced for all possible reactions. “I do expect some negativity,” Ms. Amanat said, “not only from people who are anti-Muslim, but people who are Muslim and might want the character portrayed in a particular light.”
But “this is not evangelism,” Ms. Wilson said. “It was really important for me to portray Kamala as someone who is struggling with her faith.” The series, Ms. Wilson said, would deal with how familial and religious edicts mesh with super-heroics, which can require rules to be broken.I've read Wilson's work before, and remember particularly liking her graphic novel, Cairo. I have every confidence that this book will be very good. That Times article goes a little too far out of its way to pat Marvel on the back, though, and it is important to remember that comics' diversity problem is not going to be solved by little, well publicized displays here and there. This is definitely a step in the right direction, moreso than Mighty Avengers was, and it will be interesting to see the reaction, both inside the comics community and outside of it, as we move closer to seeing this new Ms. Marvel in print.
Coming Soon To A Spinner Rack Near You: The Complete Eightball
Via Comics Reporter. It's a good time to be getting interested in Dan Clowes, I guess, between this and the show that's entering its final month at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. I've been meaning to write about my two trips there over the summer-- soon, I hope. Certainly before the show closes.
Coming Soon To A Spinner Rack Near You: Sandman Overture
My resolve to trade wait Sandman: Overture is eroding quickly.
Coming Soon to a Spinner Rack Near You: Bryan Lee O'Malley
A new 10-year-anniversary hardcover edition of my first book, LOST AT SEA, will be released this December. More details coming soon!
A lot of people are going “omg is it in full color!” so I will say right now that it is not in full color.
Chatter: Hillary Chute
This sense of the poetic page as the space of performance opened my eyes to how comics functions narratively and graphically. Comics is a site-specific medium; it can’t be re-flowed, re-jiggered on the page; hence, it is spatially located on the page the way that poetry often must be. The rich relationships between word and image in which spatial arrangement is significant, and which characterizes contemporary comics, had precursors in all sorts of poetic experiments. This connection struck me afresh at a recent talk I gave on comics when a Romanticist poetry professor told me his students became better readers of poetry after having been exposed to graphic novels, because they were more attuned to lineation and other constitutive, spatialized features of poetry.-- Hillary Chute, from "Secret Labor: Sketching the Connection Between Poetry and Comics" in the July/August issue of Poetry.
Putting The Graphic Novel To Rest
I hate the "graphic novel."
More to the point, I think its time we put it in the ground. Last week, I came across this discussion of Danny Gregory's new book A Kiss Before You Go, written by SVA's Steven Heller. The blurb that comes before the article reads as follows:
Those first two sentences are fascinating, and, I think, worth pulling apart some. For one, if, by "graphic novel," Heller means "longer (or serious) comic book," then the only resemblance between A Kiss Before You Go and say, Fun Home, is that both were written and drawn by talented illustrators, which is not to say that Gregory's book isn't a graphic novel. When Heller writes that A Kiss Before You Go "does not strictly fit graphic novel conventions" what he means is that it isn't comics. But it is indeed a "graphic novel," or, more precisely, a "graphic memoir," since its driving force isn't simple prose alone, but instead juxtaposed words and pictures, both of which are essential to the work.
More to the point, I think its time we put it in the ground. Last week, I came across this discussion of Danny Gregory's new book A Kiss Before You Go, written by SVA's Steven Heller. The blurb that comes before the article reads as follows:
Part graphic novel and part memoir, Danny Gregory's A Kiss Before You Go recounts the designer's wife's death in a personal, original, and vibrant way.This one is an all time great; to say that something is "part graphic novel" and "part memoir" is to say that a graphic novel can't be a memoir, an assertion to which, say, Art Spiegelman and Alison Bechdel might strenuously disagree. Heller's own description of A Kiss Before You Go is slightly more nuanced:
A Kiss Before You Go may appear to be a graphic novel, but the term is not entirely accurate. Nor does "visual memoir" quite fit either. The loose, impressionist watercolor drawings do not strictly fit graphic novel conventions, and Gregory, who is an inveterate journal/sketchbook-maker, has sewn this story together from numerous handwritten journal entries. The scratchily scrawled lettering, with accidental blotches and splotches, add even more gravity to his words. They're accompanied by often brightly colored watercolor and pen-and-ink drawings of friends, children, pets, and the everyday trapping of the Gregory family's life. The artwork, however, belies the palpable sadness—and this was no accident.
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| From Danny Gregory's A Kiss Before You Go |
Making this distinction isn't going to matter for anyone who isn't already deep in the weeds on this stuff. But, since I'm here with this weed whacker slung over my shoulder, I think its an important distinction to make. The difference between a graphic work like A Kiss Before You Go and a work of comics like Fun Home is vast, if only because the former text says "Here is what was and this is what it looked like" and the latter one says "this is what was at one moment and what it looked like, and that is what was at the next moment, and what it looked like, but it's up to you to close the distance in between."
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| From Alison Bechdel's Fun Home |
It's up to us to close the distance in between. That's what's different about comics, that's why we're so interested, because comics is up to us. If Fun Home is a graphic memoir, then A Kiss Before You Go is too, even though Fun Home is comics and A Kiss Before You Go is not. That's why "graphic novel" fails, both as a way to legitimize comics through renaming (incidentally, does that ever work?) and as a term that precisely differentiates between categories; it isn't specific enough. It suggests that Gregory's work and Bechdel's are the same, merely that both are drawn. It doesn't give you the sense that Bechdel's work is collaborative, while Gregory's is monolithic. It doesn't tell you that Fun Home, that comics, needs you in a way that A Kiss Before You Go does not.
Isn't that enough for comics to deserve a name all its own?
Coming Soon, To A Spinner Rack Near You: Jordan Crane
Jordan Crane previews the covers for new collections of his comic Keeping Two, premiering at the Brooklyn Comics and Graphic Festival.
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