Walrus writer Jon Evans talks about the creation of his new comic book for Vertigo/DC

Hear me, O my rapturous children, and I will tell you the saga of page thirty-eight.

By which I mean: the lettered page proofs for my forthcoming graphic novel The Executor arrived last week. They’ve been a long time coming. I first started talking to Vertigo Comics about writing something for them in 2004, and finished the script in 2007. Worth the wait, though. Absolutely gorgeous art by Andrea Mutti. Another year yet before it hits bookstore shelves, as part of the new Vertigo Crime line; but in the interim, here’s a backstage tour of how and where the magic happens. Buckle up, keep your arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times … and whatever may occur, please do not feed the artists. (more…)

This month, the summer reading issue of The Walrus boasts an eye-catching cover by the Dutch cartoonist Joost Swarte. His crisp style and high-concept approach help to razor his illustrations into our consciousness before we even know what we’re seeing. Feel like you’ve come across his work before? Odds are either you have, in the pages of The New Yorker, or you’re actually thinking of Hergé, the creator of Tintin. Both of those traditions—old-timey children’s comics, sophisticated yuks—play important roles in Swarte’s practice. Whether in his architecture or his illustration, his comics or his stained glass, the artist applies early 20th century styles to our modern world, resulting in an ironic distance that allows him to poke our self-satisfied notions of progress in the ribs—repeatedly, if never especially hard. (more…)

This comic book does not exist. Don’t look for it. Don’t ask for it. Forget you ever heard about it.

Marc Bell’s Illustrated Cartoon Videos is a comic book that doesn’t exist. Don’t look for it. Don’t ask for it by name. Forget you ever heard about it. If it did exist, though, it would be just what the title says, a pictorial playing-out of songs good bad and indifferent, the imagery trucking on by in Bell’s busy, bigfoot style. I can’t say such a book exists, though, because litigious record company suits would get all up in arms—as the cover to Illustrated Cartoon Videos might warn us, or brag, this whole deal is very, riotously “unauthorized!” (more…)

Fumbling around on the internet recently, I came across some scans of Yoshiharu Tsuge’s 1968 story “Nejishiki” (translated in the Comics Journal 250 as “Screw-Style”). I have a great fondness for the short story form in comics, and I love seeing anything translated from the Japanese avant garde comics magazine Garo, so I thought I’d highlight the story’s existence here. (A quick note, though, to point out that, unlike the other two Tsuge stories published in English, this one is still in print. So you should probably buy that thick and lovely issue of the Comics Journal, even if only to direct some money toward the folks who went to the trouble of importing the story in the first place.)

We have so few western authorities on manga, god bless ’em, that they can only begin to map out the traditions and history of Japanese comics for us; thankfully, “Nejishiki” is one of the landmarks they’ve flagged. The June 1968 issue of Garo, they tell us, was given over entirely to Yoshiharu Tsuge. (more…)

A couple books, so far, have really stood out among my purchases from last weekend’s Toronto Comic Arts Festival, and they couldn’t be more different from each other. The first is a lurid looseleaf folder of oversized story pages from (I’m guessing) the former singer of the Load Records band Coughs, providing a free-associative tour through education reform featuring sci-fi Buddhist monks, or something. The second collects webcomics by a Toronto-via-Nova-Scotia cartoonist, who pulls off high-concept lo-brow hi-jinx with brassy aplomb. With both, though, I’m having a disconcerting amount of trouble trying to figure out what exactly it is that I like so much about them. So let me have a think on this… (more…)

If you’re any sort of normal person, you’re probably one of the zillions who stayed the hell away from last summer’s X-Files movie, I Want to Believe. It featured a very angry Xzibit in a prominent role, and hinged on the magical psychic connection created when a Scottish comedian priest shares a very, um, special relationship with a little immigrant boy who grows up to become a black market organ harvester. So, yeah, it’s garbage. Which is to say, even if you did see it, its overwhelming rubbishness probably didn’t incline you to pick up the comic book spin-off series that was released to coincide with the film. Likewise, publisher Wildstorm is probably wondering why they ever secured the X-Files comic book licence, though the seventh issue of the series dutifully came out last week. (more…)

Last week the nominations were announced for the 2009 Doug Wright Awards, which celebrate excellence in Canadian cartooning. By no means are the DWAs the only Canadian comics awards, but they are certainly the awards whose nominees are easiest to review. Finalists for the more mainstream/genre-friendly Joe Shuster Awards are named next week, but these awards go to individuals rather than books, making capsule reviews a smidge difficult. Nominations for the Prix Bédéis Causa came out this week, but I have been a bad Canadian and an unlettered anglo and haven’t tracked down any of the nominated works. Enough with excusing my laziness, though—let’s start off by delving into the titles nominated for the Doug Wright Awards’ Best Book.

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Hard to believe, but there was in fact another comics-related movie that opened in Toronto this past weekend. Fear(s) of the Dark, a French animated film, enlists the styles and sensibilities of six international alt-comics stars and “auteurs graphiques” in the service of exploring notions of, well, fears and darkness (or, in French, the more unequivocal noir). Each of the artists contributes either a narrative short or a framing sequence, playing formally with the notion of darkness versus light, illustrated either in sharp black and white or greasy scratchy shades of grey, while the stories they tell delve into what scares us, with varying degrees of success. Now, the horror anthology film is always a beyond-dodgy enterprise—most horror films miss the mark with just one try, so anthologising horror often only multiplies chances for failure. While this particular attempt never really succeeds in being scary, it does sustain a certain creepiness, and rarely ever comes off dumb—no slight accomplishments, in this genre.

First off, credit Blutch’s framing story with maintaining that creepy air. (more…)

Watchmen wasn’t the first comic to deconstruct the myth of the superhero. Here’s a look at a handful of them

So I don’t know if you’ve heard but there’s this movie coming out this weekend. It looks like it’s dead serious about taking superheroes deadly seriously—an artistic strategy that the original Watchmen comics were smart enough to equivocate about. That panel up top may be moody and reflective, a key dramatic moment, but it also depicts a grown man wearing a cape, and a purple and gold cape, at that. Neither writer Alan Moore nor artist Dave Gibbons ever glosses over such facts: Watchmen the comic is a serious superhero narrative, yes, about sex and death and politics, but it is also a serious superhero narrative, about men and women who for some bizarre reason wear tights and dominos. Even before the knotty plotting and blueprint-precise artwork, the friction between two such disparate modes and moods—the serious, the frivolous—is what grants the work its awkward fascination in the first place.

Who knows what the movie will or won’t do, but it should be noted that the history of Watchmen’s reception by its artistic followers is too often a history of wilful misunderstanding. (more…)

In last month’s Walrus, US cartoonist John Porcellino riffed on his adventures north of the 49th, casting himself and his travelling companions as explorers into this untamed wilderness. It’s an autobiographical strip from one of the longtime greats of the autobio genre, and it’s a hoot. For this previously undocumented exploit, Porcellino has gone back to the mid-’90s period covered in his recently released King-Cat Classix, a fat and unfussily gorgeous book compiling the best of his seminal lo-fi mini-comic King-Cat Comics and Stories.

Since 1989, King-Cat has felt like an intimate venue where Porcellino shares the goings-on in his life with a close circle of friends, whether through his minimalist black and white line-drawings, his lists of things he’s enthusing over this month, or his typed or hand-written anecdotes and reveries. His most recent book, though, is Thoreau at Walden, a quiet and generously paced adaptation of Thoreau’s writings, a project that might seem a departure if it weren’t such a perfect match for Porcellino’s sensibilities, so attuned to King-Cat’s cadences of everyday life. I probably mistakenly thought some of Thoreau’s two-colour work and historical flavour may have carried over into his strip for the Walrus–I asked Porcellino to straighten me out about this and a few other things by email, and he was kind enough to supply the following responses. (more…)

This blog has lately been looking at Matt Groening and his seminal alt-weekly strip Life in Hell, thinking about his place in contemporary cartooning and about the mechanics of his strips and his humour; this will be the third and last instalment. Last time, I ended up thinking that Groening’s brand of relentless non-humour, when it masks a kind of nonchalant despair, can often prove liberating. But if Life in Hell arrives at its sense of humour by coming unmoored from all hope, it’s at its most humourous when it floats free of all logic as well. For Groening, childhood is the least hopeful, least logical time of life—and so, it’s the time that yields up the most to his brand of humour. His funniest book through-and-through is his first in ten years, Will and Abe’s Guide to the Universe, comprising cartoon transcriptions of conversations with his young sons on topics ranging from violence to monsters to girls to birthdays. The evident and deep affection for Will and Abe on display here can’t help but leaven the tone of the typical Life in Hell strip of decades past—indeed, Groening says the strip has lately been retitled Life is Swell (though I haven’t been able to come across any other evidence of this). (more…)

In the first of our considerations of Matt Groening’s Life in Hell comic strip, Four-Colour Words looked at the inclusion of Groening’s work in the latest volume of the well-respected comics anthology Kramers Ergot. His presence in those pages, we saw, encourages a novel understanding of his place in contemporary cartooning, while his contribution itself points toward his work’s strengths and its difficulties, which often amount to the same thing. For this installment of our week-long look at Hell, we’ll see how Groening’s strips, like his anthology contribution, are often easy to gloss, but trying to read: like, that Kramers page may look busy and crowded on your computer screen, but matters don’t change much even when printed in the tombstone-sized book itself.

Remarkably, Groening is one of the few cartoonists in that volume who doesn’t approach the enlarged 16×21 inch canvas any differently than he would his regular work—any one of his strips, any week, at any size, could look just as impenetrable. This kind of sheer density is compelling, in an OCD kind of way, but the repetition and tedium of it all rarely yields any real yuks. To be fair, that’s sort of the point—what should we expect from a book called Work Is Hell other than a mind-numbing belabouring of the point that, well, work is indeed tedious, repetitive hell—but what lets Groening get away with it is how stylish his densely-packed work can be. (more…)