Five fiends have been in poor Tom at once: of lust, as Obidicut; Hobbididance, prince of dumbness; Mahu, of stealing; Modo, of murder. Flibertigibbet, of mopping and mowing. So many giants and demons and always room for more in poor Tom’s head. Your head’s like mine, like all our heads; big enough to contain every […]
Monday, September 8, 2008
Alan Moore’s Writing for Comics is a thin book (just under fifty pages) of essays by who you’d think, and it’s about what you’d think. Except Alan Moore doesn’t cover much of the nuts-and-bolts, as you may expect; he drives deeper, to the theory. Why comics work the way they do. He wrote it in […]
Friday, September 5, 2008
Austin Grossman’s first novel, Soon I Will Be Invincible, is a fun, quick book that references the whole of superhero comics (and some other fantasy) with the usual tropes and plenty of in-jokes. (One such is the reference to criminals being “a cowardly and superstitious lot,” said with plenty of irony.) It redoes many of […]
I read Cages, which is written and illustred by Dave McKean, right after Signal to Noise, one of his many collaborations with Neil Gaiman. Cages is McKean on his own, and it shows, in new and pleasant ways, but also in some slightly tiresome ways. I like it; I think it’s very well done, and […]
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
I requested The Book of Kells from the library at Davidson College, through interlibrary loan, which is a great way to get obscure titles for free. I’ve been using ILL (InterLibrary Loan) more lately. I got Frederick Prokosch’s The Seven Who Fled, at Harlan Ellison’s recommendation, Alan Moore’s Writing for Comics, Samuel R. Delany’s The […]
Signal to Noise was written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by Dave McKean—I don’t want to say ‘drew by’ because McKean, as usual, does much more than draw. The story originally ran in 1989, in the magazine The Face—the fashion marrow of the 80’s—to communicate what the new decade would mean. It’s the story of […]