Schrödinger’s cat found its way into a comic with five randomly generated endings. [via waxy]
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Welcome
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Posts for Past 60 Days
Category Archives: Comics
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Monday, July 7, 2008
Dan Roam has shared the “Napkin Tools” from his book. (I wrote a wee review of The Back of the Napkin a while ago). New offerings in PDF format include the Visual Thinking Codex, the SQVID, and the Rule.
≡Things I’ve Learned from Women Who’ve Dumped Me (review: 2/5)
Tuesday, June 17, 2008
I wanted this to be better. It starts off well, introduced by Nick Hornby. With a few exceptions, most of the other 40-something essays in the book didn’t do much for me.
Rodney Rothman’s piece—”I Still Like Jessica”—is probably my favorite. It’s a transcript of an interview with an old sweetheart (hear the interview and see […]
≡The Back of the Napkin (review: 3.5/5)
Monday, May 19, 2008
Dan Roam does a pretty good job with this one: The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. One of Roam’s main arguments (sometimes belabored) is that we were all comfortable drawing when we were in kindergarten. Somehow we got frigid. We play visually dumb. We don’t need to.
Visual thinking is […]
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Thursday, May 15, 2008
Austin Kleon found the Gerd Arntz Web Archive, dedicated to the work of the German designer:
Otto Neurath had developed a method to communicate complex information on society, economy and politics in simple images. For his ‘Vienna method of visual statistics’, he needed a designer who could make elementary signs, pictograms that could summarize a subject […]
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Sunday, May 4, 2008
Comic strip instructions for anarchic overthrow of the office. [via dial m for musicology]
≡Gemma Bovery (review: 4/5)
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Posy Simmonds originally wrote Gemma Bovery as a 100+ episode serial in The Guardian. The story is told with a cool mix of comics panels, splash illustrations, big chunks of text. It all mixes in together.
The narrator is a baker living in Normandy, who becomes obsessed with Gemma’s adultery as it happens and as it’s […]
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Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Opolis is a comic made from photographs of paper cut-outs in a 3-dimensional office building. I’d have a hard time thinking of something more exhausting. Cool results, though. [via waxy]
≡Der Weg der Menschen (review: 3/5)
Sunday, March 30, 2008
Frans Masereel’s book first appeared in 1964 under the title “Route des Hommes.” The 60 woodcuts in this book came forty years after the others I reviewed. From what I can piece together from the French and German sources that I can’t read, I think maybe it was connected with of some kind of exhibition […]
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Saturday, March 29, 2008
Probably a parallel here with the birth of Athena:
[update: photo of a really awesome woodcut removed due to copyright complaint from Verwertungsgesellschaft Bild-Kunst]
From L’Idee by Frans Masereel.
≡Frans Masereel in Film
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
As I continue the Frans Masereel Appreciation Week Festival, here’s an animated film adaptation of L’Idee. Berthold Bartosch had Frans Masereel’s help on the film for some of the two years he spent working on it. The end result is almost a half-hour long, and though it starts a bit slowly, there are some legitimately […]
≡Die Stadt (review: 3.5/5)
Tuesday, March 25, 2008
Another set of woodcuts from Frans Masereel (last Friday I took a look at Die Sonne). Die Stadt was first published in 1925. The impressions of war-torn Europe cover the range of everyday life: the birth of a child, a man with a prostitute, parents with their children, medical students at the morgue, street scenes […]
≡Die Sonne (review: 4/5)
Friday, March 21, 2008
A man chases the sun through city, sky, and sea in this wordless story by Frans Masereel. Here’s my favorite sequence from Die Sonne:
[update: images removed due to copyright complaint from Verwertungsgesellschaft Bild-Kunst. no more free publicity—you’ll have to trust me that it’s worth your time]
Take a look at some other woodcuts from Die Sonne. […]
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Monday, March 3, 2008
Ozge Samanci’s daily comics, ordinary things, are a cool mix of illustration and collage.
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Monday, February 25, 2008
Business on the back of the napkin, a slideshow of basic doodling frameworks: portraits, charts, maps & timelines.
≡Clyde Fans: Book One (review: 5/5)
Thursday, January 3, 2008
Clyde Fans: Book One, by the cartoonist Seth, is split into two halves. Each half tracks the memories and relationship between two brothers, both of whom worked for the family business, the Clyde Fans Company.
In the first section, set in 1997, we see the older Abraham walks from room to room in the old Clyde […]
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Wednesday, January 2, 2008
A panel interview with Seth and Chris Ware conducted by Ivan Brunetti, told in comics form. I love the way that Gordon McAlpin, the cartoonist, mimicked each of their styles when they had the floor.
≡Top Books for 2007
Monday, December 31, 2007
Let’s see… glancing back through the year, here’s what I’m most glad to have read. I wrote about most of these…
Fiction:
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom by Cory Doctorow
Burning Chrome by William Gibson
Non-Fiction:
The Rest Is Noise: Listening to […]
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Monday, December 10, 2007
I don’t know where the nonist found this image. I love it. Maybe he will tell if you ask nicely.
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Monday, December 3, 2007
A few impressive woodcuts from the Otto Nückel book, Destiny: A Novel in Pictures. Really cool work. I haven’t been able to find much other information about him, aside from a Wikipedia entry in German and his being an inspiration for Lynd Ward and Art Spiegelman.
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Tuesday, November 20, 2007
There’s going to be a movie version of The Surrogates, starring Bruce Willis (see my review of The Surrogates). I really, really liked the comics, especially because I haven’t found a lot of decent scifi. Very cool book—I hope those Hollywood folks treat it kindly.
By the by, the publishers of The Surrogates, Top Shelf Productions, […]
≡Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean (review: 4/5)
Sunday, November 11, 2007
I finished this one a couple weeks ago, but never wrote anything. In Reading Comics, Douglas Wolk writes with an eye to the reader’s experience of comics. He avoids a lot of comics theory (”You already pretty much know what they are, and ‘pretty much’ is good enough”), focusing instead on loving criticism.
It was […]
≡The Best American Comics 2006 (review: 4/5)
Sunday, October 14, 2007
A little slow getting to this one, but it was worth the wait. The Best American Comics 2006. There’s a lot to cover in the collection, so I’ll just highlight the authors and stories I enjoyed the most.
Joel Priddy, “The Amazing Life of Onion Jack”: a short bio of an aging superhero who […]
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Monday, October 8, 2007
The Museum of Reading has the entire Bayeux Tapestry online with explanatory notes. And on YouTube there’s a pretty sweet semi-animated version that scrolls across the latter half of the 230-foot tapestry.
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Sunday, October 7, 2007
Cartoonist Adrian Tomine, creator of Summer Blonde among other things, shares a New York City moment:
I went out to dinner with my wife at a sushi place in Brooklyn. Right as we were seated at our table, the couple at the adjacent table begins the following exchange:
WOMAN: So, did you read that book I gave […]
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Friday, September 21, 2007
Meredith Gran, creator of the Octopus Pie webcomic, has a time-lapse video of her cartooning process. [via crushing krisis]
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Tuesday, September 18, 2007
Todd Klein has written a 5-part series on the evolution of the Batman logo: one two three four five. [via kottke]
≡Galileo’s sunspot illustrations
Monday, September 10, 2007
Back in the summer of 1612, Galileo did a series of daily observations of the sun. His illustrations were reproduced in his Letters on Sunspots of 1613. The work, part of an ongoing scientific battle with Christoph Scheiner, settled a lot of the contemporary debate on sunspots, killing the idea that the sun had minor […]
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Monday, August 20, 2007
There’s an Amazon interview with Douglas Wolk about his new book, Reading Comics, and another recent interview with Newsarama.
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Thursday, August 16, 2007
The Dvorak Zine is a 24-page web comic about the Dvorak Simplified Keyboard. Pretty cool. [via comics pundit]
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Thursday, August 16, 2007
Like my passing comment last week, David Lewis bemoans the comics memoir: “We know there’s a power to autobiography in comics—is it deniable?—but why are so many of You susceptible to it?” Tom Spurgeon offers a snappy, but thoughtful response, of course. I still think that non-fiction comics could use some more variety. Fiction, we’ve […]
≡The Plot: The Secret Story of the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (review:3/5)
Thursday, August 9, 2007
A couple weeks ago I flipped through The Plot: The Secret Story of the The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the last graphic novel that Will Eisner created. This one covers a curious bit of history that I never knew. The topic of Eisner’s book is another book, The Protocols of the Elders of […]
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Thursday, August 9, 2007
Dorothy Gambrell has done some excellent illustrations based on the Schedule C table of Principal Business or Professional Activity Codes [p. 8-10, pdf].
≡Beowulf (review: 2/5)
Monday, August 6, 2007
I haven’t yet summoned the courage to tackle Beowulf in one of those authoritative translations yet, but I figured a graphic novel could do the trick. I tried Gareth Hinds’ graphic adaptation of Beowulf. The text is in a fresh translation, so it’s an easy read, but still has a noble, epic quality. I really […]
≡Plastic Man: Rubber Bandits (review: 5/5)
Wednesday, August 1, 2007
Kyle Baker’s Plastic Man: Rubber Bandits is absolutely hilarious. Pure entertainment, like watching a good Saturday morning cartoon (as in the Fox Kids era of Eek the Cat, the Tick, X-Men, Tiny Toons, Terrible Thunder Lizards, Batman: The Animated Series, etc.). This book, along with Baker’s other one, Plastic Man: On the Lam, has some […]
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Monday, July 30, 2007
“Oaxaca. Filming a street demonstration during the teachers’ strike down there. Twice in the chest. Never made it to the hospital. He filmed his own assassination.” The print version of the article in VQR also features illustrations from Peter Kuper’s Oaxaca Sketchbook.
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Sunday, July 29, 2007
Your spreadsheet has been attacked. Modern office life can be a little like The Oregon Trail.
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