Adrian Tomine, author/cartoonist of SHORTCOMINGS and SUMMER BLONDE (amongst others), has provided this wonderfully wry artwork for the new issue of The New Yorker!
Let’s get this clear from the start, we love Ray Fenwick!
Ray is an artist, designer, illustrator and “typographic thing-maker” living in Halifax, NS. He’s designed stuff for The New York Times, CMT, Nickolodeon, Urban Outfitters and others, and his work is very very cool. He also has a new book coming out in April called HALL OF BEST KNOWLEDGE.
According to his publisher Fantagraphics, “HALL OF BEST KNOWLEDGE is part graphic novel, part art object, part satire, part puzzle.” AND it looks gorgeous.
If you want to see for yourself, Fantagraphics have made a great 12 page preview available to download which includes the beautiful covers and endpapers.
Click here for PDF preview and then take a look at Ray’s website.
AND you should also go and take a look at the recently redesigned Fantagraphics website. It’s very spiffy.
Have I mentioned that we love Ray Fenwick?
More comics!
Robin McConnell has a big sprawling, meandering (but very informative) chat with autobiographical cartoonist Joe Matt on his radio show Inkstuds:
“Everything in comics is a construction, so you’re not really getting real autobiography ever, you’re not really getting like the unvarnished truth, you’re always getting an edited version. You’re getting what the author intends to give you and nothing more. It’s a paradox. Everything is autobiographical, but everything is also fictional at the same time.”
The interview is about comics, but Joe Matt’s work is not for everyone as it often touches on some adult themes, so a certain amount of discretion is advised ...
Carol Borden recently posted a list of her favourite comics in 2007 over at The Cultural Gutter, and BEASTS! by Jacob Covey (Fantagraphics), JAMES STURM’S AMERICA (Drawn & Quarterly), and WALT & SKEEZIX by Frank King (Drawn & Quarterly) all made the list!
Thanks Carol!
Other books on the list include Grant Morrison’s ALL-STAR SUPERMAN VOL. 1 (DC Comics), LAIKA by Nick Abadzisand (First Second: 2007), and INCREDIBLE CHANGE-BOTS by Jeffrey Brown (Top Shelf) which sounds brilliant. Click here for the full list.
PS - Click here for previews of the much-loved WALT & SKEEZIX on the D & Q website...
Here are some of the most creative and visually interesting books of the year—perfect the “right brain” thinkers on your list.
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HAND JOB: A Catalog of Type by Michael Perry (Princeton Architectural Press).
Easily one of my personal favourite books of the year, HAND JOB is a collection of hand-drawn type. It’s becoming more and more popular, used in design work, advertising, album covers, clothing design and more. Michael Perry, who is himself a creator of fantastic hand-drawn type, has compiled top hand-drawn typographers from all over the world in one visually stunning package.
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TAKING THINGS SERIOUSLY: 75 Objects with Unexpected Significance by Joshua Glenn and Carol Hayes (Princeton Architectural Press).
Everybody has one of these: an seemingly ordinary object that you treat like the crown jewels. TAKING THINGS SERIOUSLY features 75 of these items--from a soda bottle to a rubber pig, from a death mask to a shrivelled artichoke--that people have collected and kept. If you’re looking for quirky, original and compelling book, TAKING THINGS SERIOUSLY is it.
Many of us invest ordinary objects with other sorts of extraordinary significance, too. My friend Tony crams a U.S. Navy 100-pound practice bomb into his tiny workspace for much the same reason that Greg, a colleague of mine at the Boston Globe, displays a wobbly wooden Santa in his kitchen year-round. These doohickeys are actually fossils, petrified evidence of a vanished epoch (young adulthood). Other writers, thinkers, designers and artists of my acquaintance cherish things—sunglasses found at a yard sale, a colored-sand-filled glass clown, a one-eyed ceramic frog—for equally irrational reasons.
--Joshua Glenn on DesignObserver
Here’s a short excerpt from the book on DesignObserver.
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TO INFINITY AND BEYOND: The Story of Pixar Animation Studios (Chronicle Books).
Every movie I see from Pixar just amazes me. Did you see how REAL the rats’ hair in Ratatouille looked? (Yeah, I know, a little TOO real for rats in the kitchen...) TO INFINITY AND BEYOND is the definitive book on Pixar, chronicling it’s 20 year-history. The book is (of course!) gorgeous to look at, full of concept art, storyboards, and snapshots, plus interviews with the people who made it all happen.
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WHITE RAPIDS by Pascal Blanchet (Drawn & Quarterly).
For another visual treat, open up WHITE RAPIDS. Written and illustrated by award-winning Québécois cartoonist Pascal Blanchet, WHITE RAPIDS is graphic novel that blends fact and fiction to tell the story of a Canadian town is forced to shut down after the local water and power company closes. WHITE RAPIDS is retro artwork at its best.
Click here to read some reviews and here for a sneak peak.
UPDATE: Pascal Blanchet was interviewed by Jian Ghomeshi on CBC Radio One’s ‘Q’ on Monday Dec 5th. Click here to listen to the interview (it’s towards the end of the podcast).
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Still designing the perfect gift? Maybe some of our other Gift Guides will help.
Thanks to everyone who entered our Adrian Tomine contest and left comments about his work. Adrian definitely has a lot of fans out there. (I knew I wasn’t alone!)
The winner of the contest, selected at random, is..... Bill Hine!
Congrats, Bill! Your poster will be in the mail shortly.
For everyone else, be sure to check back here for more contests and news and other goodness.... And I hope to see some of you tonight at the Adrian Tomine event at Sophia Books!
If you are a fan of independent comics and graphic novels you really should check out Robin McConnell’s radio show Inkstuds. Every Thursday between 2:00 - 3:00pm Robin interviews the best creators in the medium, from publishers like Drawn & Quarterly, Fantagraphics and Top Shelf, for Citr Radio in Vancouver. Then, bless him, Robin posts up a podcast on the Inkstuds website so those of us unlucky enough not to live on the West Coast can listen too!
Inkstuds recently interviewed the masterful Chris Ware (ACME NOVELTY DATEBOOK, QUIMBY MOUSE and JIMMY CORRIGAN) and comics scholar Jeet Heer about the influential and much loved work of Gasoline Alley’s creator Frank King. The newspaper strips he created are being loving collected in a series of beautiful books edited by Chris with introductions by Jeet (and published by Drawn & Quarterly) called WALT & SKEEZIX.
Three volumes of WALT & SKEEZIX available so far:
WALT & SKEEZIX BOOK ONE
WALT & SKEEZIX BOOK TWO
WALT & SKEEZIX BOOK THREE (New!)
Click here for the Inkstuds interview with Chris Ware and Jeet Heer
As the New York Times reported earlier in the year, reprints of vintage newspaper strips have suddenly become very popular as contemporary cartoonists and graphic artists like Chris Ware, Seth, and Joe Matt openly pay homage to these 4 panel masterpieces.
Other collected reprints of classic newspaper strips available include:
HANK KETCHAM’S COMPLETE DENNIS THE MENACE (Fantagraphics)
KRAZY & IGNATZ by George Herriman (Fantagraphics)
POPEYE by E. C. Segar (Fantagraphics)
POGO by Walt Kelly (Fantagraphics)
THE COMPLETE PEANUTS by Charles M. Schulz
Fantagraphics have also published R. C. Harvey’s definitive (nee massive!) biography of the legendary Milton Caniff, creator of newspaper strips Steve Canyon and Terry and the Pirates.
If you interested in all this stuff, but you don’t quite know where to begin, I’d recommend you download the awesome PDF sampler available from the Fantagraphics website. It’s very cool resource with loads of images.
If contemporary comics are more your thing, Inkstuds also interviewed the mighty Adrian Tomine recently.
As Siobhan mentions below, Adrian is appearing at Sophia Books in Vancouver on Tuesday November 13th and 7pm, to launch his first full-length graphic novel SHORTCOMINGS. He’s being interview by Vancouver author, journalist and all round good guy Kevin Chong!
AND you can also win a free signed poster of the cover art to SHORTCOMINGS (which are awesome - if I could enter, I would!) by leaving a comment on Siobhan’s post.
Apart from SHORTCOMINGS we also have several collections of Adrian’s work available from D&Q:
SCRAPBOOK
SUMMER BLONDE
SLEEPWALK
32 STORIES (which is almost out of stock so get them while you can!)
If you are really obsessive you can also get Adrian Tomine Stationery from Chronicle Books:
SHE READ THE LETTER… Journal
OPTIC NERVE postcards
(yes, yes… I do own all of these and I did get Adrian to sign them when he was in Toronto...)
Graphica artist Adrian Tomine has been all over the place recently. And fortunately (at least for me!), soon he’ll be in Vancouver.
Since Adrian Tomine’s new graphic novel, SHORTCOMINGS, came out, it seems that he’s been on the road—and all over the media, from the cover of Giant Robot to the National Post.
- Read the interview with Adrian Tomine in the National Post
“In a way, I wanted this book to be a summation of all the things I’ve learned in comics leading up to it,” he says.
- Read the review in the Georgia Straight
“Adrian Tomine is the reigning king of comic ennui, and with Shortcomings, which collects issues 9 to 11 of his Optic Nerve, he continues his wonderfully misanthropic rule."
- Read the review in Now magazine
- Listen to the podcast interview on Inkstuds.com
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ADRIAN TOMINE TOUR
After a successful event at Toronto’s International Festival of Authors last month, Tomine is heading west. He’ll be in Vancouver next week:
Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2007
Sophia Books
450 West Hastings St., Vancouver, BC
7-10 pm: Q+A and signing
For a full list of Tomine’s tour stops, click here.
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ADRIAN TOMINE CONTEST
Win a SHORTCOMINGS poster signed by Adrian Tomine. To enter, just leave a comment below to let us know what you think of Tomine’s work. The only catch is that you must be a resident of Canada. The contest closes November 12.
The fabulous artwork of award-winning Québécois illustrator Pascal Blanchet, author of the forthcoming graphic novel WHITE RAPIDS, is currently featured on the CBC Arts website:
Pascal Blanchet… knew from his earliest childhood days that he wanted to draw. “I think it would have been impossible for me to do something else,” he says. “Drawing is the thing I really love in life."In WHITE RAPIDS, Pascal’s evocative, jazz-inspired illustrations beautifully depict the rise and fall Rapide Blanc, a small town in northern Quebec, constructed by the Shawinigan Water & Power Company in 1928 for workers at the nearby dam.
The new issue of monthly online book review Boldtype explores “the vibrant medium of comics this month with a colorful collection of titles from all over the world”. So it almost goes without saying that Canadian publisher Drawn & Quarterly are very well represented!
Diana Metzger reviews Adrian Tomine’s first full-length graphic novel SHORTCOMINGS (in stores in October! woop!):
Fearless in his study of the heartbreaking and bizarre mating rituals of the young, restless, and angsty, Tomine is just as bold when it comes to capturing the intense racial issues that bubble, and sometimes explode, within casual daily conversation.
Stephen Dougherty reviews Rutu Modan’s incredible, critically acclaimed EXIT WOUNDS:
Despite Rutu Modan’s modest style, Exit Wounds is an unmistakably cerebral work whose subtle union of graphic and textual language is leagues ahead of more well-known strips… It’s clear from frame one of Modan’s story that her graphic simplicity is of the best variety: that is, loaded with meaning.
And last, but not least, H.G. Masters reviews Yoshihiro Tatsumi’s brooding and influential THE PUSH MAN AND OTHER STORIES:
Tatsumi’s timeless, and mordant, portrayal of modern urban life and its sordid underbelly remains strictly for adults.
Limited to eight pages by the men’s mag where he originally published, Tatsumi learned to craft economical narratives rendered in drawings as efficient as his characters’ abrupt dialogue.
AND don’t forget that both Adrian Tomine and Rutu Modan will be at The International Festival of Authors in October!
Rutu Modan has been interviewed by the BBC about her acclaimed graphic novel EXIT WOUNDS:
We have also just found out that Rutu will be appearing at this year’s International Festival of Authors in Toronto with fellow Drawn & Quarterly artists James Sturm, author of the forthcoming JAMES STURM’S AMERICA (which includes the out-of-print story THE GOLEM’S MIGHTY SWING) and Adrian Tomine, whose first full-length graphic novel SHORTCOMINGS is out this fall (woop!).
(Fans of Adrian Tomine on the west coast, might also like to know that he will be appearing at Sophia Books in Vancouver on Tuesday, November 13th! More details soon...)
Robin’s gone all out this month. Here’s an interview he did with Ellen Forney on her book I Love Led Zeppelin.
Look for Ellen’s next book, Lust, coming this Fall from Fantagraphics.
Rutu Modan, Israeli author of the critically acclaimed graphic novel EXIT WOUNDS is interviewed by Deborah Ostrovsky for Maisonneuve online:
I wanted to write a story that takes the perspective of everyday life. Art is not for telling your opinions. Art is not good for this. Usually when someone tells you their opinion, it’s not very interesting. But almost anyone can tell you about their personal life, and most of the time it will be interesting. I wanted to tell the truth, but I did not want to talk about my opinion of a situation that I am not capable of explaining.
Deborah has also posted a short review of the book and excerpt.
The Onion A.V. Club has just posted an terrific indepth interview with King-Cat Classix cartoonist John Porcellino:
There’s a Zen-like serenity to John Porcellino’s self-published King-Cat Comics—but in 1989, you never would have seen it coming. When Porcellino founded the Xeroxed zine 18 years ago, he was an Illinois college kid bursting with self-doubt, anger, and punk-fueled sarcasm, all of which spilled onto the pages of King-Cat. It’s almost funny then that his new book—a richly annotated, 384-page hardcover called King-Cat Classix, published by the high-profile Drawn & Quarterly—compiles the lion’s share of the scratchy first seven years of the zine. While there are hints, especially toward the book’s end, of Porcellino’s emerging maturity, his early autobiographical sketches revel in crude surrealism and wise-ass humor—all while maintaining a profound sweetness that would come to dominate King-Cat.
Here’s some Very Cool News about my hero Tony Millionaire: The Drinky Crow Show premieres on The Cartoon Network on May 13!
On Sunday, May 13, The Cartoon Network’s popular Adult Swim animation showcase will premiere the long-awaited pilot of The Drinky Crow Show, based on cartoonist Tony Millionaire’s long-running Maakies comic strip. The show’s comedy is brutal, existential, and hilarious. As with animated shows like The Simpsons or Futurama, The Drinky Crow Show is a fast-paced, plot-twisting laff-riot combining adventure, romance, debauchery and graphic violence—offering something for everybody!
The show will take the cast from freezing Antarctic waters (where Drinky and Uncle Gabby catch small-pox and inadvertently spread it throughout the world), to Gay Paree (where Drinky falls in love with a French princess and contracts a new strain of syphilis, which falls in love with his old strain of syphilis), to Japan (in an episode that looks like a Hiroshige print come to life), and even to Brooklyn (where Drinky and Gabby create Tony Millionaire in a fit of delirium tremens). And the theme song is by They Might Be Giants. It just doesn’t get any better than this.
You can get a sneak preview over at the Fantagraphics blog. Dook! dook! dook!
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