Hi. How’re things going for you? Pretty awful? Yeah, me too. I don’t know what else to do, so I’ll just write about some more comics. Crooked Teeth #9 by Nate Doyle Here we have part four of the ongoing “Blood and Thunder” story, which takes up 23 pages in the ninth issue of Nate Doyle’s one-man anthology. God bows to math. Honestly, if anyone gets anything out of this monthly column I hope it’s this: it should be mandatory for cartoonists to include at least one “In the Previous Issue…” page if they are working a serial story. I’ve saved Comics now, thank you. With all that said, I’m glad I ..read more

Back in 2015, when I was chewing over an exhausting congratulatory message for Alex Niño's then-75th birthday, cleverly disguised as an article for a German newspaper and to be later refurbished when working as a Comics Journal scribe on saluting his 80th birthday, I became convinced that there wouldn't be more new material from the absolute master of the form that the Filipino artist was and still is. To use a phrase lifted from countless letters to the editor in comics published during the 1970s and 1980s, books from the former Big Two where Niño was so prominent: “Boy, was I wrong.” German ..read more

I first encountered Matt Lesniewski's comics while sitting in a candlelit church waiting for a violin and piano duet to walk onto the podium and play the hits of Fleetwood Mac. It was then that I received a text from a friend that read “Check this out” with a link to Lesniewski’s incredibly detailed work. The few minutes before the concert spent scrolling and zooming under candlelight left a strong enough impression on me to order all of his comics when I made it home (after an excellent duet). While I was at first unsure of how to conceptualize the shifts in Lesniewski’s style over the years ..read more

No eclipse here in Merrie Olde London Towne, sadly, which is probably for the best, as we’d have been unlikely to see it through the ever present pea soup fog that looms over the city, oppressing the skyline that otherwise would be clear and bright for the chimney sweeps to step in time across, but no, that is a mere flight of fancy, while reality is contained firmly in this week’s links, below.  pic.twitter.com/Uux8tCYFaV — freya JN (@GoblinStunts) March 28, 2024 This week’s news. • Starting the week’s selection with an IDW check-in, who last we saw initiating a program of cost-cu ..read more

In this vintage interview from The Comics Journal #53 (Winter 1980), Bill Sherman speaks with the cartoonist Trina Robbins (1938-2024) about a life in underground comics as the '70s drew to a close. The post An Interview with Trina Robbins appeared first on The Comics Journal ..read more

DSTLRY is the name of the company - that’s all caps and no vowels, like it’s 1999 and Bobby Gillespie is singing about how much the 21st century is going to suck. I don’t always pay attention to the new publisher announcements, I must admit. It’s hard to get attached to the poor dears. Such a volatile business, with a steep mortality rate. So many lambs to the slaughter. But once the books are out in the world a publisher rises or falls on the merit of the stories themselves. You need to look past the foofaraw of DSTLRY's early statements regarding digital scarcity - that’s what got the commen ..read more

Ed Piskor, photographed by Chris Anthony Diaz at the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco, 2014. Edward R. Piskor, Jr., a cartoonist and online broadcaster who traversed the worlds of mainstream and independent comics and became a known social media personality, died by apparent suicide on Monday, April 1, 2024. His death was confirmed by his family. He was 41. Piskor was best known for his acclaimed 12-issue comic book series Hip Hop Family Tree, which catalogs the artistic origins and cultural legacy of hip hop and utilizes a style informed by the aesthetic of 1970s comic book offset print ..read more

Artist's portrait from the 2020 digital edition of Icon: A Hero's Welcome. Issue #257 of DC’s House of Mystery wasn’t short on talent when it hit the stands in late 1977. Like all issues of that horror anthology, it had its fair share of clunkers, but you couldn’t fault the art team. Joe Orlando (on the cover), Ernie Chan, Michael Golden, Arthur Suydam… and in between these heavy hitters was a three-pager by a newcomer named Mark D. Bright, raised in Montclair, NJ, and not yet a graduate of the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He would have other names in credit boxes throughout the years: M.D. Br ..read more

Victory Parade is an intense graphic novel by an intense cartoonist. Leela Corman’s comics have a somber tone spiked with a dark humor, going back to the very beginning with the short-form works Queen’s Day (self-published, 1999) and Subway Series (Alternative Comics, 2002). Her first full-length graphic novel, Unterzakhn (Schocken Books, 2012), drew a massive landscape of troubled and tortured souls. And now, with Victory Parade, Corman appears to have found just the right intermingling of comics and painting; this has always seemed to be a goal of hers, to find a way to merge the two art med ..read more

PREVIOUS INSTALLMENTS The post The War on Gaza – 4.9.24 appeared first on The Comics Journal ..read more