All PostsContent Topic: metaphor
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Ending Asterios Polyp
Anyone following comics blogging/reviewing/criticism will know that David Mazzuchelli’s long awaited Asterios Polyp was not only predicted as one of the best comics of the year before it came out but also highly praised all over the place (on and offline) when it came out. I’ve been following a lot of the reviews and articles and have so far avoided posting on it. I tend to not post on the really big comics: sometimes because I haven’t read them, but often because I don’t think I have anything worth adding to the conversation.
But, having read a bunch of reviews on Asterios Polyp, I found one aspect missing from the commentary. No one mentions the ending (actually, since I started this Matthias Wivel does reference it in his post). I understand that in a straight-up review context endings are often considered off-limits spoilers, but surely for such a widely praised book, there’s room to assume many have already read the book by now.
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Warmer and Little Flashes by Aidan Koch
Sometimes I read a comic and it reminds me that comics can be narrative without being clear, character driven, or plot-based. Comics narratives can be abstract, allusive, elusive, elliptical, yet still visual rich and… poetic. Warren Craghead’s work always brings this to mind, though I’ve yet to manage a post on his How To Be Everywhere which will do justice to the book. On some recommendation–or perhaps I was just ordering some other minicomics and wanted to make the postage worthwhile–I bought a copy of Aidan Koch’s Warmer a few months back. It got lost in the piles and shelves of my office until her name showed up again online, first at Arthur Magazine (where Jason Leivian of Floating World Comics in Portland does some comic editing) and then at TopShelf 2.0 (both actually showing the same short comic). So I reread and reread.
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Mushishi by Yuki Urushibara
Urushibara, Yuki. Mushishi. 10 volumes in Japanese. 6 volumes in English to date. Del Rey, 2007-. I looked around for reviews of this manga series. Six volumes have come out from Del Rey, yet I can only find reviews of the first (with some minor exceptions where the reviewer just summarizes plot). People seem to [...]
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Red Colored Elegy by Seiichi Hayashi
Hayashi, Seiichi. Red Colored Elegy. Trans. by Taro Nettleton. Drawn & Quarterly, 2008. Hardcover. 236 p. $24.95. 9781897299401. By nature comics are elliptical, an art of omission: from iconic art styles to the gaps in time and space created by the panel breakdowns. For the majority of comics, the reader’s work at filling in the [...]
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Bottomless Belly Button by Dash Shaw
Shaw, Dash. Bottomless Belly Button. Fantagraphics, 2008. 9781560979159. $29.99, 720p. If I summarized the plot of Dash Shaw’s brick of a comic, Bottomless Belly Button (henceforth, BBB), it wouldn’t sound like much. Three grown-up children return to their family home for a week to learn that their aged parents are getting divorced, psychology ensues, then [...]
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Image Text Interaction Coffee
This week’s All Over Coffee is a great use of indirect image/text interaction. Each image and it’s caption work together, metaphorically, and as a total the panels come together with a meaning in lack of meaning. The text smoothly flows, while the images jump and swerve. McCloud might call those non-sequitur transitions yet, the text [...]
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On Ghost of Hoppers
Often the writers and artists I hold in the highest esteem are the ones that I find myself least able to write about, particularly novelists like Queneau, Markson, or Gaddis, but also comics artists like Jaime Hernandez. Hernandez has consummate skill with both storytelling and image-making in a minimal yet deceptive rich style. The decades [...]