All PostsContent Topic: theme
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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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The Golem’s Mighty Swing
The Golem’s Mighty Swing by James Sturm. Drawn and Quarterly: 2001. 112p, $12.95. Baseball month continues with this comic by James Sturm, the first of two baseball comics by Sturm I’ll be reviewing. Outside of his work with the Center for Cartoon Studies, Sturm is best known for historical fiction comics, included the recent collection [...]
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Blue Pills by Frederik Peeters
Blue Pills: A Positive Love Story by Frederik Peeters (2001). Translated by Anjali Singh. Houghton Mifflin, 2008. 192p, $18.95. The comics that get the most attention in the wider press seem to be those with the most socio-political relevance, those that deal with certain “issues” (think Maus, think Persepolis). Houghton Mifflin’s hit from 2006, Fun [...]
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Kundera on Theme Words
A theme is an existential inquiry. And increasingly I realize that such an inquiry is, finally, the examination of certain words, theme-words. Which leads me to emphasize: a novel is based primarily on certain fundamental words. It is like Schoenberg’s “tone-row.” In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, the “row” goes: forgetting, laughter, angels, litost, [...]
