I’m still working on my class (I’ve got two weeks to get my paper finished) and then, hopefully, there will be more writing and comics forthcoming. I have a bunch of ideas that need to be worked on. In the meantime, a few reading suggestions:
- Emile by Fabrice Neaud – An english translation of this French’s comic artist’s short story. I’ve heard lots of praise for Neaud, but this is the first of his work I’ve read. After reading it, I’ve added his Journal 3 to my list of bande dessinee I want to read. This particular autobiographical story is most interesting in not including any actual people in the images (with the exception of drawings of images of people (photos, posters, etc)). A visually people-less comic in a sense, it is primarily a visual record of spaces and places. The translation has a few hiccups and oddities to it, but it works for the most part.
- Interview with Blaise Larmee at TCJ – I’m a fan of Blaise’s work (writing about his new book Young Lions is on the list for when my paper is finished), though I’m not always a fan of his writings (primarily at the Comets Comets blog) where I’m never quite sure how much of what he writes is just about the performance. This interview does have some engaging ideas in it, like this one that seems quite Oulipian:
Honestly, I can barely read comics anymore. There are so many boxes and word balloons and all it just tires my eyes so quickly. I feel like there is so much investment on the creator’s behalf in building a visual template — boxes, word balloons, characters, settings, etc. — that the creator has no energy left for concrete or conceptual concerns. I am currently developing a standardized template, so that creators can focus on content and conceptual structure instead of style.
I would love to see TCJ posting more interviews of younger, less established artists talking more about ideas than biography. The famously long TCJ interviews with older, famous creators always seem to go on too long about biography and history.