There are few fictional characters that can be evoked through just a symbol, but Batman is one of them, with the outline of his flying namesake, or a suggestion of the crime fighter’s black mask.
Comics
As He Releases His New Book, Adrian Tomine Talks Beginnings and Endings
Comics artist Adrian Tomine’s latest collection, Killing and Dying, took a long time to materialize.
Two Comics Narrate the Unsaid and the Unknown
A common piece of advice to writers is to show, rather than tell.
Publisher of Small-Format Comics Gives Emerging Authors a Big Break
At just 24 pages, each comic in British publisher Nobrow’s 17×23 series is designed to be an accessible gateway for readers to discover emerging authors, and for those authors to create what is often their first print publication.
A Pakistani Comic Book Fights Religious Extremism
This week, Pakistani high schools are distributing comic books that authorities hope will dissuade at-risk teenagers from joining militant organizations like the Taliban.
Women’s Rage: A Conversation with the Creator of ‘Bitch Planet’
A comic book industry veteran for the last decade, Kelly Sue DeConnick first earned her chops adapting manga to English.
How to See a World in a Corner of a Living Room
What do the ’80s post-punk band Liquid Liquid, faded family photographs, and Art Spiegelman have in common? All contributed to the creation of Richard McGuire’s latest graphic novel, Here.
New York’s Beloved, Independent, Union-Busting Bookstore
On the Books, written and drawn by Greg Farrell and released by Microcosm Publishing, is a firsthand comics account of contract negotiations at the Strand in 2012 — or, as the book’s subtitle puts it, “A Graphic Tale of Working Woes at NYC’s Strand Bookstore.”
Drawing the Dark Journeys of Drifters
For a digest of comics stories and intricate, free-standing illustrative work called The Lonesome Go, St. Louis artist and writer Tim Lane profiles familiar, typically unshaven folk: bar flies, train-hopping drifters, biker types.
The Existential Adventures of a Daredevil Escape Artist
Years before NYC-based artist and writer Paul Pope was garnering Eisner Awards for an intricate, boundary-challenging Batman series, he was making a name for himself working at a Japanese comics publisher. At night, however, Pope was crafting the story of how a circus’s sinewy escape artist earns his keep.
The Partly True Diary of a Cartoonist
California-born, Brooklyn, New York–based comics writer and artist Gabrielle Bell diarizes as often as she contemplates the very idea of memoirs in Truth Is Fragmentary: Travelogues & Diaries, her new, mostly black-and-white collection of autobiographical comics.
A Compendium of Comic Maps
The best fiction often succeeds because its creator has constructed a convincing world. By that I don’t mean a place that seems realistic, but rather a world that’s believable because it’s been thought through — pages of notes, characters described down to their beauty marks, the relationships between them, their homes and towns mapped out.