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.
Comics
Posted inOpinion
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.
Posted inArt
How to Look at Ad Reinhardt’s Cartoons
At David Zwirner gallery right now, you can see an entire room of Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings. It’s the first chance to do so in New York since 1991. But you can also see work for which the artist is lesser known — in particular, his cartoons.
Posted inOpinion
The Comical Side of Science
OAKLAND, Calif. — Science is always painted as a subject diametrically opposed to art, but some of the best scientists have talked about their thinking process as one that’s very creative in scope.
Posted inNews
Marvel Unveils Pakistani-American Teenage Girl Superhero
Marvel is launching a new solo superhero series, which in and of itself wouldn’t be that exciting — except the star will be a Muslim Pakistani-American teenage girl from New Jersey.
Posted inOpinion
Angst and Comics: Daniel Clowes in Chicago
CHICAGO — Daniel Clowes’s work is the subject of Modern Cartoonist, a show originally designed for the Oakland Museum of California but recently traveled to Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and will be showing at the Wexner Art Center in Ohio next year.
Posted inOpinion
Hijacking Family Circus to Reflect a New Reality
Erin Bradley’s Park Slope Family Circus blog appropriates one of a longest running American comic strips, Family Circus, and injects it with wit and social commentary. It’s as if artist Norman Rockwell’s idyllic vision of America was transformed into an episode of Portlandia, the popular hipster-lampooning TV series.
Posted inBooks
This Book Is About as Fun as a Barrel of Monkeys
The phrase “barrel of monkeys” generally means a bit of crazy fun. In some cases, though, people may use it as an example of something that’s less fun, i.e. “this party is way more entertaining than a barrel of monkeys.” This contradictory dual meaning makes Barrel of Monkeys a great title for a graphic novel by French cartoonists Florent Ruppert and Jérôme Mulot — in my eyes, at least, because I still haven’t decided whether the book was a really awesome barrel of monkeys or the lesser variety.
Posted inNews
Did Chicago Public Schools Ban a Classic Graphic Novel?
In a strange and troubling move that looks suspiciously like censorship, Chicago Public Schools have removed Persepolis, a classic graphic novel that tells the story of author Marjane Satrapi’s coming-of-age in Iran, from all seventh-grade classrooms.
Posted inNews
4 Finds from Last Weekend’s Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival
Last Saturday, November 10th’s Brooklyn Comics and Graphic Festival one-day fair was a packed event that featured close to a hundred exhibitors that attracted thousands of fans from across the city. The enthusiasm on the two-floors of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel’s church hall in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was palpable and the quality of publications were high — did I mention graphic novelist Ben Katchor and Chris Ware (among others) were there signing books?
