working from home

Read more of Siobhán's ace comics here.

i like katie beaton's comics

Her website is here.

trains are mint

When I'm travelling round the UK for work I always try to keep an eye out for small press comics, and, though there are always interesting new ones, wherever I am I usually note that no-one makes comics with quite the same attention to detail and love as Rolling Stock Press, whose 'Trains Are... Mint' comics are beautifully drawn and reproduced. The fifth book in the series is out now - you can read more about the comic, and buy a copy here. There's a quick example of the artist's style below:

sparks moving up and down a wire

Here's a short, sentimental and intriguing little comic, via Pete. It's by Terry Wiley. There's something wistful and energetic about the idea, which counterbalances the cuteness, for me. I like it a lot - one sample panel below. Click the link above for the rest.

xkcd webcomic

This web comic, via Gromblog, is really just a little too geeky for my taste - when joke punchlines contain references to CSS decrypters and data transfer protocols I tend to find my attention wandering. That said, there are some crackers there too; take a look.

Here's a couple of samples.

darryl's drawings

There's no need for me to re-write this, as Pete captures entirely my feelings - I've been enjoying Darryl Cunningham's webcomics and drawings for a while now, and its distressing to hear that he's in trouble. If you can possibly help then perhaps you should. Over to Pete:

"The cartoonist Darryl Cunningham is in somewhat dire straights financially at the moment and reading his journal can get a bit painful at times. He’s got to the stage where he’s desperate enough to ask his friends for cash which seems an eminently sensible idea. (He’s offering art in return once he’s sorted but I don’t think that’s necessary - he’s given enough as it as.) Obviously most of you reading this won’t know Darryl from Adam but for those who’ve known him over the years and enjoyed his comics, and who might have the odd tenner to spare, I direct you to that link".

Here's one of Darryl's drawings - hopefully he won't mind my reproducing it.

Mister Wonderful

Good to see that after a medium length abscence, Daniel Clowes is busy again. The comic book artist responsible for, amongst other things, Ghost World, has a new 20 installment comic running in the Funny Pages of the New York Times.

The first part of Mister Wonderful is available as a PDF here.

And according to the Laughing Squid, there's a film project on the way too. Ace.

exit wounds, by rutu modan

Rutu Modan's 'Exit Wounds' is, firstly, a particularly beautiful graphic novel. Modan, who can do a lot more than just draw, creates an intricate, colourful representation of the private lives of two Israeli adults drawn together by a shared interest in the whereabouts of Gabriel, who they believe was the 17th, and unidentified, victim of a suicide bombing in Hadera. Her drawings are crisp and clean, full of bold curved lines and coloured in gorgeous sepia tones. Her closely aligned frames and compositions somehow make me think of old Tintin comics.
But her plotting is thoroughly contemporary, drawing out the small-scale dramas at the heart of a society littered with tragic events, where death and disappearance are daily possibilities. Without once referring to the Israeli-Arab situation, the author draws compelling parallels in everyday life, conjuring up the sprectre of victimhood and the painful, unmet desire for solutions, always out of reach.

Yet personal, rather than societal politics form the centre of 'Exit Wounds'. For Koby, whose relationship with his father is long deteriorated, it is coming to terms with this fractured love. For Numi, the young woman who was his lover, it is coming to terms with his absence, and the fact that, too plain and unwieldy, she is always overlooked. Worse is to come, and the two must come together and seek resolutions to their problems. Though the process is painful, they do make progress. So while 'Exit Wounds' is always imbued with sadness, Modan lets us have a few, beautiful and optimistic frames with which to close.

If only real life mirrored this better.

comics and journalism

The point where comic art and journalism cross over is well established thanks to the extraordinary - and initially unprecedented - work of the Maltese artist Joe Sacco, who, since the early nineties, has published impressively researched, exquisitely rendered comics detailing daily life in Palestine, Sarajevo, Gorazde and other war zones in days of both tidy normality and great crisis.

Since his groundbreaking form of reportage was first published, similar works, blending memoir, history and politics, have helped solidify comic reportage as a substantial and cutting-edge genre. Since Sacco's 'Palestine', Guy Delisle has published two superb books of travel journalism from restricted states (his 'Pyongyang: Journey in North Korea', and 'Shenzhen: A Travelogue From China'), Jean-Philippe Stassen's 'Deogratias, a Tale of Rwanda' is a deeply moving study of life in the East Central African nation at the time of the Tutsi genocide, and David Axe's 'War Fix' (extract below) is a devastating look at the aftermath of the Iraq War. Greg Cook is pursuing similar themes and Ted Rall's 'To Afghanistan & Back' does the same for the first country attacked in the "war on terror'.

Craig Thompson is another writer currently writing the kind of book which demands not just creative power but serious research. His forthcoming graphic novel, Habbibi, is not yet published, but his comic book travelogue, 'Carnet De Voyage', which documents his research, taking in Barcelona, the Alps, France, and Morocco is serious travel journalism.

Now, adding to this body of work, the legendary comic book writer Harvey Pekar, more well-known for his closely obseved autobiographical style, has turned his hand to a new project - working with the peace campaigner Heather Roberson and the artist Ed Piskor, Pekar has written 'Macedonia', a book which depicts not another state of War in Eastern Europe, but rather the state of peace which has somehow, set against troubling ethnic rivalry, prevailed since the break-up of Yugoslavia. It looks like a great read.

Despite all this, my favourite travel illustrator is someone not so often mentioned in comic-book circles, but someone whose meticulous line drawings combine with delicate narrative to produce really powerful pieces of graphic art. Yet there are still no collections of Olivier Kugler's work!?! Amazing - I hope someone remedies this soon. One of his drawings appears below - marvellous.

There are plenty more of Kugler's drawings here. Go see.