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December 28, 2006

REVIEW
JAPAN AS VIEWED BY 17 CREATORS

This review has been moved to a page here.

December 27, 2006

[above] A one-off t-shirt design that I made. If you're interested in the long-running adventures of these two ancient Gauls, the "official site" is here

[below: Drawing of a couple in Richmond, Virginia. Color from Photoshop.]

More drawings of people around Richmond here

December 26, 2006

If you're interested in black and white storytelling, then director Fritz Lang (1890-1976) is the place to go. He made a bunch of color films during his long career, but of particular interest should be the black and white silent films like Metropolis, and early sound films like M and (especially) Testament of Dr. Mabuse. This last film is "especial" because it uses unusual visual techniques which (I just saw the film so I am still parsing it) seem perfectly suited to comic books. The film is available on DVD from the usual places, but it shows up on Turner Classic Movies from time to time - - it is a German movie with English subtitles, as is "M." Lang also made english-language noir films like Hangmen Also Die, Ministry of Fear and Clash by Night. He moved to Hollywood after more or less running for his life when the Nazis took control of Germany in he early 1930s. Lang's Testament of Dr. Mabuse seems to be something of a poke in the eye at Nazi party politics, though I have read (but did not notice as I watched the movie) that there is direct commentary toward the Nazis specifically - - so no wonder Lang had to get out of town in a hurry.

WATERCOLOR AGAIN:
If you enjoy pretty and well-done watercolor landscapes, you may like this John Martin piece (below). It is from the exhibit I saw (The Artists Vision: Romantic Traditions in Britain) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC over these holidays. (Click to view a larger image.)

The National Gallery of Art is just a short walk from the Capitol Building. I wonder how often any of the members of the Congress or Senate make it over to the museums on the mall?

Dusk on the Mall: The National Gallery with the Capitol dome in the distance.

Holiday notes:

Paul Pope had a drawing and an imaginative (and brief) snippet of a story about Christmas pop-music and Rasputin visiting Corto Maltese over the holiday here

Tom Spurgeon's Comics Reporter printed the cover to a "Who Killed Santa Clause!" Justice League comic from 1974 here. I've got that comic, sans the cover. Nostalgia seems to fuel both comicdom and the holidays!

I saw this at Dirk Deppey's journalista:

[A review of Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home] "Dense and multifaceted, the book abandons traditional linear narrative for an aspect-to-aspect approach in its quest to discover the truth behind the life and death of Bechdel’s father, shifting focus from one factor of their lives together to the next. Bechdel circles around her subject, relentlessly studying the life of her father from every available angle, adding detail upon detail, with later chapters offering information that places earlier scenes in an entirely different light. This elegantly drawn book thus rewards multiple readings to a higher degree than many other graphic novels, and its cool, literary approach to its subject grants the reader every opportunity to join Bechdel in her dissection of a family life veiled in custom and circumstance. Book of the year? Yeah, I’d say so..."

The rest of his analysis is here.

What puzzles me about this review is the mentioning of "multiple readings" of the graphic novel - - how often does a reader want to reread a graphic novel? I have reread a few, but that's not the question that Deppey's review prompted me to ask: how many comic graphic novels are worth rereading?

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