Aaron here today with Rosalie Lightning; Ubu Roi; Trish Trash; Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky; Dronewatch 2017; George Herriman’s Biographer, Michael Tisserand; What Dan Nadel is Reading
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Background/Middleground/Foreground
Tom Hart’s Rosalie Lightning, a strong contender for book of the year, is excerpted at the PEN America blog.
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‘I think you have to let teens come to their own satire’
The Lunar Observer’s Jacob Khepler observes the anniversary of Alfred Jarry’s play, Ubu Roi:
Ubu Roi will never get the high school treatment — it was a big, big noise in its time, forging a path for Dadaism, Surrealism, and the Theater of the Absurd, but the very first word is SHIT, if not in all caps then in an all-caps feeling, and there’s no avoiding or defending that.
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Rollergirls (on Mars)
Michael C. Lorah interviews Jessica Abel at the Comic Book Resources blog:
Many authors have books later published in another language. Was it strange in any way to see this one first appear in another tongue?
It was interesting because it definitely gave me a lot of insight into how the French comics industry works. That was very interesting information, because producing a book doesn’t happen the same way it does in the American system. And there are good sides and bad sides to the French system as well. It’s a complex question.
It’s nice to bring back into English. Of course, it was written in English, so it’s sort of being “untranslated” more than anything else. But I was able to work closely with the translator for the French version. I speak French, so I was able to refine it and make it reflect the spirit of the book. I’m proud of how it came out there.
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Here, Kevin Huizenga finds the baron composing aphorisms at a house known as Mad Bean Cottage.
Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky Comics
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The 173rd meeting of the NY Comics & Picture-story Symposium will be held on Tuesday, Dec. 13, 2016 at 7pm at Parsons The New School for Design, 2 West 13th Street, in the Bark Room (off the lobby). Free and open to the public.
Michael Tisserand on Birth of the Krazy: The Early Days of George Herriman and Krazy Kat.
George Herriman’s biographer Michael Tisserand revisits the years when boxing, funny animals, and the one cartoonist’s genius produced comics’ most enigmatic character.
Michael Tisserand‘s biography of George Herriman, Krazy: George Herriman, a Life in Black and White will be published by HarperCollins in December, 2016. His previous books include The Kingdom of Zydeco and the Hurricane Katrina memoir Sugarcane Academy. He lives in New Orleans.
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Nadel’s Reading List
Including Lauren Weinstein’s Normel Person Comics:
Normal here opens up to move away from the old “white straight guy” meaning and into a whole mindset of viewing the world and asking simple, structural questions and funny, moving observations. Halloween costumes, babies, food. The basics of our particular little kind of life. All done in Lauren’s detailed line work and lush watercolors. A master at work.
And Jessica Campbell’s Hot or Not: 20th Century Male Artists:
l love this little book that does exactly as the title suggests: breaks down male artists into the ol’ “hot or not” categories usually reserved for women, even, or even especially in the art world. Campbell nails the silly “objective” tone of it all, digs deep in her choices, and is very, very funny. Also, her unfussy, to-the-point cartooning removes any sense of artifice. The book moves along easily and you barely stop to realize how funny, weird, and uncomfortably natural it all feels.