Comics scholar Emma Tinker has made her doctoral thesis, Identity and Form in Alternative Comics, 1967 – 2007, available online in its entirety, taking in several famous creators from Crumb to Gaiman. From the abstract: “This thesis argues that for many creators there exists a useful analogy between the comic book form and mental processes, specifically [...]
Continue reading...7. January 2010
Ever since his Abécédaria was chosen as the most beautiful book at the 2008 Leipzig Book Fair (see here), it would seem that the world has (finally) discovered French cartoonist and illustrator BlexBolex. Abécédaria was recently translated into German, English and other languages, and now BlexBolex was asked to create the poster for the 2010 [...]
Continue reading...4. January 2010
There are nicer ways of starting the new year than by announcing the death of yet another mainstay of European comics. As the Flemish comic blog Strip Turnhout announced on Sunday, cartoonist Tibet passed away during the night of Saturday, January 2nd, at the age of 78. (Tibet at the 1989 Angouleme Festival, pic borrowed from [...]
Continue reading...17. December 2009
Today’s Best of the Year for 2009 comes from one of our own regular contributors, our very own Continental Correspondent, Wim Lockefeer; over to Our Man in Belgium: Ah, it’s that time again. You know the drill, so no frills. In no particular order : Tales From Outer Suburbia (Shaun Tan, Arthur A. Levine Books) [...]
Continue reading...16. December 2009
In June, 2010 the Haarlem Comics Festival will take place for the tenth time in a row. That, and the fact that the Stichting Beeldverhaal Nederland will celeberate its 20th anniversary, calls for something special. Next to the obligatory reminiscing on previous editions, this has turned out to be a quite ambitious project which aims [...]
Continue reading...11. December 2009
What do you get when you take a healthy doses of nonsensical and non sequitur humour, a relentless ear for pseudologic and a quite temperamental gnome? Well, Wesley The Gnome is what you ge ! Wesley is angry at the world and constantly gets involved in things that happen for no reason, and don’t go [...]
Continue reading...9. December 2009
Last week the Angouleme Festival announced the “Sélections” for its 2010 edition. These are sixty-odd books that were published over the past year, and that are deemed to be indispensible in any Bande Dessinée library. As is the tradition, it’s a real smorgasbord of styles, subjects and formats. The usual suspects are present, of course, with [...]
Continue reading...3. December 2009
The trusted Blake, Jacobs and Mortimer blog, that we’ve quoted before, has found some very nice Jacobs items in the catalogue of a new comics items auction due to be held on December 12th at the Coutea-Bégarie auction house in Paris. Next to a very nice large-sized sketch by Jacobs (valued at 4000 Euros), [...]
Continue reading...2. December 2009
On December 11th to the 13th, 2009, Strip Turnhout, the best little comics festival in the Low Countries, takes over the quiet town of Turnhout in the middle of Flanders. For three days, everybody who’s anybody in the Flemish comics world will be there, either as a visitor or signing their work. Most of the events [...]
Continue reading...1. December 2009
Here’s a little something from the past that should be cherished. In 1978, Pierre Culliford, born in 1928 as the son of an expatriate Brit and better known as Peyo, celebrated his 50th birthday. To honour that occasion, Yvan Delporte, the legendary editor of Spirou Magazine (and subject of a new, wonderful book by Christelle [...]
Continue reading...17. November 2009
A couple of days ago we reported, admittedly rather belatedly, that the Angoulême Festival organisers had run into a bit of trouble in financing the next edition of the festival. A dispute with the local government on who should pay for the construction of the festival tents lead to a huge gap in the organisation’s [...]
Continue reading...11. November 2009
If you believe the press in France and in the French part of Belgium, the arrival of the new Blake And Mortimer (scheduled for publication in French on November 20th) will be met with a level of hysterics unseen since the release of the latest Astérix book (and which it undoubtedly will fail to reach [...]
Continue reading...10. November 2009
According to reports by the French Sud-Ouest newspaper and the RTL news, the 2010 edition of the world-renowned comics festival of Angoulême (scheduled for January 28th to 31st) may not take place after all. The news has been confirmed to comics blog BoDoï’s Benjamin Roure by the festival’s organisers. The problem seems to be the construction [...]
Continue reading...28. October 2009
Celebrated Australian illustrator and cartoonist Shaun tan (The Arrival, Tales From Outer Suburbia) is currently touring Europe (or at least part of it) with an exhibition of a selection of his illustrative work and comics. The exhibition debuted on October 11th in the Burg Wissem Bilderbuchmuseum (or Picture Book Museum) in Troisdorf, Germany, and features [...]
Continue reading...27. October 2009
Jef Nys, the creator of Flemish comic hero Jommeke and one of the most succesful cartoonists in Flemish history, passed away earlier this week. He was born in Antwerp in 1927, and originally wanted to become an engineer. When he was 16 he started attending art classes in the Royal Academy in Antwerp and turned [...]
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8. January 2010
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