By Sam Vanallemeersch

Nobrow Press

I’m just not the right person to appreciate this.

I’m a comics guy, and my art tastes veer strongly to the sort of art that looks great but does so in service to a story.

So basically Big Mother, as an A3 collection of artwork by Belgian artist Vanallemeersch just leaves me cold. Attractive in its way, but in no way worthy of this treatment.

Vanallemeersch operates under his own name and two aliases; the visually tight and controlled Kolchoz and the mania of Solchoz – and here in Big Mother it’s all definitely Solchoz – panaramas, pencil works, lots of colours – flat and washes.

So yes, it’s huge, yes it’s colourful, and yes the artwork is a littlemore comics-ish – but effectively it’s just the same thing as those Drawn & Quarterly petit livres I slated a while back for being a waste of time (see this one - Nogoodniks).

I didn’t like those much at all. This I like a little more, but honestly? Give me comics.

And that’s my problem with it – as illustration, it’s alright, but nothing I can’t see all the time at numerous websites (including our own) every week. As a package it’s impressive through its size – but is that merely painting it with the brush of artistic pretension? Or to justify the price of £18 for 23 pages of content + cover?

So if you do have £18 burning a hole in your pocket – try The Wrong Place – beautiful, colourful art and a great comic story. Or the new Joost Swarte book – beautiful illustration, AND a master of comic art.

(Somersault is (c) Richard Cowdry; if you want to reproduce any part of it you should ask him first )

“Poetry and poetics of the visual and verbal were energizers. Drawing and lettering comic panels is an absorbing occupation as well as being labour intensive. But no matter how inimitable and unique a drawing style, quirky comic line doesn‟t always sell to sixteen-year-old boys buying graphic novels. To many male adolescent minds a taste for the eclectic may be interpreted as gay and pretentious. Comic-book subculture is built around story arcs and pictures drawn by comic-book artists schooled and trained through years working in definitive US comic-book formats. Until 2000AD weekly and its larger-than-life Judge Dredd character there hadn‟t been a future in the UK for artist-fans. Brit artists had copied American comic-book house styles to professional standards since boyhood, knowing one day their labours may be rewarded.”

(page from Run In Groove by and (c) Michael Weller)

A trailer for the documentary about the excellent comics creator Guy Delisle, best known for his wonderful travel books such as Shenzen, the Burma Chronicles or his most recent Jerusalem: Chronicles From the Holy City which scored honours at Angoulême (the English language edition is due from D&Q this spring, it’s already on my Must Read Radar). From the description:

“Captured over the course of a 1 year period in the south of France, the film follows the gradual realization of Guy’s latest travelogue ‘Jerusalem Chronicles’ and includes an in-depth look at Shenzhen, Pyongyang, Burma Chronicles aswell as an intriguing insight into the rise of the independent graphic novel. Equally explored are Guy’s beginnings in animation, his studio, his inspiration, his career thus far and the travelogues that never saw print: Vietnam and Ethiopia.”

The Guy Delisle Chronicles from phillip rashleigh on Vimeo.

Harvey James, who created the very fine A Long Day of Mr James – Teacher for Blank Slate’s Chalk Marks imprint, has a new work coming later this year from Blank Slate Books, this time a full length graphic novel, Zygote. And lucky us, he has just set up a new website for Zygote where he is teasing us with some imagery already. Quite confident this one will end up on the blog crew’s collective Must Read Radar, bookmark and follow now, I think you’re going to want to be reading this one.

And on the Harvey theme, our own Kenny points me to this post Harvey put up last year “It’s Only a Matter of Time Before We Find Out Where Dan Clowes Hid the Bodies”. It’s a delightfully tongue in cheek – and yet offering circumstantial evidence to support the satirical claim  - examination of the work of Dan Clowes, not from the usual Salinger of comics revered approach but from the angle that close study of some of his characters and his dialogue for them (especially that which is clearly a comics alter ego for Clowes himself) reveals a shocking truth: that Clowes is either about to embark on a murder spree to cull some of humanity, or that he already has some bodies stacked up in the woods, basement chest freezer (delete as applicable).

“I think the most prevalent theme in his comics has been entirely overlooked, and it stares me in the face every time I see his stuff- that Dan Clowes wants to kill a lot of people, and has possibly already killed. Let’s examine the evidence!” It’s well thought out with frequent references to many Clowes strips, and it is bloody funny…

And on one final Harvey James note, he is the guest on the excellent Inkstuds show where he discusses Mr James and the upcoming Zygote, go and have a listen.

By Bram Stoker, adapted by Jason Cobley and Staz Johnson

Classical Comics

It’s been a while since I looked at Classical Comics, way back in 2009 with the adaptations of Romeo & Juliet and The Tempest. Of which I ended with:

“They may come across as worthy reads to this reviewer but to children in their teens, turned off by the complex, exaggerated, theatrical language of Shakespeare I can see these full colour, well illustrated graphic novels being a very attractive alternative and a wonderfully exciting breath of fresh air.”

And that’s been proven to me several times this past year, as the Shakespeare graphic novels found their way into the school library to be eagerly read and enjoyed by several of the great readers in Year 6. Noticeably though, the children gravitate towards the Quick Text versions – sufficiently fast paced and succinct to give them a good read without bogging them down.

But what I have here is the original version of Stoker’s classic. A classic I first read as a young teen, and loved for the originality of his idea, and the creeping, oncoming horror that works its way into your head far slower and effectively than any of the Dracula movies I’d seen by that stage. Reading it here sent me back to that first experience, of a novel that chilled, that thrilled, that genuinely scared me so much I couldn’t tear myself away.

And reading it all over again, in this abridged form that utilises Stoker’s original words, I had a real sense of all the excitement of that first reading.

Or at least it did after a little perseverance. Because that first section of the book, maybe 30 odd pages, is really heavy going – as though Stoker’s words were doing battle with the adaptation itself and I found myself reading the words with scant attention to the artwork at times. There’s simply too much here, too much on the page, too much to properly construct a symbiosis of words and pictures.

BUT BUT BUT - crucially, it’s only the first section. Once that’s over and done with it’s as if a lightness descends on this darkest of tales, with Cobley relaxing and settling into a far more confident flow.

And once that happens Johnson’s artwork becomes far more integral to the adaptation, and everything settles down to a much more enjoyable read. There’s a far better sense of flow, of integration of words and pictures and we’re presented with many pages of lovely layouts, although there is a feeling that Johnson’s art, with a strong US comics style, is eminently more suited to the action sequences than the slow, creeping horror of what is actually a rather slow moving tale.

Here are just a couple of highlights, where Johnson really makes those ages work – such as this montage where writer and artist combine beautifully to summarise Dracula’s journey to Whitby, as the doomed ship he sailed on comes to port:

Or this piece, with Renfield detailing his meeting with his master:

So yes, once over that initial trouble, this had most of what I was after with an adaptation of Dracula. It certainly manages to get across everything I remember so vividly from the novel, and that is always a sure sign of the success of an adaptation of a work I’d previously read and enjoyed.

Overall, without having seen the Quick Text version, I do have a sneaking suspicion that I’d have had far fewer problems with this in that format, and sense the words and pictures would fit far more comfortably throughout. As it is, this original version is a flawed yet fulfilling adaptation of a book you really should read at some point in your lives.

Okay, we’ve had more than a few reports on here from the recent Angoulême comics festival in France (see here), but here’s a wonderfully unusual one to point you towards, a torrid tale of teased yarn, sneaky undercover knitting, street art and comics at Europe’s most important bande dessinee bash. Yes, it could only be Deadly Knitshade herself, Lauren O’Farrell, one of the Fleece Station Mafiosi abroad, creating some of here woollen wonders around the festival (I still grin recalling seeing her knitting a fantastic Nessie at Hi-Ex in Inverness a couple of years back) and she’s posted up a report with loads of pics of her work and some of the other fab street art created around Angoulême that caught her eye too, go and have a look for a very different Angoulême report.

(above: The Three Lovers by Lee Smith and Charles Vess. Below: The Galtee Farmer by Jeff Smith and Charles Vess)

Charles has gifted the Book of Ballads to one of the world’s great literary collections – The Library of Congress. The stories, adapted from old English and Scottish songs, originally handed down by the old oral tradition, were adapted into graphic form. The collection now residing in the revered halls of the Library of Congress consists of some 132 original art pages, as well as notated scripts and preliminary layouts for each story. Martha Kennedy of the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division commented that “(Vess’) style of contemporary drawings illustrating narrative comic art is only sparsely represented in the Library’s collections and will go a long way towards filling this particular gap in its holdings.” How lovely to see more comics work being preserved for the public in one of the great libraries of the world; kudos and congratulations to Charles, his collaborators on the original Ballads and to the Library of Congress for recognising the importance of such work. I’ll leave you to enjoy a couple more gorgeous pages Charles was kind enough to send us (thanks, Charles!):

(above: The False Knight on the Road by Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess. Below: The Daemon Lover by Delia Sherman and Charles Vess)