Famous Rapes #1: Old Master Paintings
This is the first in a series of retrospective collage art focusing on myth, stories, historic events, and cultural attitudes about rape as seen through different time periods.
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Spotlight
Spotlight: Perrin Ireland
Perrin Ireland’s work combines art with science, using shape and color to tell visual stories about cerebral subjects like microbiomes and the Higgs-Boson particle.
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Spotlight: Boco Watches the Sea
I asked Boco, “What was the coast guard like?” He said it was lonely.
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Spotlight: Frog Heaven
A beautiful, amphibious comic from writer and illustrator T. Coulter.
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Spotlight: Adrienne Celt
Writer and cartoonist Adrienne Celt imagines the complicated inner lives of animals in her comics.
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Spotlight: In San Francisco, There Is a Street
A comic based on a French children’s song found in a book by Georges Perec, who found it in a book by Paul Eluard, who heard some French children singing the song
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Spotlight: Hiphop Is the Future
Though Matt Dojny has become known primarily as a novelist since the publication of The Festival of Earthly Delights this past June, he’s been making comics since his earliest childhood:
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Spotlight: I Dream of Sweden
I have been thinking a lot about Sweden and Iceland. Maybe it’s because its cold in Chicago—and I know it’s much much colder there.
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Conversations with Literary Ex-Cons: Matthew Parker
You know what struck me about Matthew Parker, one-time homeless wanderer, former drug addict with more than ten years of prison under his belt, between his ears, now a writer and graphic author?
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A Taste of Larceny in My Blood
Two excerpts from Matthew Parker’s graphic memoir, Larceny in My Blood: A Memoir of Heroin, Handcuffs, and Higher Education:
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SPOTLIGHT: Ozge Samanci
Once I asked a friend, “Am I compulsive?” and she said “If you ask that to someone who loves you they will say you are passionate. If you ask someone who does not like you, they will say you are compulsive.”
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The Rumpus Interview with Natalie Dee
Cartoonist Natalie Dee’s eponymous website, NatalieDee.Com, has consistently ranked among the most highly trafficked comic sites on the Internet since its debut. Her comic panels are equally hilarious and dark
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The Rumpus Interview with Tom Kaczynski
Publisher of Uncivilized Books and comics artist Tom Kaczynski opens up about primal motifs, utopian thinking, and growing up with comic books in Poland.
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The First Three Pages of “Million Year Boom”
The first three pages of “Million Year Boom,” one of the stories featured in Tom Kaczynski’s new collection, Beta Testing the Apocalypse:
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The Rumpus Interview with Bucky Sinister
An illustrated interview with author, comedian, and poet Bucky Sinister about his new book, Time Bomb Snooze Alarm.
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No Straight Lines
A Collection of Queer Comics (3 of 3)
The future is bright, queer, and full of comics.
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The Rumpus Interview with Alison Bechdel
Alison Bechdel is a living legend (and I say this from the point of view of a queerish autobio cartoonist).
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A visual review
When I think about Kramers Ergot Number Eight, I imagine 1970’s aesthetics, and the Beatles’ album, Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967).
I decided the only way explain in words such impressions of visual stories was to first show the visuals.
...moreSPOTLIGHT SERIES: Adrian Tomine
Like most things I liked when I was 16, I first got into Adrian Tomine’s comics because of my older sister, who let me borrow her early issues of Optic Nerve.
SPOTLIGHT SERIES: Tom Gauld
Tom Gauld is an illustrator, cartoonist, and publisher. His finished pieces range from animated advertisements to book illustrations, as well as the weekly comic strips he produces for the Guardian. Whether he’s drawing a campaign for one of the UK’s largest drug stores or illustrating a book of monsters, Tom’s drawing style is intimate and concise, reflective of an artistic process that uses technology without relying on it.
SPOTLIGHT:
Eleanor Davis
I first encountered Eleanor Davis’ work in the form of Beast Mother, a fairy tale that thrilled me with its visual intricacies and thoughtful storytelling.
SPOTLIGHT SERIES: Vanessa Davis
Vanessa Davis brightens the world around her, not just through her comics, which have been published in the collections Spaniel Rage and Make Me a Woman, but in her outgoing personality.
OBSCURE CARTOONISTS: Edward Bolman
A heavy-metal-obsessed Puerto Rican 12-year-old. A Dartmouth professor of biology and science-fiction writer. A party girl and print designer from Birmingham, Alabama. What do these people have in common? They are all obscuro cartoonists I have known.
A Punch In the Gut, a Book Review: Pinocchio (Not What You Think)
The painter Douglas Schneider once said to me that when he saw a great piece of art it was like getting a punch in the gut. He said a masterful work could knock the wind out of him with a fist of admiration and envy, making him stumble-run to his studio to get back to work.
OBSCURE CARTOONISTS:
Steve Willis
A heavy-metal-obsessed Puerto Rican 12-year-old. A Dartmouth professor of biology and science-fiction writer. A party girl and print designer from Birmingham, Alabama. What do these people have in common?
SPOTLIGHT SERIES:
Casey Scieszka & Steven Weinberg
Casey Scieszka and Steven Weinberg are the authors of To Timbuktu, an illustrated travel memoir of their adventures together after college. Casey was born and raised in Brooklyn, and Steven grew up in Bethesda, Maryland. They met while studying abroad in Morocco, which is where To Timbuktu begins.
The Rumpus Interview with Jim Woodring
Cartoonist Jim Woodring is the creator of the surreal landscape starring characters Frank, Manhog and Pupshaw. Judging from Jim’s prolific blog, he shouldn’t have time for anything other than drawing.
SPOTLIGHT SERIES:
James Jajac
Silver Hell is the work of James Jajac, which he sums up as being “the process of self-destructing and the gradual process of rebuilding your life.”
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