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Hannah Tinti discusses how The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley came into being, the formation of its characters, and how twelve scars and the celestial heavens help give this book structure and heft.
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Allyson McCabe talks with Nicole Georges, illustrator, zinester and educator, about her new book Fetch, how she got into the DIY punk scene, and family secrets.
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Brandon Hicks reviews Boundless, a new graphic novel from Jillian Tamaki.
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Isabel Greenberg is a London-based illustrator and writer. She studied illustration at the University of Brighton and has written for a variety of outlets including the Guardian, Nobrow Press, The National Trust, Seven Stories Press, and the New York Times. In 2011 she won the Observer/Jonathan Cape/Comica graphic short story prize. Her first graphic novel, The Encyclopedia of Early Earth, […]
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In April, the Mystery Writers of America named Max Allan Collins a Grand Master, the organization’s peer-voted lifetime achievement award. Collins has had a prolific and often eclectic career. The Iowa Writers Workshop graduate has written more than one hundred books, has had a long career as a comics writer including, most famously, the Road to […]
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The artistic oeuvre of Cecil Castellucci is dauntingly varied and vast. A singer/songwriter, a playwright, a librettist, she is also the author of many books, ranging from the picture book Grandma’s Gloves (winner of the California Book Award Gold Medal) to the YA novels Boy Proof, Tin Star, and the part comic, part prose novel […]
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Allyson McCabe talks with Leah Hayes, acclaimed illustrator, graphic novelist, songwriter, and musician.
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Damian Duffy and John Jennings discuss their new graphic novel adaptation of Octavia Butler’s classic novel Kindred.
...moreComic artist and writer Mike Norton is doing alright. After working on various titles for DC (Queen & Country, Gravity, Runaways, The All-New Atom, Green Arrow/Black Canary), in 2011 he launched his webcomic Battlepug. In 2012, Battlepug won an Eisner for Best Digital Comic. He’s a co-creator of Revival, a critically acclaimed and commercially successful […]
...moreThe circus was small, a little tent in the center of a field, but of course we didn’t know it was small, we didn’t know there were bigger circuses in other places. We didn’t even know there were other places. As part of Guernica’s bimonthly series “The Kiss,” graphic novelist Kristen Radtke has an illustrated […]
...moreAt The Believer, Shannon Tien caught up with Chester Brown, graphic novelist and author of the newly released Mary Wept Over the Feet of Jesus, which Tien describes as “essentially a layman’s interpretation of the Bible.” Mary Wept is a collection of graphic adaptations of Biblical scenes involving prostitution, including Brown’s interpretation of Mary as a […]
...moreThe Library of Congress is, for the first time, naming a graphic novelist as the Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. The honor goes to Gene Luen Yang, author of the graphic novels American Born Chinese and Boxers & Saints, among others. The post was created in 2008 to help promote children’s and young adult literature, and […]
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In the imagined scenario wherein my apartment burns to the ground and I lose all my worldly possessions, there are just a few things I would miss—family photographs (of course), an old wooden trunk my grandmother reupholstered and that I used to store my toys as a child, and the book, John Black’s Body. I discovered […]
...moreI feel like I’m just a hair’s breadth away from a consensus that what I do is horrible. Guernica has a wonderful interview with graphic novelist Adrian Tomine, whose latest book Killing and Dying was recently released. Tomine talks about the difficulties of capturing the subject matters of race and fatherhood, all while meditating on […]
...moreA recently revealed 1982 DC Comics style guide created by José Garcia López shows shows the familiar cast of characters in bright colors and positive attitudes. Superheroes have fun too.
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Artist and author Phoebe Gloeckner talks about her semi-autobiographical novel The Diary of a Teenage Girl, just adapted into a film starring Kristen Wiig and Alexander Skarsgard, and what she’s working on now.
...moreOver at NPR, Glen Weldon looks at a new anthology of Drawn and Quarterly that collects the Canadian comic publisher’s first 25 years.
...moreThese days there are so many screens showing superheroes one can almost forget that they came from comics. Ta-Nehisi Coates talks to Vulture about storytelling, representation, and the places where movies fall short: We’re talking about something that’s so surreal it’s just not possible within the world as we know it. So that requires a […]
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The question that lingers even after reading the book is about the use of symbolism in the cartoon and who has the final say—the creator or the readers?
...moreThe Marvel universe is about to get a much-needed dose of perspective when G. Willow Wilson’s all-female team of Avengers arrives this May. NPR talked to Wilson about gender, identity, and ladies who draw: If we’re going to have an all-female team, let’s really push the envelope and talk about what gender means… Can you […]
...moreJust in case the events unfolding in Ferguson aren’t enough of a reminder of the effects of overly aggressive police, The K Chronicles is compiling a series of police brutality strips.
...moreOn August 18, hip-hop and comic book nerds alike convened to celebrate the release of Volume 2 of Ed Piskor’s The Hip-Hop Family Tree, a history of the genre in graphic novel-form. In the Daily Beast, Daniel Genis explains how the competing personae and one-upsmanship among rappers translate so easily to a medium that often […]
...moreOften times readers dismiss graphic novels as too unrealistic to posses literary merit. That would be a mistake, argues Stefan A. Slater at The Airship, because reality isn’t inherently part of good story telling. Plenty of other fictional forms flaunt the rules of the naturalistic universe while retaining literary value, and graphic novels often contain […]
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Comic publishing pioneer Françoise Mouly discusses bringing comics to the mainstream, life at The New Yorker, and the burdens of being legendary.
...moreThis year’s annual Banned Books Week—a celebration of books that have been banned—will target graphic novels, those picture-filled narratives better known as comic books. And that’s exactly why Banned Books Week is taking a special interest in comics this year, as Comic Book Legal Defense Fund executive director Charles Brownstein explained to Library Journal: For […]
...moreFormer child star Wil Wheaton read twenty-one books last year, meeting his annual goal on GoodReads of twenty books. Then the Internet flogged him for having a goal of only twenty books, and because three of those books were graphic novels. But as Jill Guccini points out over at BookRiot, readers can aspire to any […]
...moreArguably, no other story has been made to express absolute black and absolute white as clearly as World War II. So how can an artist integrate the textures of grey that make a story truly poignant? In an essay for The Millions, Charles-Adam Foster-Simard reviews an Art Spiegelman exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery called […]
...moreOur own MariNaomi represented at this year’s SPACE Awards. (SPACE stands for the Small Press and Alternative Comics Expo.) Smoke in Your Eyes took 2nd place in the Webcomic Category. And her memoir, Kiss and Tell, tied for 1st in the General Category. Congratulations, MariNaomi!
...more“I’m sure someone out there has a workable solution. But what do I know? I make comic books and write about jazz. I do know the difference between right and wrong, though.” As the second anniversary of Harvey Pekar’s death approaches, Guernica shares an excerpt from his posthumous graphic novel, Not the Israel My Parents […]
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Alison Bechdel is a living legend (and I say this from the point of view of a queerish autobio cartoonist).
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