Het viel niet mee om een biografische strip te maken over een schilder waar we eigenlijk weinig van weten en waar ook relatief weinig werk van bewaard is gebleven. Ruijters legt in het interview daar de nadelen maar ook de voordelen van uit.
Jitse Verwer, die onder andere de strips aankoopt in de ABC, was zo aardig om de avond te organiseren en het gesprek met zijn smartphone vast te leggen. Als je er niet bij was, kun je het nu dus alsnog bekijken. Pak een kopje koffie en ga ervoor zitten. En ga daarna naar de winkel om Jheronimus aan te schaffen en te lezen. Dat kan in ieder geval in het Nederlands en het Engels.
Op de etalageruit van the American Book Center in Amsterdam heeft Margreet de Heer een illustratie gemaakt om de Engelse editie van haar boek Religie in beeld te promoten.
Met alle recente reli-aanslagen is deze uitgave goed getimed. De Heer introduceert op zeer toegankelijke wijze de belangrijkste wereldreligies in stripvorm. Ze publiceerde soortgelijke strips over wetenschap, filosofie en – recent – wereldheerschappij.
Wie overigens geïnteresseerd is in informatieve strips en journalistiek in stripvorm, kan sinds deze week terecht op het Engelstalige platform Drawing the Times. Dat werd afgelopen woensdag gepresenteerd in het Persmuseum in Amsterdam. Het doel van de site:
Drawing the Times is a platform where committed graphic journalists and cartoonists worldwide publish work that informs, entertains, engages and challenges readers on global issues and local stories. They can be background stories in comic form, reportages, live sketches, infographics, cartoons and more. These stories are the so-called Drawing the Times Originals, made by graphic journalists that are collaborating with the platform. We also republish stories from other media, that we think are must reads. Four times a year we do a Special on a specific topic, like Climate Change and Human Rights. With a diversity of perspectives and personal styles, Drawing the Times shows what graphic journalism can accomplish.
In deze strip toont Eva Hilhorst wat je je daar precies bij voor kunt stellen, een journalistieke strip. Hilhorst is trouwens een van de initiatiefnemers van de site, samen met Mara Joustra en Stijn Schenk.
Natuurlijk is de journalistieke strip niet iets nieuws en bestaan er al een tijdje andere sites waar je terecht kunt voor dergelijke beeldverhalen. Toch ben ik benieuwd naar hoe Drawing the Times zich zal ontwikkelen en of de site haar publiek weet te vinden.
There’s more than meets the eye in In Real Life, a little moral story about online gaming.
Teenager Anda just moved from San Diego to Flagstaff but has no problem fitting in with the other smart and nerdy kids in high school. Anda loves playing Coarsegold, an online multiplayer role-playing game where she spends most of her free time. Within the game-environment she can be a very skilled female warrior and meet people from all over the globe. At first she teams up with Lucy aka Sarge to make extra money by stopping and killing gold farmers: players that collect valuable objects and then sells them to other players for money. This behavior is against the rules of Coarsegold, but when Anda befriends one of these gold farmers, she discovers he’s a poor Chinese kid who works 12-hour days within the game to make some money. All of a sudden the questions about what is considered right or wrong are not as clear as they used to be.
Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing editor and writer of successful science fiction books, shows with In Real Life that actions within the virtual world are connected to what happens to us in the real world. As he explains in the introduction: ‘I hope that readers of this book will be inspired to dig deeper into the subject of behavioral economics and to start asking hard questions about how we end up with the stuff we own, what it costs our human brothers and sisters to make those goods, and why we think we need them […] It’s not surprising that gamespace has become a workplace for hundreds of thousands of “gold farmers” who undertake dreary, repetitive labor to produce virtual wealth that’s sold to players with more money and less patience than them.’
Anda as her game persona.
All this may sound a bit preachy and although In Real Life might be considered what we call a moral story, Cory Doctorow and artist Jen Wang never stuff their message down your throat. Instead they’ve created an entertaining comic book that will appeal to young adults, and especially gamers. I believe it will create a superficial awareness of the workings of behavioral economics. However, it would have been nice if the book included some suggestions for further reading.
Writer/Artist Jen Wang (Koko Be Good) uses a very recognizable and accessible drawing style that could be characterized as Disney meets Manga for In Real Life. The book is actually an adaptation of a short story by Doctorow. He and the artists worked very closely on the script for the comic.
Wang contrasts the real world and the fantastical environment of the online game by using earthly, brownish and reddish colors for the former and bright colors for the latter. In an interview with Comics Alliance she explained her approach to the coloring of the story: ‘Since I was drawing the real life and Coarsegold scene similarly, the best way to separate the two was to color them differently. From Anda’s perspective her real life is dull and uninteresting, so all those scenes have a brown filter over it. It’s not so gross or depressing as to be a grey or blue, but definitely something that’s down to earth and homogeneous. The Coarsegold scenes, in contrast, have a multi-colored layer on top of the normal color layer, so everything’s just a little extra saturated and textured.’
Hieronymus
A fictionalised biography of the iconic Medieval painter Hieronymus Bosch, by respected Dutch artist Marcel Ruijters. It is a commissioned work for the Bosch500 Foundation and the Mondriaan Art Fund, as a part of a large program of festivities scheduled for his 500th anniversary in 2016.
Marcel Ruijters
Born in 1966 in Holland, Marcel Ruijters has drawn comics since the tender age of seven. A typical art school dropout, he has self-published over 30 titles since 1988. Several of his short comics stories have been published in international underground publications such as Hopital Brut, Malefact and Stripburger. He has also published five Dr. Molotow books with Belgian publisher De Schaar (now defunct) and three Troglodytes books with Amsterdam-based Oog & Blik. Marcel also paints, creates three-dimensional works, and is a member of the editors’ staff of Zone5300.
Earlier this year, I interviewed Ruijters about the book as well (in Dutch):
Mark Millar is one of my favorite current comic book writers. The Scottish scribe (born 1969) always comes up with promising high concepts that deliver most of the time. Millar is the co-creator behind titles such as Kick-Ass(which I reviewed earlier), Wanted, The Secret Service and Marvel’s Civil War. If some titles sound familiar to you that may be because most of his creator-owned series have been adapted for the silver screen or will be in the near future.
MPH is a five-part limited series recently collected in one trade paperback published by Image Comics under Millar’s own label Millarworld. The science fiction comic revolves around Roscoe, a 19 year-old drugs runner that hopes to get out of the slums of Detroit and build himself a business. During a drug deal Roscoe gets busted and goes to jail. He’s a model prisoner, counting on his good behavior to reduce his sentence. However, when Roscoe discovers he’s been framed, he takes a special drug he has been offered. This special drug, called MPH, gives Roscoe the power to move really fast. While under the influence of the drug, it seems time and everyone else stands still which makes escaping the high guarded prison easy.
Roscoe, together with his best friend, his girlfriend, and her younger brother decide to use the remaining pills to rob as many banks as possible. This isn’t just their ticket out of the slums of Detroit, it is also their way of getting back at the bankers and other bastards that bankrupted the city in the first place: ‘We knew it was wrong but it felt so good to pick the pockets of all of those fat cats that crippled Detroit. The banks that stopped our lines of credit, the crooked politicians that sold us down the river, the car companies that outsourced jobs and left us with nothing but drugs and American Idol. They took us from being an industrial powerhouse to half the city upping and leaving us with over eighty thousand empty buildings. It’s only right we got a little payback for those three generations of corruption and neglect,’ are Roscoe’s thoughts on their actions. And really, who could blame them?
By anchoring MPH in contemporary America, in which a lot of regular folks are crippled financially by the economic crisis, Millar not only tells a relevant story, he also writes characters whose motives are understandable and hard to argue with, especially when the thieves act like modern-day Robin Hoods and start to distribute part of their takings amongst the poor and jobless.
Of course, there’s trouble on the horizon: not only will they run out of pills, the teens will also have to fight Uncle Sam and a mysterious guy who seems to know an awful lot about the drugs and Roscoe and his partners. I don’t want to spoil the story too much, so let’s just say Millar has some nice twists and turns in store before this adventure comes to a well-rounded end.
British artist Duncan Fegredo is MPH‘s co-creator and delivers realistic and vibrant art for the comic. Fegredo really gets across the contrast between the fast-moving thieves and the world around them, which is not an easy feat in a medium consisting of static images.
MPH reads like a fast-moving and very enjoyable movie, so I wouldn’t be surprised if we can revisit these characters in the cinemas soon.
This review was written for and published on the wonderful blog of the American Book Center.
Locke & Key #1: Welcome to Lovecraft is a quality book. Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez treat the reader to a captivating and well-executed supernatural thriller that you’ll want to read in one reading session because it’s a real page-turner.
Reader, be warned, though: this series is very addictive. Most comic book stories seem to be never-ending. Such is the nature of comics. Sometimes this annoys me, because I like to have closure from time to time. Maybe that’s why I like graphic novels so much because, when you reach the end of the book, it usually also means the story is finished. The series Locke & Key was published in comics format from 2008 through 2013. Right now it is finished. Welcome to Lovecraft is the first trade paperback of six. So basically Locke & Key reads like a graphic novel in six installments.
The series revolves around the Locke family. After the brutal murder of the father, the three siblings and their mother move to their ancestral home in Lovecraft, New England. The mansion is called Keyhouse and has magical keys and doors, giving the bearers of the keys magical powers. For instance, one of the keys gives you the power to temporarily die and turn into a ghost. Another key changes your sex. The Locke family will soon will find out that a devious demon, kept captive on the grounds, also has its eyes on the keys and is willing to shed blood to get them.
Author Joe Hill (yes, Stephen Kings’ son and author of Wraith, which I reviewed a while ago) gives an original twist to the haunted house theme and treats us to very rounded and likable characters. The three Key kids have a hard time dealing with the murder of their father and all of them do this in their own way. These characters imbue the horror story with a lot of heart.
The horror and violence in Locke & Key feel real and are not for the faint of heart. Gabriel Rodriguez‘s art style is very lively, consisting of stark, clear lines. It’s just cartoony enough to take some of the edge off of the depicted violent actions.
I wonder if an adaptation of the comics will be as graphically violent. Several years ago, Fox ordered a TV series pilot based on Locke & Key. The pilot was made, but the network decided to pass on the series. However, Universal is developing a movie adaptation at the moment. Locke & Key has won numerous awards, including an Eisner Award in 2011 for Joe Hill as Best Writer and the 2012 British Fantasy Award for Best Comic or Graphic Novel.
The Locke family might live in a harsh world, but it also contains a lot of magic. To me, Locke & Key is just that: comic book magic. I’d like to recommend you step through the door to enter this dark, but fascinating world. I enjoyed every page.
A special Locke & Key Master Edition, collecting the first two story arcs, was published earlier this month.
Trees, volume 1: In Shadow by Warren Ellis (Transmetropolitan, The Authority) and Jason Howard is something else. Trees is a great science fiction story that presents a new perspective on the theme of alien-invasion. Like all good science fiction, Trees is an exploration of human nature in alienating and trying circumstances.
Ten years ago we discovered there is intelligent life in the universe: large black obelisks came down from the sky and landed on different places on earth. These big shapes wrecked their surroundings wherever they landed, destroying whole city blocks. Humanity panicked, but ‘the trees’ as people call them all but ignored humans all together. They don’t recognize us as intelligent or alive. Basically they just stand there, sometimes dumping toxic waste on their surroundings.
Now, ten years later, people have accepted these ‘trees’ and life goes on as well as possible. Writer Warren Ellis focuses on five locations on earth to show how the presence of the trees has changed our lives and how people adapted to them. In China a young artist arrives in the special cultural zone of a city under a tree and starts a journey of self-discovery. In Italy a young woman under protection of her boyfriend, the leader of a fascist gang that rules the city, meets an older man who will teach her survival skills so she can move up the social ladder. In Svalbard, one of the members of a research team is about to discover that the trees may not be dormant after all. The Somalian president starts placing artillery on the trees to demonstrate his military power, and in New York a Democrat is running for mayor in a city that’s been utterly transformed when the trees landed – Manhattan flooded when the trees landed on the cityscape.
Panel from Trees by Warren Ellis and Jason Howard.
In the first eight comics that are collected in Trees, Volume one: In Shadow, Ellis focuses most on the young artist, the Italian woman and the research team. Rightly so, because these three storylines concentrate on the characters and their development, whereas the other plotlines are more concerned with the politics of a world covered by the trees. At the moment they seem less interesting than the more personal storylines, but my guess is the political issues will be explored in later comic book issues.
I especially liked the story about Tian Chenglei, the young artist who is the new arrival in the city of Shu, a special cultural zone in China. Chenglei tries to find his place within a community of free thinkers, artists, homosexuals and transgenders and starts to explore his own sexuality.
Jason Howard‘s artwork has an energetic feel to it. Howard’s love for cross-hatching gives the art a sketchy kind of look, while at the same time he gives a detailed impression of the scenery. All major locations in the book have their own distinctive look and feel, and these settings really sell the story. For the facial expressions Howard seems to use a sort of short-hand: they sometimes are lacking subtlety.
At first glance the cover of Trees reminded me of the film poster of David Lynch’s Eraserhead with Jack Nance wearing that goofy haircut, but although the trees are weird, Ellis’s story isn’t as strange as any of Lynch’s films. Trees isn’t less fascinating, though.
This review was written for and published on the wonderful blog of the American Book Center.
Sometimes you just don’t ‘click’ with a story and for me this is the case with Umbral, Book One: Out of the Shadows, a so-called dark fantasy story that takes place in the fictional Kingdom of Fendin, a world in which magic and religion are forbidden.
The story is about a young thief named Rascal. During an eclipse she sneaks into the Red Palace and tries to steal a priceless royal gem called the Oculus. She gets help from Arthir, the crown prince. Together they witness the horrific murder of the King and Queen at the hands of the Umbral: nightmarish, Lovecraftian creatures from another dimension. When the creatures kill the young boy as well, Rascal can barely escape the palace alive. With the Oculus in her possession Rascal tries to flee and outrun the Umbral. Interestingly, the Umbral are able to take on the shape of the people they’ve killed, making it hard to figure out whom to trust. On the way, Rascal gets help from a drifter named Dalone, who might be a wizard of sorts.
Page from Umbral, Book One: Out of the Shadows.
I’ll admit: I’m not a big fantasy buff, but as a reviewer I’m willing to try and read any comic that I come across. I thought the cover of the comic looked intriguing. Speaking of the interior art by Christopher Mitten, I have mixed feelings. On the positive side, I like the look of the Umbral. With their dark and shadowy form, bright red eyes and large mouth with sharp teeth they indeed seem to be creatures that will devour you in your nightmares. Storytelling-wise, Mitten is all over the place and from a visual standpoint the narrative flow feels a bit disjointed at times. It also doesn’t help that some of the characters look alike a lot and are hard to tell apart. For instance, Dalone and Master Gearge, master of the thieves’ guild, could have been twins. They’re both big-bearded men and father figures to Rascal.
Of course it is nice that the main character is female, and a teenager at that. But Rascal is a young, spunky girl with a potty mouth that frankly isn’t very interesting as a character. Nor are most of the other characters, to be honest. As a whole, Umbral Book One is pretty bland. It seems writer Antony Johnston (The Fuse, Wasteland, Dead Space) put some familiar tropes of the fantasy genre in a blender and this is what he came up with, throwing a bunch of ghost pirates in the mix as well.
Reader be warned: this first volume ends with a annoying ‘to be continued’ sign, so after almost 170 comic pages of chasing, cursing and violence, nothing really gets resolved. To be honest, I don’t think I can muster the enthusiasm to pick up the recently-published second installment of the story.
This review was written for and published on the wonderful blog of the American Book Center.
Nee de titel van deze blogpost verwijst niet naar een aanstaande team-up van deze twee beroemde detectives – al ben ik benieuwd hoe zo’n avontuur zou verlopen; waarschijnlijk wordt het een clash of the ego’s.
Juni is namelijk Classic Crime Month bij de ABC, vandaar dat Halley gevraagd werd om de twee literaire speurneuzen te portretteren. In de rest van Nederland is het trouwens ook de Maand van het Spannende Boek, maar dat terzijde.
Halley is druk met illustreren en soms blogt ze daarover. Recent bezochten Linda en ik de open dag van het atelier waar ze werkt. Ik vind Halleys verfijnde potloodtechniek erg mooi. Check deze vleermuis maar eens:
Ook maakt ze portretten waarin diezelfde delicate lijnvoering in terug te zien is.
I am a fan of the work of Canadian comic book artist/animator Guy Delisle (Québec, 1966). He has made a couple of very interesting travelogues about life in faraway countries, such as Burma Chronicles, Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City, Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea, and Shenzhen. The great thing about these comics is that we experience the cities and local culture through Delisle’s eyes, much like we would experience them ourselves.
So even though Delisle shares his personal experiences with a nice dose of humor, the things he experiences and his observations are quite universal. This not only makes these travelogues very good reads, but quite educational, too. Thanks to Delisle, we are able to experience every day life, panel by panel, which is more telling than just watching the news and getting the highlights of whatever disaster has taken place in those foreign countries lately. Also, Delisle’s style is quite straightforward and therefore very accessible.
Besides these wonderful travelogues Delisle also produces comics about parenting. Drawn & Quarterly recently published Even More Bad Parenting Advice. This is a sequel to A User’s Guide to Neglectful Parenting. The books are best described as short comical scenes of Delisle parenting his daughter and son, or better said: trying to be a good parent for these kids. As you can imagine, the comic book artist isn’t your typical middle-of-the-road dad, but more like a big kid himself. Actually, this dad is quite lazy and selfish, though despite these characteristics, he really tries to be a good parent.
It seems that all incidents in the book reflect real life, whether it is the father trying to introduce his son to a videogame he once loved and then telling his son exactly what to do without letting the kid discover it for himself, or the father trying to escape from a boring party by convincing his daughter she is tired so they have a reason to leave without insulting their hosts.
When Delisle is easily found by his daughter during a game of hide and seek, he shows his childishness. When she comments he’s a bad hider, he takes offence and tells her in detail why she is also very bad a playing the game. ‘I don’t need a six year-old telling me how to play hide and seek. I’ve been hiding for 47 years! 47!’ he yells, but is put in his place when his daughter replies: ‘Hee-hee! You’re being a bad loser, daddy!’
The comic book reads like a sitcom with great dialogue and well-timed jokes. I only have one beef with Even More Bad Parenting Advice and that’s the scene’s visualizations. You see, Delisle tends to recycle his images. A lot. Whenever he thinks it’s appropriate, he uses the same image as the one that came before. This not only points to lazy draftsmanship, to me this also wastes an opportunity to make the storytelling more nuanced and more alive, because we miss a lot of the character’s little expressions. Another effect of this visual recycling is that as a reader you give the dialogue far more attention than the pictures. Then again, maybe Delisle tries to emulate the static style of sitcom television through this method, in which case, he’s spot on.
Even More Bad Parenting Advice was originally published in French. The English translation is by Helge Dascher and Rob Aspinall.
Written for and published on the wonderful blog of The American Book Center.
Meteen heb ik het boek besteld bij the American Book Center, maar al snel kreeg ik bericht dat het boek niet voorradig was. Jitse vertelde me later zelfs dat de kans groot was dat het heel lang ging duren voordat Reflections binnen zou komen. Eerlijk gezegd was ik het boek al helemaal vergeten toen ik deze week plotseling bericht kreeg dat het op me lag te wachten.
Dit soort kleine gebeurtenissen maken het leven leuk.
Twin Peaks-fan Brad Dukes sprak met leden van de cast en crew en voert deze sprekend op in een lang interview. Fantastisch om te lezen hoe het er achter de schermen bij Twin Peaks aan toe ging. Ook co-creator Mark Frost en Angelo Badalamenti komen in het boek aan het woord. Alleen de stem van David Lynch ontbreekt vooralsnog. Maar gelukkig heb ik ook het boek Lynch on Lynch van Chris Rodley in de kast staan, waarin de regisseur uitgebreid over Twin Peaks vertelt.
Ever since she was a little girl, Rose and her parents have been going to Awago Beach. The small coastal town is their summer getaway. Rose’s friend Windy always stays there in the summer as well; she’s like the younger sister Rose never had. This year, however, the summer retreat seems not so idyllic.
Rose’s parents are fighting a lot. Their attempts to have another baby have failed, and Rose’s mom doesn’t seem to be recovered from that. Meanwhile, the guy at Brewster’s, practically the only shop in town, who Rose is secretly crushing on, might have gotten his girlfriend pregnant.
This One Summer may be a graphic novel aimed at young adult readers, but it is very enjoyable for older readers as well. Written by Canadian writer and performer Mariko Tamaki and illustrated by her cousin Jillian Tamaki, This One Summer is a lovely dramatic piece about two young girls on the outskirts of adulthood. The characters and their emotional turmoil feel real, therefore the book never gets melodramatic. Previously, the Tamakis published the celebrated graphic novel Skim.
The book reads like a nicely-paced movie and its construction is quite clever. The Tamakis take their time to unfold why Rose’s mom reacts the way she does and what exactly has happened to her. Rose, being the protagonist, is present in every scene. We experience the story through her eyes, so to speak. I especially liked how the authors incorporated the little drama-in-the-making that’s happening to the local teens, and how they linked this to Rose and Windy’s adventures. Whether the girls are visiting the local shop or the Historic Heritage Huron Village, they’re always in the right spot to witness part of the unfolding drama without it feeling contrived in any way. The blind spots Rose and Windy (and the reader) fill in with their own imagination.
This One Summer won the Ignatz Award for best graphic novel last year. Jillian Tamaki won the Governor General’s Award for Children’s Literature-Illustration for this graphic novel.
Written for and published on the wonderful blog of the American Book Center.
