Fantagraphics Blog

Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware contribute stories to this Zadie Smith anthology of new fiction, The Book of Other People. Charles Burns illustrates the covers. It also has prose from the likes of Dave Eggers, Jonathan Lethem, and George Saunders. All of this makes for yet another beautiful Penguin Books artifact. [Note: I originally found out about this book via the great Blog Flume which has some scans of the cartoonists' work.]

This weekend I sat down with our latest Mome anthology (#10 with Al Columbia covers) and I highly recommend that every fan of the comics medium buy it if only for the brilliant piece by Dash Shaw. For me Dash came out of nowhere and now he's just burning up with unconventional story-telling and smart formal experiments. One of the more remarkable things about his work is that in general (but very specifically in Mome 10) Dash is succinctly using color the same way other cartoonists use images in addition to words– as a means to tell more than the…

This is interesting: the New Yorker has set up a cartoonists' blog. Cartoonist and online cartoon editor Mick Stevens will be the blog's first "captain," and it'll rotate every month. If this means future blogging from folks like Gahan Wilson and Bruce McCall, count me in.

Here it is (even though it still says "chapter 14" on the NYT site).

Come on down to JIM's INFO BARN, the new blog from artist Jim Blanchard. I particularly enjoyed the panoramic photo of his studio: if you check it out, be sure to look for the reflection of Jim's face in the mirror. I laughed.

Daniel Clowes talks to the Onion's A.V. Club. Sample quote, on his current NYT strip: "I'm sure 10 times more people are reading it online than in the actual paper. People have complained to me, like 'Man, that's expensive. Five bucks for one page.' Well, you do get a thousand pages of interesting stuff in addition."

Tom Spurgeon just made my day, and not just because his essential Comics Reporter is back up-and-running. No, I'm talkin' about this photo of Jeff Foxworthy and Wilson Fisk (a.k.a. the fuckin' Kingpin of Crime), from Halloween night circa 1996:

PRINT Magazine talks Palestine with Joe Sacco.

The creator of the acclaimed surreal crime-noir graphic novel Hwy. 115 is half of a joint exhibition opening Saturday January 5 at the Viva Dolor gallery in Lyon, France. Details for Francophones are here.