good morning

this is an extra picture from the 'top five' i put together for spencer and andrea of the silver lining.
check it out here, it was fun to do.

Chris Ware's Candide

See more here.

Persepolis

An animated movie I would like to see.

Hergé and Ware

Heureusement, ce titre est l'un de mes favoris..


..so it isn't in storage et je pouvais prendre des photos d'elle.
(Yes ok, my French is terrible. Letting alone problems of grammar, what is 'storage'?)


Aujourd'hui, ici à Toronto, nous sommes au milieu..


..d'une tempête de neige nous-mêmes.


Pauvre Milou hurle à la mort..


..parce que son maître est tombé dans la crevasse.

PBS interviews Chris Ware:

P.O.V.: Hergé underwent a period of despair and anxiety during which he suffered recurring nightmares filled with whiteness — certainly iconic dreams for a cartoonist! Eventually, after psychoanalysis, he emerged with a new direction: Tintin in Tibet, with its stark alpine landscapes and minimalist cast and story, was a major departure for Hergé. Do you have periods when you lose faith in your work? How have you handled them? What do you feel is your greatest creative or artistic accomplishment?

Chris: I lose faith every time I have to start a new page, and this is no joke.


Click on the photo; it's probably worth seeing in
greater detail

New lending library and books-by-the-foot

The Toronto Zine Library has started to circulate their collection (via Torontoist).

More form vs. content here.

Maira Kalman

Okay, I'm a little slow today. As I was writing my earlier post about cartoons I thought about Maira Kalman and her great monthly column for the New York Times. At first it was free and then they migrated it, sadly, to TimesSelect (subscription only). This evening I learned that TimesSelect is no more! I hurried over to Kalman's column and discovered that she stopped drawing/writing it in April 2007. Oh, well. At least now I can look through all the ones I missed. Find them here.

From the email that went to TimesSelect subscribers, via The Shifted Librarian:

“Since we launched TimesSelect, the Web has evolved into an increasingly open environment. Readers find more news in a greater number of places and interact with it in more meaningful ways. This decision enhances the free flow of New York Times reporting and analysis around the world. It will enable everyone, everywhere to read our news and opinion - as well as to share it, link to it and comment on it.”

Turns out the Times finally figured out they can make way more money from advertisers than from subscribers. Hooray for the Web. (Just download Adblock Plus for Firefox. There must be equivalents for IE and Safari.) Now The Globe and Mail should follow suit..

Cartoon magic

Chris Ware


Chris Ware


Robert Crumb


Richard McGuire


The adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck, by Rodolphe Topffer (1799-1846), inventor of the comic strip

John Updike wrote, "in the thirties and forties, when I was growing up, the cartoonist occupied a place in the cultural hierarchy not far below that of the movie star and inventor. Walt Disney, Al Capp, Peter Arno - who, now, could attain their celebrity with just pen and ink?" (From McSweeney's Quarterly Concern Issue 13.

The pictures above are from some well-known artists that I like. Slightly less well-known is Jeffrey Brown. I didn't include a picture of his work mostly because his drawings don't photograph well, and you need to read a few panels to appreciate their charm. His characters tend to be socially awkward and self-conscious, and he has a sparse, wobbly drawing style. This is what he says about his style:

"Basically when I did Clumsy I was in the middle of my MFA at School Of The Art Institute here in Chicago. I was in the painting and drawing department and I was kind of trying to reject a lot of things. I wanted to draw comics like I did when I was a kid. So I tried to forget everything about rendering to react against a lot of things at art school. I wanted to create something completely human and honest to try to have a purity of expression... It has less to do with the skill than what you are trying to express. I found that when I was drawing in my sketchbook that the stuff that was speaking to me the most was this crude simple cartoony drawings much more then the heavily rendered realistic stuff which people tend to like. But I felt those drawings don't say as much."