Verbing Nouns
Very little time today, so let’s jump to it:
- Howard Tayler starts his tenth year of daily cartoonin’ (with no skipped days or guest strips) over at Schlock Mercenary tomorrow. Wow.
- David Malki !‘s release party for the newest Wondermark book is Wednesday in the city of angels.
- In light of Brigid Alverson’s thoughts on the Eisner nominees for Best Digital Comic (i.e.: webcomic), and how they pretty much don’t rely on anything that would be unique about the web, please consider the Andrew Hussie guest strip at Dinosaur Comics today. Take your time.
- Finally, if you wanted to get a copy of Kate Beaton‘s newly re-available book, get it quickly. The review panel at The AV Club (for my money, the best collection of media commenters and reviewers on the planet) got their mitts on it and were pretty damn effusive:
The young Canadian artist has turned a history degree into a non-stop laffs-generating machine, as her book Never Learn Anything From History (TopatoCo) illustrates; the great leaders, military figures, artists, and philosophers of the past are her usual subjects, but they’re usually portrayed as consumed by petty ego and expressing themselves in the freewheeling, dismissive argot of snotty adolescents. Add to that a keen sense of the absurd (in her footnotes, Beaton herself cannot explain why a weeping Napoleon stuffing his face with cookies while Josephine carries on a wild affair is so damn funny, but it is) and you’ve got a book full of comics that are generally hilarious even for those who don’t fully recall the history behind the stories. Beaton’s art is likewise impressive; her neat linework and terrific grasp of simple caricature and facial expression sells a lot of the best strips, including Sasaki Kojiro meeting an undignified end, Jane Austen and Nikola Tesla being pestered by their fans, and Lord Byron muttering “Bitches, man†to a grieving Percy Bysshe Shelley. A-
Thanks so much for mentioning Kate Beaton’s book. I totally forgot I hadn’t ordered that yet.
Done and done.
By GroundChux on 06.15.09 10:30 am
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