The big news of the week is, of course, the winners of the Ignatz Awards that were announced at Small Press Expo (SPX) over the past weekend. All women winners too! What strikes me look at the awards list is how diverse all the winning works are; sure, they were all created by women but they vary widely in terms of genre and style. The amazingly dark world of Through the Woods by Emily Carroll (which is seriously so good) is miles away from the delicate work of Mariko Tamaki in Sex Coven. If you’re looking to dive into some of the winner’s works, Bloody Footprint by Lilli Carre is free to read at the NYTimes site.
Ron Wimberly talked to ComicsAlliance this week about Martyr Loser King, his upcoming collaboration with musician Saul Williams. This is hands down the coolest comics project of 2015- an Afropunk-inspired collaboration between Wimberly and Williams that will include both a graphic novel and a musical play about a hacker in Burundi. When theatre and comics intersect it’s usually a staged adaptation of the comic work like the musical version of Fun Home on Broadway now. I don’t know of any other times a play and graphic novel have been developed in conjunction, which makes me just dying to see what Wimberly and Williams come up with.
There’s a new Snowpiercer comic debuting in France next month and, in what is an amazingly quick turnaround for comics translation, will be hitting English-language markets in early 2016. Snowpiercer 3: Terminus follows a group trying to survive after the titular never-stopping train…well, stops. Olivier Bocquet will be joining original artist Jean-Marc Rochette for this third volume, which follows the original Snowpiercer published in 1982 by Rochette and writer Jacques Lob, as well astwo sequels published in English in a single volume as Snowpiercer: The Explorers. The popularity of the 2013 movie adaptation probably accounts for the unusually quick translation, and anything that gets more international comics into the English-speaking marketplace is a good thing in my opinion.
We’re in something of a golden age for good sci-fic comics right now, and I really loved this interview with Andy Belanger, artist of Southern Cross, about the design sensibilities behind the comic. I really like the grimy, lived-in design of the spaceship where the story is set. You get the sense that regular people actually live there like the best of Alien and it’s futuristic yet workmanlike designs. This is a book that didn’t grab me from the first go, but I’m going to give it another shot and read the whole first arc once it’s wrapped up.
Ron Wimberly is amazing. Just sayin’. 🙂