Encountering tables or shelves full of manga can be overwhelming, and you’re not always ready to do a month’s worth of research before you feel like buying a book. So how do you pick from the mess? You judge it by its cover. I do, anyway. Last time I judged Durara!, These are my thoughts…
It Could Still Happen: Plan B-200 by Rachel Masilamani
I’m not a mother, but I might have been. When I was nineteen I had an abortion. It wasn’t the right time, I was depressed, and the pregnancy was working hard to hasten the end of a bad relationship. I don’t need to give you excuses or reasons, but we do it anyway, don’t we?…
Multifarious
Haunting Women I first saw Carly Janine Mazur’s illustrations in the pages of Nightmare Magazine. She’s a Connecticut based artist who works primarily in oils and acrylic, and her work is definitely on the dark and haunting side. Similarly, Craww’s work features horned figures, birds, and women’s faces tilting upwards. Much of the shapes happen organically…
Gift Guide: Art! Prints! Flat Graphic Products For Your Home and Office
Jack Teagle rug designs If you thought those hero/heroine/villain facial composite card and wrapping paper designs were neat, check out what Teagle can do with a rug. Dreamy! £600 of dreamy, but that’s what fantasy is for, right? Teagle is a really interesting British cartoonist on the rise (along with frequent collaborator Donya Todd, of…
Multifarious: Space Art and GIF Technology
Welcome back to Multifarious, our weekend arts linkblog. What’s new in our own personal art worlds? What’s new in unusual art? PasteDesign has discovered the best thing. The best thing! There is now a giphoscope! The Giphoscope looks a bit like a haunted rolodex, with a moment from a film playing forever inside. It’s a low tech creation…
Multifarious: Welcome to the Future
Famous Avant Garde Painting Discovered…in Stuart Little’s Living Room? Discovery of famous lost pieces of art aren’t completely unknown, but you don’t exactly expect to see them in the house of a CGI mouse voiced by Michael J. Fox. A work by Hungarian avant-garde artist Róbert Berény was recently unearthed when an art historian spotted…
Recommended Listening: James Baldwin, The Fire This Time
The Sunday Edition is a long-running CBC Radio program. This morning, host Michael Enright interviewed famed American dancer and coreographer, now the executive artistic director of New York Live Arts, Bill T. Jones. The group staged a performance this year called James Baldwin, This Time! based on the writer and critic’s work. Enright and Jones had a…
Multifarious: Praying in a See-Through Church
It’s Nice That has a rundown of why and how the New Yorker manages to consistently get such wonderful illustrated covers. From Chris Ware, to Adrian Tomine, those New Yorker covers are killing it, and it’s all thanks to art editor Francoise Mouly and contributor Mina Kaneko. Work like this is important to cartoonists and…
Multifarious: Apple Strudel vs Art
One day, a woman made a fine very apple strudel. She shared that strudel with an artist, who in turn gifted her with a painting. Now, that painting is up at auction and experts estimate it will earn the woman’s daughter somewhere between $15,000 – $20,000. That artist? William Kurelek. That strudel? Damn fine, apparently….
Sequential Sartorial: Why Does Fashion Matter In Comics?
Costuming is important in art. Clothing is more immediately communicative than body language, and art communicates. For example, Lana Del Rey’s video for her 2012 release “National Anthem.” It’s all Jackie & JFK pastiche. Towards the very end, there’s that last ride recreated, and Jackie/Lana has on the pink suit. WRONG. She wears goldenrod. Her hat…
Multifarious: Beautiful Bizarre
If you happen to live in the DFW metroplex or are passing through, you should definitely check out the “Faces of Impressionism” exhibit at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth. The works are on loan from the Musee d’Orsay in Paris. Seeing art close up is a vastly different experience than seeing it in…
Creativity for Creativity’s Sake
What inspires our love of comics and other geek creations is the creativity involved: inventing characters, worlds, and stories and visualizing them in unique ways. Sometimes we read them to escape, to feel connected, to feel challenged. Creativity is a comic creator’s job. I envy that. Deliberately cultivating creativity in my life often feels like a luxury…