Joshua Malbin

Comics for Grownups Episode 39 with Joshua Malbin, Alex Rothman, and Andrea Tsurumi is now out on iTunes. Direct RSS link for Android users here, or listen on the Web here.

This episode we begin by discussing a few great new resources like The Tiny Report, a new source for information about micro-presses by Robyn Chapman; Radiator Comics, a new publisher and distributor headed up by Neil Brideau; Nick Bertozzi’s fundraiser for the new Rubber Necker, and let’s add in Festival Season, a new self-publishing review platform from Kenan Rubenstein. (We didn’t know about that last one yet at the time we recorded.)

We also review some great new comics, specifically:

Pictures that Tick Vol. 2: Exhibition by Dave McKean

The River by Alessandro Sanna

Truth is Fragmentary by Gabrielle Bell (and here is the interview with James Romberger that we mention)

Darwin Carmichael Is Going to Hell by Sophie Goldstein and Jenn Jordan

Irene #4 edited by d.w., Dakota McFadzean, and Andy Warner

Red and Other Me by Ada Price

š! #17 edited by David Schilter and Sanita Muižniece

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I’ve hesitated to review Pictures That Tick, a reissue from Dark Horse Books of Dave McKean’s short comic collection, originally published by Spiegel Fine Arts in 2001. The original became a collector’s item, selling for as much as $500 for a first edition.

McKean is best known for painting all those stunning Sandman covers that were inevitably better than the plodding emo stories inside, and Pictures That Tick shows him stretching his creative wings. The art is amazing, miles beyond what most comic book creators can dream of doing. He often works in collage, combining painting, photographs, drawing, and typography in ways that seem descended from Marcel Duchamp or Hannah Höch.

But, and this is embarrassing to admit, a lot of the time I feel like I’m just not getting it. I’ve mostly decided to think of these as comic poems rather than stories, because that way I don’t have to worry about puzzling out the full sense of the narratives in a literal sense. And that, I suppose, is how I would recommend taking them.

With the critical vocabulary I’ve learned for poetry I have ways to describe when work is ill-formed, sentimental crap or finely balanced, careful, and beautiful. Unfortunately, I don’t have a similar critical vocabulary for comic book poetry, so I can’t really do the same here. Various parts of it strike me each of those ways. I recommend picking up in a store and flipping through to see what you think yourself.

A few isolated pages below the fold.

(continue reading…)

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