Numerology, 2010 edition Analysis by Xavier Guilbert

Reader my friend, reader my Love, Here comes the time of our now yearly installment, as du9 takes on the opportunity of the looming Angoulême Festival to try and paint the portrait of the little world of bande dessinée. (Of course, the English version somehow lacks this superb timing, but we still hope it will [...]

After having published her first stories in the Kinderbook collection and having collaborated with Frédéric Boilet on Mariko Parade, the talentuous Takahama Kan seems to have reached her full maturity in L’eau amére, in which she unveils the complexity of human relationships through difficult but also oddly endearing break-ups. With 2 Expressos, she follows up [...]

All unite ! Early June, the 36 publishers of the Japan’s Digital Comic Association and a few US publishers announced a coalition to fight the “rampant and growing problem of scanlations”. And it was about time : as Brigid Alverson concluded briefly, “The rise of scan sites like Onemanga and Mangafox has coincided with a dip in [...]

Jason Shiga opens this book on a warning : “This is not an ordinary comic !” And indeed, there are very few comics which need a notice for reading them. Reading a comic book is usually rather intuitive : pictures follow each other and the reader create or recreate the narrative thread by linking them together mentally. But [...]

My favorite room in the Philadelphia Museum of Art holds a series of paintings by Cy Twombly called “Fifty Days at Iliam”. I always spend a few minutes walking around the room, looking at the paintings — which are not completely divorced from the idea of comics, they are a sequence involving both text and [...]

The announcement of the details of the seventh volume of the anthology Kramer’s Ergot (KE7) came with quite the internet brou-ha-ha. While Kramer’s Ergot, as a series of anthologies, has earned a reputation for quality art comics, people were upset by the $125 price tag. A $125 new comic ! The reaction is understandable, until you [...]

In comics,) the ellipsis — a spatio-temporal jump in the narration which happens between panels — is a given which the reader, quite often, ignores. This is normal : if you were constantly distracted by each ellipsis, reading a comic would quickly become tiresome. Most ellipses in comics are “mild”, made to be ignored, but certain [...]

Among manga artists, Urasawa Naoki is certainly one of the few to benefit from a worldwide reputation, acclaimed for his mastery of suspense and celebrated for the success of his two series Monster and 20th Century Boys both in Japan and abroad. It comes as no surprise that his latest project should become an even [...]