Krent Able Entretien de Rat Devil

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Since his debut, James Sturm has always been an explorer of the darkest times of American History, in particular through his trilogy God, Gold and Golems. He has recently completed Satchel Paige: Striking Out Jim Crow, a biography of one of the best pitchers of baseball history, who ended up playing in the Negro Leagues because of the color of his skin. Rich Tommaso, who handled the drawing duties on this book, also shares his impressions regarding this collaboration.

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 2006, Miriam Katin (then aged 63) set on her 120-page graphic novel, We are on our own. This piece of information regarding her late debut in the comics medium is far from anecdotal — as it implies she was three years old during the Second World War, and the occupation of Hungry by German (and afterwards Russian) troops. The young Jewish child then experienced clandestinity during a voyage full of violence, death, betrayals and, for sole hope, a few rare selfless acts. The opportunity to explore the atypical carrier of an artist who, not unlike Debbie Dreschsler, feels the need to purge herself from the weight of her past.

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 […]