Do cartoonists deserve to be paid for their labor? It’s a yes or no question. And, frankly, it doesn’t seem to be a very hard question. But I’ll give you a minute. A week before my writing this, Brooklyn comic book store Desert Island and the SoHo based Drawing Center put on an event called […]
Questionable Comics: Katie Skelly and Sarah Horrocks
Questionable Comics is a series where Dan Hill surveys professionals from every corner of the comics industry about their methods and experience. This week Dan surveyed Katie Skelly and Sarah Horrocks, two incredible indie comics creators who also co-host a podcast called Trash Twins and collaborated on Agent #73. Up first is Katie Skelly, who releases most […]
Irene #6 is an Ambitious, Remarkably Eclectic Anthology
I received the sixth installment of the impressively eclectic zine Irene an embarrassingly long time ago. There is no real excuse for why it has taken me so long to get around to writing it up, but if we’re removing my inability to comprehend the passing of time from the equation, the reason is that it’s simply […]
Till the Blood Runs Red: Katie Skelly’s My Pretty Vampire
Katie Skelly hits all the ‘feels.’ Her comics bristle with verve, emotion and an ‘it’ factor best expressed as je ne sais quoi. What’s easier, by far, to say (and see) is how she has honed her craft. Skelly is a cartoonist on the rise as her peers have confirmed. With Nurse Nurse, her 2012 […]
Electric Candyland Brings Heart to Mathematical Style
Comics has had a number of Wild Wests over the years, frontiers where rules are broken or ignored and outlaws flee the mainstream to carve out new niches. The ’60s had the comix crowd, the ’80s had the small press boom and the advent of the internet has brought the webcomic, a frontier that grows […]
Yellowed Pages: The Residents’ Freak Show
Sometimes we just want to talk about old comics we found in bargain bins or antique stores or in our garages. Is that so wrong? In this installment, we look back at Dark Horse’s 1992 collaboration with The Residents, Freak Show, which brought together the world’s most mysterious band and an awe inspiring line-up of […]
Anatomy of a Page: Owen Gieni’s Negative Space #1
Comics are a visual medium, but so often criticism of the medium hinges on narrative, ignoring or minimizing the visual storytelling and unique structures that make comics so different from cinema and photography. We’ve decided to change that up with a feature that we’re calling Anatomy of a Page, in which we explore pages and […]
Poetry Magazine Rattle Expects Cover Artists to Work on Spec
Update and a response from Rattle at the bottom. Poetry isn’t the big money game it once was, but there are still a few magazines that command a bit of respect, paying their contributors for poems and running contests that could help fund the lifestyle of a writer alongside adjunct teaching gigs or copywriting. […]
View Finder: Photographer Ryan Walter Wagner
View Finder is a series in which we talk to artists about how they got started, what their experiences in their field have been like and get some stories behind some of their works. This month, we spoke with Ryan Walter Wagner, a Vancouver, BC-based photographer and musician who I’ve been lucky to call a […]