Tag: Deborah Vankin

Bringing Keshni Kashyap’s debut graphic novel, “Tina’s Mouth: An Existential Comic Diary,” to life was nearly an existential crisis in and of itself. Neither Kashyap or illustrator Mari Araki had worked in comics before. Kashyap is a filmmaker and Araki a surrealist painter. The two worked, blindly, on their debut for hours at a time over four years – the book features nearly 1,000 drawings –  even holing up in a Las Vegas resort for several days to mesh ideas. The result, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, is a smart, funny and refreshingly unique story of adolescent angst featuring the spirited 15-year-old, Tina Malhotra — a Southern Californian of Indian descent who has a penchant for the Sex Pistols and French philosophers. In witty and observant, if neurotic, letters to Jean-Paul Sartre, Tina chronicles the emotional minefield that is her ...

It began as a “fever dream” of an idea on Twitter — how special would it be to bring together an all-star roster of U.K. comics creators and let them tell a single life story by taking turns at their art tables and then handing off the narrative like a baton in a relay race? The result is “Nelson,” now on sale, a 250-page experimental graphic novel that also functions as an exercise in charity with 100% of profits going to Shelter, a group dedicated to housing issues and the homelessness crisis in Britain. “Nelson,” from U.K. comics publisher Blank Slate, chronicles the life of protagonist Nel Baker over 43 years. Each contributor portrayed a single event in Nel’s life over successive years, and the result is a cohesive arc that is also beautifully fractured. Blank Slate describes the project as “part exquisite corpse, part relay race” ...

In the introduction to Marzena Sowa’s soon-to-be-released graphic memoir, “Marzi,” she describes herself as a “mute and insignificant witness” to life behind the iron curtain while growing up in 1980s communist Poland. Hers is a bleak world – quite literally, as the book is drawn in muted, reddish brown tones — which is “drowning in politics and problems.” But Sowa is anything but mute or insignificant. Her memoir is filled with seemingly banal, everyday vignettes – visiting family in the countryside, scrounging for toilet paper and bread, playing in cramped apartment hallways with neighboring children – that collectively paint a vivid picture of both a country awash in poverty, politics and war, as well as a lonely only child who longs, more than anything, to be heard. Sowa now lives in Paris with her boyfriend, the artist Sylvain Savoia, who ...

Sabrina the teenage witch is getting a makeover. On Wednesday Archie Comics, which created the character, announced a partnership with MoonScoop Entertainment and plans to create a new half-hour animated TV series. The new show will feature a more “current” interpretation of the character, according to Archie Comics Chief Executive Jon Goldwater. Think skinny jeans, spiky hair and a tattoo. “This is the first new animation for Sabrina in almost 10 years,” said Goldwater. “It’s a combination of ‘Twilight’ meets ‘Buffy the Vampire Slayer’ … she’s more modern.” Story wise, the project aims to be more action-oriented than previous incarnations such as ABC’s short-lived Saturday morning “Sabrina: the Animated Series” (1999-2000) or the sitcom starring Melissa Joan Hart that ran from 1996 to 2003 on ABC and then the WB network. “It’s a little more dealing in the supernatural realm,” ...

French graphic novelist Ludovic Debeurme may be well known in Europe, but he’s only just breaking out in the U.S.  This July, Top Shelf published his English-language debut, a translation of “Lucille,” which earned him much critical acclaim when it was originally released in French in 2006. “Lucille” is the moving, emotionally raw and dark story about two alienated teenagers who, amid a torrent of personal and familial conflicts, find an instant connection and first love. Top Shelf has just announced that it will publish the sequel to “Lucille” — “Renée,” which follows some of the same characters and introduces a handful of new ones, and is set to come out in late 2012.  Hero Complex contributor Deborah Vankin recently chatted with Debeurme about his work through his translator, Leigh Walton. DV: This is a pretty dark book – suicide, alcoholism, ...

Grief can be paralyzing to an artist; but — in a strange and bittersweet way — it can also be liberating. It was for British cartoonist, Ross Mackintosh, who lost his father to cancer in 2009. In “Seeds,” Mackintosh’s debut graphic novel, he chronicles his father’s diagnoses, rapid decline and death in deceptively simple black and white cartoon blocks. It’s an honest, inquisitive and candid illustrated memoir in the vein of Joyce Farmer’s “Special Exits.” And Mackintosh uses the story thread to probe deeper questions about birth, death, DNA and the meaning of life. Ultimately, however, as the artist explains in conversation with Hero Complex contributor Deborah Vankin, the Com.x release is a tribute to Mackintosh’s father and to every father-son relationship. DV: Why did you choose this form of storytelling – comics over straight prose – to relate such ...

“Fantastic Planet” Long before there was “Pink Floyd The Wall” or “Koyaanisqatsi,” there was “Fantastic Planet” — a trippy, animated French sci-fi feature film from the early ’70s, rounded out with spacey, psychedelic music that assured its status as cult classic and stoner staple. For the uninitiated, the distant planet of Ygam is a surreal place where tiny, abducted humans (the Om race) run wild, scampering across the vast, muted plains and prickly wooded areas like vermin. Others are collared and kept as pets by the indigenous Draag race, enormous, blue-skinned humanoids with fire-red eyes.  The film is as remembered for its lush, hand-drawn images as it is for the airy, orchestral score by Alain Goraguer. On Tuesday, animation historian Jerry Beck will host a rare “performance screening” of  the film at Cinefamily’s Animation Tuesdays. The series, held monthly at the ...

Last Sunday, Hero Complex contributor Deborah Vankin wrote about Joyce Farmer and her 208-page illustrated family memoir “Special Exits.” Today we continue our look at  female cartoonists, with Vankin’s snapshot portrait of Kate Beaton. Canadian cartoonist Kate Beaton began uploading her Web comics — which are witty reinventions of literary and historical figures navigating modern times — to the Internet in 2007. “I just put them up so my friends could see them,” she says. “I wasn’t looking for a career in comics.” Today her website, “Hark! A Vagrant,” has an especially large, devoted fan base that includes more than 21,000 Twitter followers, and now she’s drawing cartoons for the New Yorker. Beaton’s whimsical black-and-white drawings cover whatever’s on her mind that week — be it annoying hipsters, the steam-punk aesthetic or the pop-cultural infiltration of “Sex and the City.” Mostly, she ...

On Sunday, Hero Complex contributor Deborah Vankin wrote about Joyce Farmer and her 208-page illustrated family memoir “Special Exits.” Today we continue our look at  female cartoonists, with Vankin’s snapshot portrait of Vanessa Davis. In “Make Me a Woman,” Vanessa Davis lays it all out there — Fat Camp, phone sex, late-night binging, even mustache bleaching. Her second book, in what’s still a relatively young career that also includes columns for Tablet Magazine, collects the rambling, neurotic and admirably honest diary comics she drew throughout her 20s, from 2004 to the present. The book, out recently from Drawn & Quarterly, stitches together a pastiche of styles: loose, deeply personal pencil sketches, richly colored narrative comics, and full-page, color self-portraits showcasing a spectrum of moods, outfits and haircuts. Plus random drawings that were “just hanging out in my sketchbook,” she says. From ...

On Sunday, Hero Complex contributor Deborah Vankin wrote about Joyce Farmer and her 208-page illustrated family memoir “Special Exits.” Today we continue our look at  female cartoonists, with Vankin’s snapshot portrait of Sarah Glidden. Sitting on the sidelines doesn’t come naturally to Sarah Glidden. In 2007, she yearned to better understand the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, so she signed up for a free, two-week Birthright trip to Israel. “How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less” is her literary debut, a 206-page graphic memoir rendered in simplistic drawings that are rounded out with careful, delicate watercolors. Just out from Vertigo/DC, the book is part travelogue, part coming-of-age memoir and part intrepid if relentless quest for cultural understanding. Despite the intensity of the subject matter, it’s dotted with humor — especially in Glidden’s fictional depictions of historical figures —that add moments of intermittent ...