World Comics

Nominations for the 2011 Joe Shuster Awards, honoring the best in Canadian comics, have just been announced. Winners will be announced at a public ceremony in Calgary, Alberta on the evening of Saturday, June 18th, 2011 at the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo which takes place June 17-19, 2011 at the BMO Round-Up Centre. In addition to nominees for various categories, judges chose two cartoonists for induction into the Hall of Fame: Chester Brown and Todd McFarlane.

Art Spiegelman has won the Grand Prix at this year's Angouleme comics festival, meaning he will be the "marshal" for next year's festival, setting the pace for the whole show.

The annual Angoulême comics festival is taking place over in France, and folks are blogging it like crazy. Tom Devlin and Peggy Burns from D&Q are having the best time ever obviously. And for those -- like The Beat -- who bitch and moan about having to stay at a hotel in San Diego more than 7 blocks from the convention center, the Burns-Devlin contingent is staying at a hotel 30 kilometres from city center. It helps when the hotel is a remodeled centuries old farmhouse and not a Days Inn, however -- no complaints at all.

According to this article, India is getting its first comic-con, a two-day affair to be held next month in New Delhi, and called...Comic-Con India:

In the spirit of our Christmas in Blighty, here are a few classic British comics images. Wishing all of you the best in the holidays,...

Cartoonist Matt Bors, who recently went to Afghanistan undercover, writes to tell us about Cartoon Movement, a new site devoted to editorial comics from a worldwide cadre of cartoonists. In his letter he notes that "Unlike other websites, we pay our contributors and and are working to make this a sustainable enterprise." He'll be covering his Afghanistan trip for the site. Above cartoon by Israel's Shlomo Cohen. PR below.

The Singapore Toy, Games & Comic Convention was held this weekend in Singapore (where it's now Tuesday), and the excitement for comics seems to have taken hold in this emerging comics nation. The show is notable in that is was purchased by ReedPOP, owner of such domestic fests as New York Comic-Con and C2E2. The guest list was a merry band of international scoundrels, including Phil Yeh, Phil Ortiz, C.B. Cebulski, Matt Fraction, Gail Simone, and Ivan Brandon from the US, Salvador Larroca from Spain, David Lloyd from the UK, Guiseppe Camuncoli from Italy, and, as the wise-cracking gentle giant , Croatia's Esad Ribic. If you were going to cast a comic book convention movie where people have to fight aliens or fend off a killer or fly off to an asteroid to something, you could not have a better bunch. We can just picture the scenes where Fraction must dismantle the alien's guidance system, or Yeh offers to let them read an issue of The Winger Tiger in our mind's eye.

You'll find a nice gallery of the work of the highly influential Italian cartoonist/illustratorSergio Toppi in this link.

From November 9th to 14th, I had the honor and pleasure (duh) of being a Guest of the RIO Comicon, the first comics convention in Rio de Janeiro since 1993. The seven-day arty/indie comics fest took place at the Leopoldina Central Station, a cavernous former railway station, built in 1925, the sheer grandness of which lent the proceedings an epic surreality. Also instantly impressive was the mindful 360° design of the space. U.S. con-runners take note: art direction matters! From a cheerfully pervasive purple and orange color-scheme, to an upliftingly exquisite superbly-curated art exhibition of international masters & independent Brazilian artists, to a specially-constructed “castle” showcasing Italian living legend Milo Manara’s art, guests and artists alike were transported upon arrival.

It was another busy day for Mark Millar, who is quickly becoming the Oprah Winfrey of comics, using his success in one platform to become a world wide mogul of cross-platform entertainment. Not content just to script best selling comics that turn into successful movies, he's launched a magazine and now...a comic-con: Kapow Comic Con, which will be held April 9-10 at the London Business Design Centre in Islington, a venue which holds about 5000 people a day.

It's one of the more notable aspects of the Franco-Belgian comics scene that there's no stigma either way for comics experimentalists to create genre work. Thus the trailblazing cartoonists of L'Association have variously worked on children's comics and most light-hearted fare with great success. Such a work is Lewis Trondheim's DONJON, which NBM has been publishing in the US. DONJON is a sprawling satirical fantasy about anthropomorphic warriors in a magical, ludicrous kingdom. It's a darkly whimsical epic that's a mash-up of D&D, CEREBUS, GROO, and any number of works by headliners Trondheim and Joann Sfar.

Launched in 1937 The Dandy is the oldest still-running comic in the UK, and the third oldest in the world. The weekly kids’ humour...