John Seven reviews ‘Texas Chainsaw Sculptor’ by Katie Fricas and ‘Fizzle #2’ by Whit Taylor
INDIE VIEW: Is ‘The Nib’ the most important comic out there?
John Seven reviews The Nib #3
Radiator Comics looks to the future with Whit Taylor, a Kiva campaign, and a new distributorship venture
Radiator Comics has announced that it will take over publishing Whit Taylor’s Fizzle, offering a five-issue subscription and reprinting the first two issues.
A Year of Free Comics: The History of the FDA and Food Safety
Cartoonists Whit Taylor and Maki Naro uses the recent E.Coli outbreak as a starting point to explore the history of food safety in the United States and it tracks the creation of the Food and Drugs Administration. This is a very informative comic. I enjoy these longer works that The Nib is publishing. It’s allowing […]
Free Comics Bonus: PEN’s State of Emergency looks at the matetr of the day
PEN America has a section of comics called State of Emergency, and I’m sure you can guess what that refers to. Meg Lemke, Rob Kirby, and MariNaomi curated the section and it includes Whitney Taylor: Iasmin Omar Ata Dylan Edwards Thi Bui, whose memoir about her family’s journey from Vietnam The Best We Could Do […]
Review: Whit Taylor’s Up Down Clown tackles mental health issues
The sad clown is a trope that has been well-used in every storytelling media there is, but Whit Taylor’s Up Down Clown from Ninth Art Press takes that trope further than usual. Rather than settling for the simple dichotomy of make-up and merriment hiding gloom, Taylor examines how a mental state might fluctuate with the […]
Must read: Whit Taylor on “A Visit to CAB” and comic arts festival sustainability
Whitney Taylor continues to be my favorite investigative comics journalist—well, maybe investigative is too strong a word, but if “talking to a lot of people and painting a picture” is the criterion, Whit is it, as her report on Comic Arts Brooklyn shows. This was a strong show but one that experienced an unexpected glitch: a lot of people thought it was a two day show and didn’t come to the exhibits on Saturday. This resulted in a smaller crowd and, for some, lower sales. On the day there was a lot of anxiety—it’s like basing your business plan on Christmas sales and then there’s a big blizzard the day of the big sale—but everyone seems to have survived intact.
And yet, is a financial model this precarious one that is “sustainable”? I predict sustainable will be THE word of 2015, as a the last few days of posts here have been exploring. Taylor talks about the model with many publishers and creators and key behind the scenes people like publishing rep Tony Shenton, and while everyone is optimistic, there is no real consensus on whether things are working, improving or just providing a false illusion of hope:
The lot of the indie cartoonist as viewed through the 2014 Small Press Expo
Even though it’s two weeks in the rearview mirror, a lot of worthy writing has been done about this year’s Small Press Expo. I’m sure devotees have read all the following, but given all the talk about what sells at conventions and the evolving comics market, this was an important show to think about. § […]
Preview: Subcultures: A Comics Anthology
Comics anthologies are generally a good thing, but in my personal preferences, I like ones that are on a tightly focused topic better than “here are a lot of great comics by great people!” That’s just me, you can like what you want,. Thus I was intrigued when I heard about the upcoming Subcultures: A […]
Kibbles ‘n’ Bits 1/17/14: People said things
§ This appreciation of Cliff Sterrett’s great Polly and Her Pals says many of the right things: More than 50 years later, it’s difficult to explain why Cliff Sterrett’s magnificent creation never quite took flight. To be sure, “Polly” was way ahead of its time. Sterrett’s surrealistic, quasi-cubist artistic style was a unique fixture on […]