This year’s Edinburgh International Book Festival was launched this morning and in amongst a programme full of novelists, poets, thinkers, journalists and musicians there is the odd graphic novelist too.
A new documentary about the history of “the galaxy’s greatest comic” Future Shock: 2000AD is out on DVD next week. It's a talking heads film featuring the likes of Neil Gaiman, Pat Mills and artist Carlos Ezquerra.
The cover is rough stock, tactile. You can follow the lines with your fingers, feel the indentations. The bulbous squiggle that stands in for a nose, the deep black dots of eyes, the wavering line that does double duty as a mouth and as an emotional state. (Nervous? Anxious? Convinced that someone is going to pull the ball away from him at the last moment?)
During a trip to the DCA in Dundee yesterday I started thinking about Steve Ditko. Ditko and Gene Colan and their work on Doctor Strange (still, the Marvel comic book that has lingered longest and most sweetly in my memory).
“Comics are both simple and complicated at the same time.”
What We’re Looking Forward to This Autumn.
Remember, we were all young once.
Simon Grennan, academic, artist and creator of new graphic novel Dispossession, tells us why comics rule...
