Lots of people may enjoy this hilarious deconstruction by Laura Hudson and David Wolkin of DC’s recent Batman: Odyssey (a book which, I must admit, I kinda want to buy now). It’s some, uh… amazing stuff, no doubt about it.
But I’m really just posting this link for one person’s benefit: the woman I love.
Google is celebrating the birthday of the late, great Will Eisner today with a terrific Eisneresque Google Doodle, and I had the pleasure of contributing a guest blog post to help celebrate the occasion as well.
Thanks to everybody at the Big G for honoring a truly important cartoonist, and a great friend to a century’s worth of comics-lovers.
Fondly remembered. Sorely missed. And now celebrated across the internet. Happy birthday, Will.
[Please note: Some news outlets are reporting that I drew the finished art for the Doodle. Not true. I was involved in early design discussions, but the final version was by artist Mike Dutton]
I sometimes check-in with your website, and seeing your writeup of 5 Card Nancy (fantastic!), it occurred to me that you might like this project I’ve been showing around: 52 Card Psycho. It’s basically an Augmented Reality installation where the shower scene of Hitchcock’s ‘Psycho’ is made into a deck of cards. Writing to you now, I can see that this work strongly relates to the inspiration I had when reading Understanding Comics back in ’93: how can I made films into comics (the inverse of that has been done a lot lately…).
Maybe it will inspire an idea– I’m currently making several new projects with the same technology.
Welcome to Pine Point is a “creative non-fiction interactive documentary” by Paul Shoebridge and Michael Simons for the National Film Board of Canada.
Despite the rough, hand-animated photo-collages and humble lettering, Welcome to Pine Point achieves sophisticated and haunting effects as it chronicles a small Canadian town that was literally wiped off the map, and the lives of those who once called it home. I especially liked the use of music.
I highly recommend setting aside some free time, hitting full screen and diving in.
It’s not comics, but shares some of our visual vocabulary, and it should be of interest to anyone studying visual communication, storytelling, and the power of shared memories.
I had the pleasure of meeting Tan briefly in New York in 2009, not long after The Arrival was released.
Tan famously realized only halfway through The Arrival that he was working on a graphic novel. Fortunately, so did the rest of us, and it’s won many well-deserved honors since. Congratulations to Tan for racking up another great honor, this time in the field of animation.
Tan’s personal site is here. More on the film here.
San Francisco, CA
March 23, 2021 San Francisco State University
Round Table Discussion, "Adapting Comics for Blind and Low Vision Readers," moderated by Nick Sousanis