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It always surprises me how few people outside of Europe have heard of Swiss cartoonist Zep. His most well known work by far is Titeuf, a page from which is shown above. I would say that it’s probably behind only Asterix and Tintin in terms of name recognition among the general public in French-speaking Europe […]

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That’s me carefully examining the entirety of the original art for Italian cartoonist Hugo Pratt’s second Corto Maltese adventure, Ballad of the Salt Sea (you can’t see all of it in the photo, of course) as presented at the Pinacotheque museum in Paris, France. It was pretty great. I will hopefully get around to writing […]

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Perhaps you have already heard of Sam Hiti’s Death Day. If not, you should check it out because it is a really good comic. Anyways, I wanted to talk for a second about Hiti’s brushwork, because I think it’s one of the most interesting and notable aspects of his cartooning. His thick line is deceptively […]

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Yeah, this explains why (weird Japanese jokes aside) One Piece is amazing, and why Naruto hasn’t been any good in years. Oda is clearly killing himself to make an amazing comic, but Kishimoto might as well be sitting in a cubicle at any office complex in the world – at least to me, Naruto reads […]

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There are several reasons why I love this depiction, from the inside front cover of Chris Ware’s ACME Novelty Library 18, of the thoughts swirling around a character’s mind as she attempts to fall asleep (seen in bed at far right). First, it makes great use of its physicality as a printed objected. There’s something […]

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There are many great things about Mitsuru Adachi’s baseball/coming-of-age comic Cross Game, but I was especially taken in my initial reading of the first three volumes (as newly released in English by Viz) with Adachi’s use of pages like the one above – read right to left, of course. This page isn’t at all necessary […]

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After having finally read Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library 19 a while ago, I was eager to return to Rob Clough’s interview on the book with Tom Spurgeon, which I remembered having skimmed over and been intrigued by when I first saw it. The whole piece was quite enjoyable, but this quote really stood out […]