The Ninth Art (that being comics)

Beloved indie publisher Peow is relaunching!!

Dear Friends of Peow,

As you might have heard, we just announced Peow2! Peow2 is a sequel, more graphics, more open world, more sidequests, and more exciting, and more books. Stay tuned for more updates (and a big trailer tomorrow!) but for now, we would like to announce our first release as Peow2, an artbook from one of the first Peow artists,Natalie Andrewson! This is her first book with us since Lemon & Ketwas released 9 years ago! We are funding Natalie’s book via Kickstarter, which you can back right now!

You can check out the kickstarter here.

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@connrrr nice. need them to relaunch them damn import fees whenever i buy one of their books.

I have a Saga-shaped void in my heart since finishing Volume 11 yesterday – any suggestions as to what to read next? I’m open to any genres at this point, just want to read some good comics.

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I’m absolutely huffing this current run of She-Hulk.

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I finally got around to reading Kate Beaton’s Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands, and I don’t think I could say anything more accurate than the blurbs already do.

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I’ve got a copy on my nightstand waiting for me to finish Moore’s Swamp Thing.

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brubaker & phillips are about the best team in comics, and i cannot wait for house of the unholy in august

if you enjoy good crime & noir stuff, absolutely don’t sleep on criminal, reckless & the like

I’m also rounding out this semi-intentionally excellent double feature with Paying the Land by Joe Sacco.

Beaton wrote about her time in the oil sands in a way where indigenous people are conspicuously almost entirely excised from the whole narrative; that was on purpose, and given context, and it’s amazing how and why she executed on that, but, never mind, I don’t want to spoil why and how she did that, because it’s one of the best parts of Ducks.

Sacco, who also isn’t indigenous, wrote on a similar subject, but the perfect mirror image inverse in terms of indigenous perspective. It’s all based on interviews with the entire breadth of Dene society, and gives such a rich and complex and human voice to this community.

It’s also page after page after page after page after page after page after page of these representational-yet-stylized spreads with all of this rich expressive detail. This 2 page spread is not really all that remarkable, pretty much every page is like this:

So, just imagine how good the art has to be where this isn’t a remarkable pair of pages. The character and emotion in people’s faces is especially captivating.

Despite Sacco not being indigenous, the way he has captured the humanity and perspectives of his subjects feels more like talking to them but with all of these sumptuous curated illustrations of what they are talking about. It feels like, to use the word with reverence, storytelling.

Truly, I would urge anyone who feels they don’t know enough about indigenous communities, our more recent history, and our contemporary present, to give this a read. I haven’t finished it yet but it’s so good that I went over to the library to pick up Palestine (1993) by Sacco (I suppose there is some precedent for Sacco being tuned in with indigenous issues…).

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Doinking on the originals I’ve had since I was a teen. (I’m not that old, I found them in a flea market.)

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I have a full pallet of these beauties on the way.

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Try No 5 by Taiyo Matsumoto or Incal by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius. Both are expansive sci-fi worlds. Jodoverse especially is sprawling and overflowing with imagination.

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Here we go. I’ll be posting a few favorites here and there as I assemble the studio.

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I’m in the Fs and I hit a pocket of Kirby.

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Hit the Ditko pile.

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I got extremely lucky and found this for $12CAD. I’m assuming this is the only time Alberto Breccia’s Lovecraft work was translated into English. There’s also a dope Moebius story in here that I haven’t seen printed elsewhere.

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Tradd Moore.





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Feasting.



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I’ve been reading through The Strange Death of Alex Raymond by the brilliant, deeply frustrating and disappointing Dave Sim (finished by Carson Grubaugh).

It’s a “metaphysical” examination of realism in comics, refracted through the life and death of one of the best to ever do it. If you actually try to pick up all the pieces that Sim is dropping down and link them all together you’re going to be exhausted or frustrated, but if you treat them more like harmonics that support Sim’s tour of realism, there’s a lot of enjoyment to be had.

As a matter of craft, it’s breathtaking in both execution and scale. The intertextuality of SDOAR is Joycean. Sim’s producing the best art of his life. Panelling and lettering layout is simply dazzling.

Regarding the elephant in the room, I know Sim’s controversial for being a goober to women. Bearing that in mind, you can see how that informs some creative choices. It’s a flawed book made by a flawed person, and if you’d rather abstain, that is understandable.

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Sim is too hot for me, but I cast no aspersions at you for reading it.

As the resident Spawn super fan, I have to mention Cerebus is featured in issue #10.

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