Alison Bechdel, creator of Dykes to Watch out For and creator/author of the graphic memoir Fun Home, has a new book out entitled Are You My Mother?: A Comic Drama. The New York Times gives it a favorable review:

Bechdel weaves emotional honesty with highbrow deliberation in a way that is never burdensome, and mostly light. “Fun Home” is subtitled “A Family Tragicomic,” and in both books the tragedy and the comedy are so consummately entwined, so gloriously balanced, the reader can’t help being fascinated. “Are You My Mother?” manages to incorporate complicated and sometimes arcane references – to psychoanalysis and the theories of the pediatrician and psychiatrist Donald Winnicott, to the work of Virginia Woolf and Adrienne Rich – into a story that is gripping and funny and radiantly clear.

The book is getting favorable reviews else where, like the Burlington Free Press and Salon

Jake Parker has launched a Kickstarter project to fund a collection of comic short stories that he’s created over the last eight years. The project has already met its funding goals with 28 more days left, but donors can still contribute and receive signed copies and other incentives.

Part of his pitch:

For the last 13 years I’ve been working as an artist on everything from toy commercials to feature films. For 5 years I worked in feature animation on the films Horton Hears a Who, Ice Age III, and Rio. I’ve also written and drawn my own graphic novel series, Missile Mouse, published by Scholastic imprint, Graphix. In between all that I’ve drawn several short stories which I want to collect in a book.

My book is called The Antler Boy and Other Stories and all of the stories were previously published in other comic anthologies like Flight or Out of Picture. Some are out of print and it’d be hard to track them all down so I thought it’d be great to collect them all in one book.

Sample pages look great. Due out in May.

So they didn’t completely ignore him. Derf himself depicted Dahmer in his high school sketchbooks and worked to sneak him into photos in the high school yearbook. He and his friends indulged in occasional encounters with the future serial killer in ways that almost mimicked normal high school social interaction.

Here we see the netherworld of relationships that aren’t true friendships, even by the most casual standards, yet bloom for some fleeting, mysterious purpose. We’ve all had them. As Derf points out, those were the only relationships Dahmer had at school.

To mark the anniversary, Spiegelman and his publisher, Pantheon, have released MetaMaus, a new book about the making of that seminal graphic novel, which features a lengthy series of discussions with editor Hillary Chute, as well as interviews with Spiegelman’s immediate family and transcripts from his initial conversation with his father, Vladek.

Follow the above link for the interview. The new book MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus (Book + DVD-R)
includes a DVD with a digitized copy of The Complete Maus that is linked to an archive of audio interviews with his survivor father, historical documents, and a wealth of Spiegelman’s private notebooks and sketches.

I’ve missed so much good TV (so..much..) Four days a week I get up before work, and draw for three hours. Sometimes I draw after work, but I try to not to. Did I mention how much good TV I miss? But the trade off is that I get to create something that I own. If my audience is just my wife, or my Mother, it has to be worth it. If it’s wider then that, I’m truly blessed. I’m telling this story just to remind people that being ‘creator owned’ takes discipline, hard work, late nights, early mornings, and so many blank pages that ask the creator who the hell he thinks he is. That blank page is taunting the creator day and night, and for some of you, that’s why you stay on the couch. There’s too much pressure. Too much competition out there. The blank page wins. If you’re a creator and you haven’t started that project that you’ve always wanted to do, this is the best time. The world is changing. Publishing, or better put, “sharing”, is becoming more accessible to everyone. Be encouraged. You have a story to tell, so tell it, even if the first story is just told to yourself, and then eventually your friends and maybe one day strangers. At this early stage of creation, the goal is in the “doing” and less in the achieving.

Via Jason Brubaker (Making Comics)

Harvey’s connection to the library and librarians he loved is described in this last video, as well. But, if you really did read all the way to the bottom of this, it can be assumed that you’re a literate and flexible thinker, someone who also loves his or her own library. No one’s talking about erecting Comics as Art & Literature desks in other libraries yet. It could happen… Joyce would agree. But the truth is, the Estate of Harvey Pekar is pretty much just Joyce with the help of some friends. She can not afford to bankroll this project herself and things would have been so much easier for her if she could have simply sprinkled Harvey’s ashes in the backyard.

If, after all the bills have been paid, there’s any money left over, that cash goes to buy still more graphic novels for the library.

As of this writing the project has raised $3,917 of the $30,000 with 30 days left.

Since I couldn’t ask him these questions on a stage in Sydney, I asked Robert if he’d answer these questions in a post-Sydney interview, to which he graciously consented. I recently witnessed an exchange on an academic forum discussing Crumb’s alleged racism or misogyny (I can’t recall which) where someone, referring to crumb’s own responses to the allegations, said that Crumb wasn’t a very thoughtful cartoonist. I couldn’t disagree more. Not only is he thoughtful about his own craft and art, but has a wide-ranging curiosity, verging on the inquisitorial, about the wider world and the Important Questions. Not that he always has the answers, mind you; but few cartoonists of my acquaintance think more and more deeply about the questions than Crumb does. This interview skims the surface.