Some readers may flinch at the very scent of a superhero comicbook. Decades of flat artwork, turgid prose and hypertrophied subplots have frightened off all but a handful of masochists from the world of capes and glutes. It’s a trend Marvel Comics means to change.
It’s Enki Bilal’s first visit to Toronto, and he’s looking a little weary. It’s been a full day of interviews promoting a new film he’s written and directed, an FX-bloated fantasy called The Immortal. Now here he sits, pressed against a wall of books on The Beguiling’s crowded […]
“A good salesperson has to be a psychologist,” Mel Rapp says, sitting at the back of his College Street optical shop, legs crossed alertly, riding a tangent in his distant, foggy voice. “I use all my experiences to try to inform the attitudes and feelings — the psychology […]
Art Spiegelman has a lot to live up to. He founded Raw magazine in the early 1980s, an anthology of independent comics assembled well before the masses cottoned on to the concept. Through it, he brought sunlight to some of the medium’s best practitioners, Dan Clowes and Charles […]
Adrian Tomine in one word? Clean. His unofficial uniform is pressed khakis and an oxford shirt, hair fastidiously parted, black-framed glasses polished to a glow. Clean, too, is his top-selling comic series, Optic Nerve. Not that he doesn’t curse; his comic is full of four-letter invectives and frank […]
To the converted, the guest list at this weekend’s Canadian National Comic Book Expo is stupendous. The star attraction: the famously ovular Patrick Stewart — though the Star Trek skipper only slightly outshines the comics brethren sidling in his corona, like Asiophile David Mack and Marvel Ed-in-Chief Joe […]
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The Cultural Gutter 