Comics: Librarians Choice

Comic Book Month wraps up today, though as with all good comics, it's just a matter of waiting for the next issue! As a final treat, here are a few personal recommendations from some of the comics fans who work at Auckland Libraries: Michelle and Blair from the 2014 Comic Book Month team; Baruk, creator of our new Comics NZ blog (check it out); Stanley from Collections, and myself! Enjoy!



Adamtine by Hannah Berry

This is the first horror-themed graphic novel I have read. Although I admire the artists' skill, the violent gore scenes typical of this genre are a bit much for me. But I do enjoy a good scare, and with this graphic novel I wasn’t disappointed. It is horror with a difference, with the artwork creating a sense of foreboding and darkness. In fact, I have become a big Hannah Berry fan. The artwork is clever and emotive, supporting a captivating, frightening story line that really does keep you guessing. This is a graphic novel requiring more than one read, with each reading revealing more of its mysteries – most of which are hidden in plain sight. It is definitely a thinking person’s graphic novel... oh, and beware the last page!

-- Michelle, Titirangi Library


Faction 1  ed. by Damon Keen, Amie Maxwell

Quite simply, I liked this enough to buy my own copy, and that doesn't happen often. Especially not when it is also available for free (legal) download!

Faction 1 is a Kiwi comic anthology, from 14 very different writers/artists. One of the joys of anthologies is the unlikely juxtaposition of very different styles, and Faction does not disappoint. The artwork moves eclectically from Ned Wenlock's bold primary colours, through Damon Keen's delicate shading or Ralphi's yellowish-greenish-brownish and Karl Wills's detailed black-on-white, to Mark Holland's lush, painterly style. The stories very well matched the artistic styles used to tell them.

Faction was created through crowdfunding, and it is nice to see contributors named on the back page (dammit, I missed my chance at fame!). The Faction website has links to individual artist websites, and a free subscription to the (digital) anthology. Auckland Libraries also holds Faction 2 and Faction 3.

If you like anthologies, you may also enjoy Syncopated, an anthology of non-fiction picto-essays. Or not.

And if I sound like a fanboy, that's because I am.

-- Baruk, Digital Services

Shaolin Burning by Ant Sang


Full of graphic martial arts action and mayhem, Shaolin Burning is a thrilling and fast-paced adventure through Qing dynasty China. The plot centres on Deadly Plum Blossum’s journey to challenge The Monk Who Doubts, who has been terrorising China. Events like the destruction of the Shaolin Temple, and the legend of the five surviving elders place this in a time of kung-fu legends and martial arts monks.

The illustrations of BroTown’s Ant Sang skillfully capture the chaos of the combat; the parries and thrusts of the sword, feints and blows of the fighters come through in the black and white shading and ink, and deftly illustrate the action.

I found the characters a highlight. They are unique and intense figures with legendary pasts, and equally awesome names. I also like the subtle humour that runs through the book, with skillful plays on words, quirky names like The Benevolent Laughing Monkey Palm Gang, and the tiger-costumed group The Killer Tongs. Still, the themes running through this work – the need to control desire, the perils of revenge and the sacredness of life – make it more than just an entertaining read.

-- Stanley, Collections



The Sandman (The Absolute Sandman Vol. 1) by Neil Gaiman

Widely considered one of the greatest comic book series of all time, The Sandman tells the story of Morpheus, Lord of Dreams, as he escapes from captivity and seeks to rebuild his realm. Along the way, Morpheus is forced to deal with the enormous changes within both himself and his realm. The Sandman is a wildly imaginative series that manages to be as effortlessly entertaining as it is thought-provoking. Its dark, adult story set the tone for DC Comics’ fledgling Vertigo imprint. The Sandman is a story about stories, and should be read by anyone who loves them.

(This Absolute Edition format collects issues #1-20 of THE SANDMAN and features completely new coloring on the first 18 issues, as well as a host of never-before-seen extra material. It is the first of four volumes.)

-- Blair, Central City Library

Corto Maltese: The Ballad of the Salt Sea by Hugo Pratt 

I was turned on to Corto Maltese long ago when I went to live in his home country of Italy, where the fumetti (Italian for comics) about the sailor with the pierced ear had attained cult status. Fumetti means puffs of smoke, that being what Italians saw where we saw speech bubbles or word balloons, as well as all around themselves. Everyone smoked, and everyone read comics, and Corto Maltese was everyone's favourite. The art work is brilliant -- the scene where an underwater Corto is drawn with squiggly refracted lines which grow ever more boldly abstract as the panels progress leave me in awe -- and the rhythm is intense and filmic. So are the characters. Corto casts a spell over everyone, men and women, in that Humphrey Bogart kind of way.

“Who knows why you make me think of that Arola’s Tango I heard in the Parda Flora Cabaret in Buenos Aires?” “Maybe there was someone there who looked like me?” “No! It’s precisely because you don’t resemble anyone that I would have wanted to meet you anywhere”. Are those tears on Corto’s chiselled face?

The original drawings were all in black and white, while this edition uses colourised drawings which, as with colourised movies, somewhat detracts from the artistry. But Pratt is such a genius that they are still great. If you like comics, you owe yourself a sail with Corto.

-- Karen, Books in the City 

Timothy Kidd's comics choices

The best thing that happened to me this Comic Book Month was reading the piece Kelly Sheehan wrote for Factional, the Faction Comics blog, about the work of Timothy Kidd. For a second I was going to correct that to say 'the best comic-booky thing', but actually I think it was the best thing, period. It's a wonderful, unstinting exposition, absolutely worth reading.

Timothy Kidd is one of my favourite comics artists, as well as being one of my favourite people, unforcedly original and unfeignedly genuine. I still remember that the first time I talked to Tim about his having written a graphic novel, I saw a twinge of discomfort cross his face. Not, as you may be thinking, because he didn't want to talk about his work. It was because of the terminology I used. "People who make comics don't really like the term graphic novel", he said. "We think of all these (gesturing towards Central Library's graphic novel shelves) as comics."

Comics 

It made sense to me. Comics was what I had always called them, too, until I went to work in a library, where the first time I heard someone talking about 'graphic novels' I thought it meant books with explicit sex and violence. What, a whole collection? "No, no, it means comics in book form! You know, when they tell a story!"

Well. Years after this conversation, it's still hard for me to think of the term 'graphic novel' as anything much more than a ploy to convince establishment figures such as book publishers, the compilers of the New York Times 'Books of the year' book lists, school boards, and old-school librarians, that comics can rub elbows with Lit-ra-ture! (Here I need a sound clip of Johnny Angel, creator of Afi, the first Samoan superhero, the time he was pretending to me he didn't know how to pronounce the word.) Comics lovers don't need to be convinced! It reminds me of the episode in the American comic classic Doonesbury where a survivor of Nixon's "secret bombings" of Cambodia says "Secret bombings? There wasn't any secret about them! My wife knew too! She was with me and I remarked on them. 'Here come the bombs!' I said."

There's not much to add to Kelly's appreciation of Tim's talent. Here instead, for your enjoyment and edification, are some of the intriguing comics recommendations he's written for us over the last few years.

Or, "Here come the comics !" I said.


Very Casual by Michael Deforge (2013)


On the cover is a weird deer. Is it a deer? Maybe not. It is deer-shaped, with deer legs, a kind of deer face, and antlers, all in the right deer places. But something tells me that it is not actually a deer. It seems to be made out of some kind of oozing, red substance and its eye is like a big flat dish. And it kind of has a beak.

Something is wrong with something familiar. Or else something weird is treated as if it was the most mundane thing in the world. This is what Deforge plays around with in this collection of short comics. A faux-natural history comic explains that the creature on the cover is actually a common Canadian quadripedal slug. The narrator in another story is a teenage guy who is super-excited to be hanging out with a cool local band. We the readers see that the band is made up of disgusting meaty blob-monsters, but do the characters notice? No one mentions that the singer looks like a piece of fried chicken. Are the kids oblivious? or brainwashed?... or just living in a world where monsters are pretty ordinary?

This weirdness is so underplayed that it seems all the more weird, and Deforge draws it just right-- in a cartoony, clear line style, so that nothing looks exactly normal. Post-Fort Thunder indie-comics weirdness meets twisted body horror meets goofy bigfoot cartooniness. Weirdness aside, these are compelling stories told in an entertaining way. I really liked this book and I look forward to new things from Deforge.


Everything together by Sammy Harkham  (2012)

I always try to read every comic Harkham makes but he doesn't always make it easy to be a completist. Most of his strips are published in obscure places-- small anthologies, niche websites, or his own indie comic book, Crickets. I love his stories so much that I have always made (grainy, pixilated) copies/print-outs of them, then read, and re-read those loose A4 pages until they fall to pieces.

So I am happy to say that those short stories have finally been collected in this shiny new volume-- his first book. And it’s great; I think he is the best new cartoonist to emerge in the last ten years. He has figured out the perfect style for comics-- it can be goofy like Popeye, grown-up like Chris Ware, sweaty like R. Crumb, satirical like Dan Clowes, or exuberant like Roy Crane.

I like the way his characters seem to want to be civilized or act like grown-ups, but really are just at the mercy of the random whims and needs that come over all creatures. At some point in a Sammy Harkham story, the façade will crack and a professor will get punched in the nose for blocking another academic’s ambitions (The New Yorker Story), or teenagers will put rubbish bins on their heads and crash into each other (Somersaulting), or one cartoonist will laugh when his dog bites the other’s drawing hand (Clowes+Huizenga). Heartbreaking and hilarious.


Garden by Yuichi Yokoyama (2011)

It doesn't have a plot exactly. There are just a lot of oddly-dressed guys walking through a huge landscape filled with weird structures and features. One guy's head looks like the front of the space shuttle, another guy is spiky. They look at the weird things, climb over them, swing, jump, crawl through them and narrate as they go-- "Oh look, it's a river filled with giant rubber balls instead of water" or "The walls are suddenly made of concrete”.

All the strangeness is underplayed, though. The drawing is uninflected and spare -- lines ruled, circles stencilled -- there are no faces to get attached to. It is quite stilted but very fascinating. It looks as if the natural world had been remade out of concrete and water by some faceless architect who had never actually seen the natural world. And the way the reader follows the guys from moment to moment reminds me a lot of platform video games. It is pretty engrossing. I’ve never read anything like it.


Wilson by Daniel Clowes (2010)

Wilson is the kind of guy you would hate to sit next to on the bus-- opinionated, obnoxious and quick to take offence, a middle-aged misanthrope who thinks that he is way smarter than you. Fortunately for the reader, Clowes is a good enough cartoonist to find the humanity lurking within this apparently charmless man. About halfway in, Wilson finds himself alone in the world and goes on an odyssey to try to reunite the family that he has alienated. This plan goes about as wrong as possible for him-- with darkly comedic results. The book is made up of a series of self-contained one page strips, each drawn in a different style. Some of these are individually funny or tragic but taken as a whole they add up to a nuanced and touching story. This approach engages the reader, and gives the book the strange liveliness that is in contrast with its surface blankness. This is an odd book and an odd character but it turns out that Wilson is not so bad.


Auckland Libraries holds these works by Timothy Kidd, published by Comic Book Factory,

Came the dawn. Book One

Came the dawn. Book Two

Came the dawn. Book Three

War comics

Special guest blogger Kelly Sheehan writes comics and, also, interesting things about comics, such as this:

Born too late for personal recollections of the Second World War my generation still managed to inherit a strong cultural memory of that great conflict. Games of war were a normal way of passing the time and small plastic soldiers, tanks and planes were a staple part of any boy’s toy box. Comics, which were then a more integrated part of a child’s life, featured a host of characters still fighting the war decades after it ended. Any New Zealand comics fan in his 30s or 40s would have vivid memories of Commando comics and Battle Picture Weekly, not to mention sundry characters such as Captain Hurricane who would routinely tie knots in the gun barrels of Nazi panzers without breaking a sweat.

One of the more bitter experiences of my childhood was going to hospital for a couple of days. I have no idea why I went but I have a very clear memory of the intense disappointment and sadness I felt when I discovered the huge cache of war comics, generously given to me by my older cousins, had disappeared from the locker next to my bed during the night. After that being in hospital kind of sucked.

^{(Picture from Sir George Grey Photograph Collection, 7-A13520)}

There is part of me that wonders if my father was responsible for those comics vanishing. Certainly, he would have felt I should not be reading anything that glorified war. If it was Dad, he was mistaken. While the Commando’s featured pretty straight forward tales of Tommy fighting Jerry, Battle Picture Weekly was a subversive little rag that undermined those simplistic conventions and threw a whole new light on what goes on during war. Written by such luminaries as Pat Mills and John Wagner these were stories that dealt with the unfairness and inhumanity of war, not to mention class, wayward authority, fear and the brutalising effect of violence. Anyone who was ten when they read the episode of Charly’s War featured below did not walk away thinking the First World War was in any way glamorous:

The library carries a number of recently republished comics from Battle Picture Weekly, most notably Johnny Red and Charley’s War. Each volume is lovingly put together, with introductions and afterword material that give the strips, and the historic events featured in the stories, context. The Johnny Red volume features an introduction by Garth Ennis, the Irish writer responsible for comics such as Preacher, Hitman and The Boys.

Ennis has always been effusive in his praise of Battle Picture Weekly. He was a fan growing up, indeed he had a letter published in those hallowed pages:

It is hardly surprising that Ennis is one of the few of his generation to put his own mark on the genre of war comics. Reading interviews with him it is clear that this is where his heart lies. Published under the umbrella titles of War Stories and Battlefields each of the stories covers different characters, circumstances and theatres of war.

A number of Ennis’s stories are undoubtedly responses to various strips featured in his beloved Battle Picture Weekly. Johann’s Tiger featured in War Stories Volume 1 bares a strong resemblance to Hellman of Hammer Force, Nightingale in the same volume can be yoked with H.M.S Nightshade, and the recent Night Witches and Motherland draw heavy inspiration from Johnny Red and his struggles on the Eastern Front during the Great Patriotic War. These are not Boy’s Own narratives. War is shown as brutal and chaotic. If there is there is sentimentality it is hard earned and the price paid for survival is high.
I like to think that Ennis has a secret plan. That, at the end of his career, he will have completed a vast novel composed in parts over the years. An epic novel in pictures that will document the gigantic, tragic history of the Second World War.

- Kelly

A celebration of comics

The kind you read, not the stand-up kind. It's Comic Book Month at Auckland Libraries and we're celebrating the Cosmics, as my father used to call them. "Pass me the cosmics" he'd say as soon as he arrived at the Sunday breakfast table, back when "comics" meant the comics section of your newspaper. Now comics are those comics and comics are cartoons, graphic novels, superheroes, manga and many other genres, and instead of being a once-a-week treat, every big and little kid can get them whenever they want at their local library.

Thanks to Adrian Kinnaird, cartoonist, writer and one of New Zealand's foremost authorities on comics and graphic novels, for contributing this fun reminiscence about the origins of life in the universe, um, I mean, of comics in libraries.

Comics In Libraries: The Collected Golden Age
Comic and graphic novels started popping up in libraries in the early 1980s, if you knew where to look. If you were lucky, you might find a copy of the Smithsonian Book Of Comic Books hiding out in the drawing reference and cartoons section; under the call numbers that would be burned into my memory: 741.5. When I was growing up, I knew if I searched out those magic numbers at any library there was always a chance I might strike gold and find comic books.

On one particular visit to the Christchurch Public Library in 1989 I really hit the mother-lode. While exploring the far reaches of the library floor, the work 'COMIC BOOKS' jumped out at me from a random shelf in the 'Over-sized Books' section. I had discovered the fabled two volume set of Photo Journal Guide To Comic Books: these two enormous volumes contained cover photographs of almost every American comic published from the beginning of the industry to the end of the '50s. The birth of the medium was contained in these two volumes; every cover of Action Comics lined up fifty covers to a page, like postage stamps.

I pored over every page till my eyes hurt, it was almost too much information to take in. It was all here, the history of comics laid out in front of me: the rise of superhero comics, horror, romance and everything in between (who knew Cowboy comics were massive in the 1950s??). Alas, these volumes were marked with the dreaded phrase 'REFERENCE COPIES ONLY. NOT FOR LOAN' ("that means you, kid!", I imagined it saying in smaller print underneath). So I would have to visit them every week, sneaking off to the 'adult' section to the library to soak up as much comics history as I could handle.

On one of these trips I also discovered there was a 'Graphic Novel' shelf, hidden beside 'Young Adult' (sidenote: as a 10 yr old the YA section always made me feel a bit nervous; would I be asked my age if I grabbed the wrong book?). It was only a small shelf, with a couple of volumes that would become cornerstones for this growing section: Watchmen, Maus, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. I flicked through a few pages of Dark Knight Returns and three things occurred to me. 1) It scared the crap out of me 2) I had to read it RIGHT NOW and 3) I had to make neither my mum or the librarian got a good look at the contents when I checked it out (hiding it under a safe Tintin volume took care of that).

Over twenty years later, graphic novels are now one of the largest and most borrowed collections in libraries world wide. There are graphic novels and comics to suit every age and subject. From literary autobiographies like Persepolis, through to children's comics like the collected Tove Jansson Moomin comic strips, and Jeff Smith's wonderful Bone series. Or if superheroes are your thing, you can easily read the first 20+ years of Spiderman and Avengers comics (collections that would set us back thousands of dollars) for nothing! And if you look under 741.5, you can learn the secrets to cartooning from the masters themselves, and learn about their lives and craft. I can now read almost all of those classic comics that appeared in those giant reference guides by looking them up on the Library catalogue.

The entire history of the comics medium is waiting for you at your local library, and my 10yr old self wouldn't know where to start.

-- Adrian Kinnaird

Check out Adrian's blog on New Zealand Comics at www.fromearthsend.blogspot.com
 
...and here's what's happening around the libraries (eg free comics workshops, exhibitions, the "Create a character" competition where you can win a term of drawing classes, prizes for most comics read...)

Christmas nonsense

Not "Christmas, nonsense!" in the Scroogian sense of "Bah, humbug!" ie "If I could work my will, nephew, every idiot who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips should be boiled with his own pudding and buried with a stake of holly through his heart", but pure, simple, funny Christmas nonsense. Along with the family Christmas, the consumer Christmas, the religious Christmas, I'd like to take a moment to celebrate the funny Christmas. If you'd like to join in, the first thing to do is to sing these lines to the tune of "Good King Wenceslas":

Good King Sauerkraut look out
On your feets uneven...

This is just one of a series of splendidly mangled Christmas carols which appeared in the classic (we're talking back in the Kennedy era, the Cold War era, the Race to the Moon era) American comic strip Pogo, written by a genius named Walt Kelly. Pogo is a chipper little possum who lives in the Okefenokee Swamp in America's Deep South, along with his best friend Albert the Alligator (big and a bit stupid, in that classic best friends tradition where one has the brains and one has the brawn) and a slew of other swamp creatures incarnating various human personality types, such as the morose and prickly Porky Pine and Mam'zelle Hepzibah, a sexy French skunk.

In the house where I grew up there were three paperback Pogo collections on a low shelf in the dining room and we kids found them and read them, over and over, without knowing or caring that the animals were actually satires on various political figures of the era, but just because they were so funny. I remember my mother explaining about a bobcat with thick eyebrows who represented Joe McCarthy, the man who led the witchhunt against communists in Hollywood, the Army etc (you know, all those likely places), and how we just didn't really care.

I still don't really care about the political jibes, but I have enjoyed over the years catching on to various clever literary allusions with which Pogo was also sprinkled, my favourite being the mud turtle named Churchill La Femme, nicknamed "Churchy".

It turns out Roger Ebert, the American film critic famous for the entertaining "thumbs up" or "thumbs down" reviews he used to do on TV with Gene Siskel, vestiges of which can still be spotted on DVD cases as "Two thumbs up! -- Siskel and Ebert", and for his clear and intelligent writing style which made him the only film reviewer to have won a Pulitzer Prize, and then more recently for his clear and intelligent writing about life after thyroid cancer, which left him unable to speak or eat, and now for a memoir called Life itself, is a Pogo fan as well, and he has posted Walt Kelly's Moon Race version of everyone's favourite Christmas poem, "Twas the night before Christmas" as I call it, but which is actually titled "A visit from St. Nicholas", on his blog. If you are a comics reader or writer who would like to sample a fine, aged comic, I recommend taking a look.

There is also an official Walt Kelly site and the vintage newspaper comics site ilovecomixarchive.com has got some good Pogo strips on it. Walt Kelly, I found out, also worked for Walt Disney for a time, and is responsible for animating Geppetto inside the whale in Pinocchio -- is this my favourite Walt Disney animated film, or is it Dumbo? -- hey, look at that, Walt Kelly worked on Dumbo too!

Supposedly a complete Collected Pogo is in the works. I will definitely be requesting a purchase for the library.
Addendum, a year later: it's here! From our friends at Fantagraphics: Pogo, the complete syndicated comic strips. Volume 1, through the wild blue yonder.

"...Due to run 12 volumes, this collection completes the holy trifecta, along with Charles Schulz' Peanuts and George Herriman's Krazy Kat, of comic strips whose influence cannot be overstated." -- Booklist

Merry Christmas to all from Books in the City. And to wrap up, may I offer a Pogo chorus of:

Deck us all with Boston Charlie,
Walla Walla, Wash., an' Kalamazoo!
Nora's freezin' on the trolley,
Swaller dollar cauliflower alley-garoo!

Graphic Novels, Comics & Cartoons at AWRF 2011

Tim Kidd from Readers Services is a comics reader, creator and appreciator, and the person who takes care of the teeming comics and graphic novel shelves at Central City Library. He is also the only person on our library quiz team who knew which creature possesses the largest eye in the animal kingdom. It's the giant squid. Here Tim casts his own eye (in black bakelike glasses) on the comics and graphic novels session at the Auckland Writers and Readers Festival, which was chaired by Adrian Kinnaird, cartoonist and writer of the New Zealand Comics blog From Earth's End.
 
The guests were Karen Healey, Dylan Horrocks, Chris Slane and Ant Sang. All four have had books published in the last year, which are available in regular bookstores around the country. Dylan re-released his major work, Hicksville, last year, with a new design, new cover and a lovely new comics-form introduction; Guardian of the Dead is Karen Healey’s latest, award-winning teen novel; Ant Sang’s Shaolin Burning is set in medieval China and tells the story of Plum Blossom, a young woman who is determined to be the best Kung Fu warrior in the land; and Chris Slane’s Nice Day for a War adapts the diaries of Cyril Elliott, a soldier who served in the trenches in France. A big year for New Zealand comics.

It was a nice hour, led by Adrian Kinnaird, who began by asking the creators to talk about their early experiences reading comics, accompanied by pictures of Spiderman, Casper, Tintin, Donald Duck etc. projected on the big screens.

Then Karen and Dylan discussed the role of women in superhero comics. Karen Healey had been involved in the Girl Wonder group that was concerned with rehabilitating the male-centric genre of superheroes for everyone. Dylan had written Batgirl for some time and so had some insights to bring to a conversation about the poor treatment of women superheroes in recent years (for an interview with her and Mr Kinnaird about this and more go to http://fromearthsend.blogspot.com/)

But my favourite part of the talk was when the cartoonists showed some of the preparatory material that went into their finished comics. It was illuminating to see these private sketches and notes blown up large on the big screen. They are such good cartoonists that even what they might consider a throwaway working-drawing still looked great enlarged a hundred times the size. I could see that what might take just a few seconds to read on the page could take many days of work to make. And I liked seeing the very different approaches they took to construct their stories.

Slane was obliged to do historical research for his book and he certainly did not take any shortcuts. Images of the battle fields in France as they look today on Google Earth, tourist photos of the area uploaded to the internet (beautiful green rolling pastures, lovely vineyards, cyclists) were married to photos taken by soldiers of the time ( blackened limbless trees, shattered buildings, mud, holes) and maps of battle positions and trench layouts. These gave him the ability to place his characters into the landscape. He went on to show how he unobtrusively incorporated all this reference work into the finished pages.

It was nice to see his thumbnails (small, sketchy drawings made to plan the comic page as a whole and test how one panel flows to the next). He showed how these were tightened up into more detailed sketches to get the character placement right, the story information clearly shown, and to check for readability. I thought these sketches from him looked good enough to publish as they were. But there was a further version of the page to work out the balance of dark and light tones. Only then came the finished drawings- done in pencil and watercolour. The writing, for him, he said, was inseparable from the drawing.

Ant Sang's Shaolin Burning is a beautifully crafted story and I was excited to see that Ant had chosen to show us the plotting process. He used techniques adapted from cinematic writing and his book does have the feel of a great dramatic action movie. To see the way he diagrammed the plot and the characters' transitions and development was fascinating. He displayed pages full of tiny notes with scribbled arrows leading to other notes to other arrows to more notes. A pair of columns of writing side by side -- each one representing a character -- with arrows shooting back and forth; triangles with words at each corner. His writing was arranged in a very visual way.

Dylan showed the pages from the script notebook he uses for his new story The Magic Pen, as serialised on his website hicksvillecomics.com. To see someone's handwriting blown up so large was very personal and nice. A cartoonist needs to be clear above all other things and he excels at this. I thought it was neat that even his hand-written notes are a model of clarity. Then he showed how a few sketches in the corner of a page could expand into a new character and then how that character could intrude into the story so much that the whole thing changed. It all seemed natural and fun.

-- Tim Kidd