Wis[s]e Words

Haarlem comics con 03: Amanda Majoor

Published on June 8, 2014Leave a comment

Amanda Majoor (left) sketching, with moral support

If you’re very lucky at a con you can discover a major new talent you never would’ve come across otherwise, somebody like Amanda Majoor. A graduate from the Zwolle artschool, she did her thesis on the intersections between comics and music (see below). Unfortunately it hasn’t been published yet, but from what I could see of it leafing through it, it should be interesting. Amanda’s main comics project, which she ultimately would like to publish as a graphic novel, follows on from this interest in music and comics and would be about the socalled “Swingjugend” in forties Hamburg.

Swing und Comics. This needs to be properly published.

(Short historical recap as I understand it. Swingjugend were young German jazz/swing fans, which was of course verboten in the Third Reich; Hamburg was always one of the most leftwing cities in Germany and not very known to be Nazi loving. Enough scope for a graphic novel, I think.)

panel from the Swingjugend project

Currently Amanda’s busy doing research and tryouts for this project, but she also does other work on the side, like a comic and interview for the FML website. She blogs at Swing und Bratwurst and has an art portfolio at Flickr.

Her artwork has an understated elegance I like a lot, as I do the “retro” forties styling. It’s also interesting to see her muted use of colour and greyscales. It fits the slightly melancholic mood of her artwork. Of course I asked her for a sketch as well and below is what I got.

sketch by Amanda Majoor

Blog fodder for June 5th through June 7th

Published on June 7, 2014Leave a comment

Blog fodder for June 5th through June 7th:

From Best To Worst: The Mitfords | Bibliodaze – Every history geek has some sort of fascination with the Mitfords. It’s like being an American politics nerd and obsessing over the Kennedys, it’s practically required.
Ever Wished That Calvin and Hobbes Creator Bill Watterson Would Return to the Comics Page? Well, He Just Did. | Pearls Before Swine – Like at one point when I wanted to change a line of dialogue he wrote, I prefaced it by saying, “I feel like a street urchin telling Michelangelo that David’s hands are too big.” But he liked the change. And that alone was probably the greatest compliment I’ve ever received.
To what are “contrarians” contrary? | An und für sich – The contrarian takes the counterintuitive position that mainstream opinion is under constant attack, that the ruling class is the underdog.
Heroines – Distaff versions of well known comics heroes…
Mostly I write these just to make up names for comic book series. – This going to go so wrong at some point in the not too distant future
From the Heart of Europe – Ireland’s babies mass graves roundup – Roundup of links about the discovery of mass graves in Galway

Haarlem comics con 02: Mattt Baaij

Published on June 6, 2014Leave a comment

Mattt Baaij sketching at Haarlem Stripdagen 2014

Mattt Baaij is another up and coming Dutch cartoonist who had a stand at the Haarlem Stripdagen. He’s been doing comics for some time now, his main character Bunbun (not this one) celebrated his tenth birthday on May 19th. That’s him in the sketch at the bottom of this post having painful things done to his todger. All my fault I’m afraid; I asked for Mattt to draw something sleazy and vulgair and that’s what he came up with.

Bunbun was originally a webcomic, but has also been collected into two books so far, both available from the Syndikaat website. I got the first collection, which looks rather nice, eighty pages in full colour, roughly US floppy sized. The Bunbun strips are pure gag comics, mostly done in a half page six panel format, with occasionally a full page strip. Mattt’s artstyle is functional and sparse, Bunbun especially pared down to the minimum necessary needed to show he’s a rabbit: two long ears and coloured white and that’s it.

What I especially like about the Bunbun strips is the way Mattt has several series of gags that keep coming back. One series for example has the rabbit as a suicide bomber, completed with belt of dynamite attempting to get on a bus to blow it up and getting thwarted every time. Another has him as a knight failing to rescue his girlfriend from a castle guarded by a dragon. On their own these gags barely raise a smile, but the repetition makes them hilarious. If you like this sort of humour of course.

It is a very Dutch sort of humour, high on sex and violence as funny in itself, somewhat corny too at times. None of this is really meant to be shocking, it’s just that there’s a long tradition of this sort of jokes in Dutch comics, something that could seem a bit crass or even naff to foreigners. Fortunately Mattt also has a sense of whimsy to leaven things a bit. It’s not all dick jokes.

Mattt Baaij sketching at Haarlem Stripdagen 2014

(Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

Haarlem comics con 01: Marloes de Vries

Published on June 5, 2014Leave a comment

Marloes de Vries sketching

This weekend the bi-annual Haarlem comic con was held again, all around the inner city of Haarlem and beautiful if at times a bit windy it was too, making it very nice to walk around the various stalls to spot new cartoonists and get some sketches.

Case in point. Marloes de Vries, a graphical designer/art director turned illustrator, who as she told me has done a lot of work for children’s books. She said she had wanted to be a cartoonist for a long time but had only in the last few years taken it up again.

Sketch of me by Marloes de Vries

One of the reasons she started doing cartoons again was because she had “left her hometown in the countryside and moved to the big city on the other side of the country” and it wasn’t always easy adjusting, hence she started keeping a visual diary. Early last year she started publishing these cartoons as journal doodles on her tumblr, which she collected into her first, self published book this year. Of course I picked it up and not only got it signed, but this boss sketch as well.

I like her artwork a lot; it’s cute without being cutesy, deceptively simple and it reminds me of somebody else but for the life of me I can’t think of who. Nevermind. What’s also a plus is that just browsing through the cartoons made me laugh several times.

You can buy Journal Doodles — The Works at Marloes’ own shop, which also has several prints on sale.

Bookmarks for June 5th

Published on June 5, 2014Leave a comment

Blog fodder for June 5th:

Clarkesworld Magazine – Science Fiction and Fantasy : The Issue of Gender in Genre Fiction: The Math Behind it All by Susan E. Connolly – Knowing that some people will be curious about the math behind Susan’s piece, we asked her to provide something a bit more technical for those more mathematically inclined among us.
Clarkesworld Magazine – Science Fiction and Fantasy : The Issue of Gender in Genre Fiction: A Detailed Analysis by Susan E. Connolly – Gender representation in genre fiction is an issue that’s been getting more and more attention, but nobody had yet assembled a comprehensive review of the data. Now that I have collected this data, I can see why. So many emails . . . So much Excel.
Investing in Whiteness: the UCSB tragedy and Asian AmericaSocial Text – I don’t want to contribute to his celebrity status here; I do believe that this shooting and his statements about his motivation teach us important things about the operationalization of things like the model minority myth or American masculinity and pathology. I offer a cultural critique to see what sense can be made of this tragedy and what sad sense this tragedy makes of critical theory and its continued relevance.
How Different Cultures Understand Time – Business Insider – Americans do time like this, Asians do time like this