Word: comics
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Growing up in Phnom Penh between the worlds of his French mother and Khmer father, Séra routinely escaped into the pages of French comics, and again as a young refugee in Paris. Now the author of a dozen graphic novels - three of which have been about Cambodia's war years - he is working to rekindle Cambodia's interest in the art form. Since his debut showing in Phnom Penh, he has been regularly returning to the city of his boyhood to hold workshops for aspiring illustrators. "It's important to try to approach the reality of our times...
...Cambodia started printing domestic comics in the mid-1960s, according to Our Books, an organization that archives comics that survived the war and promotes comic-book culture in Cambodia. Though many of that generation of artists were killed, some survived the Khmer Rouge years by drawing agricultural plans for the regime, or sketching small portraits of soldiers in exchange for food. After the Vietnamese deposed Pol Pot in 1979, comics enjoyed a bright but fragile reemergence in the 1980s, gaining a foothold in Phnom Penh's markets before the onslaught of television, movies and video that coincided with Cambodia...
...gravitas and the graphic arts were not mutually exclusive. Impasse et Rouge wasn't published for almost another 12 years. Although the following two titles about Cambodia, L'Eau et la Terre (2005) and Lendemains de cendres (2007), were picked up in fairly quick succession by the major French comic publisher Delcourt, Séra has still not had the international success that "serious" comic books artists like Spiegelman, Daniel Clowes (Ghost World) and Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis) have enjoyed. He teaches drawing by day and works as a night porter at a Paris hotel...
...eking out other precarious livings, like a woman gathering lotus pods to sell in the city. Not that the artists will be better off if they intend to make a living from drawing alone. It's cheaper for small printers in Cambodia to publish a reprint of an older comic than to buy rights to a new story, and literacy rates in the country remain low. "People have the decks stacked against them a little bit," admits Weeks. For Séra, however, money has never been the point - facing the difficult realities of the nation's present...
From start to finish, Heston was a grand, ornery anachronism, the sinewy symbol of a time when Hollywood took itself seriously, when heroes came from history books, not comic books. Epics like Ben-Hur or El Cid simply couldn't be made today, in part because popular culture has changed as much as political fashion. But mainly because there's no one remotely like Charlton Heston to infuse the form with his stature, fire and guts...