Word: comix
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Like Rehr himself, these guys are pushing 40 (another rarity for comix characters) and are all facing the issues of that life stage. Craig moved away before 9/11 to become a professor and raise a family. Though he harbors a secret mid-life crisis, Craig seems the most grounded of the crew. He becomes the story's locus as he reacquaints himself with his friends. Mac, a successful painter and permanent bachelor, left the city after the disaster. Deeply shaken by the experience, but loathe to admit it, he puts up a vain and pompous front - "Don't touch...
...Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade books, it would have something of the resonance this Tardi/Malet team has for this work. Malet's Nestor Burma, detective de choc, or ace detective, appears in multiple hardboiled volumes and has been adapted to film and television. Tardi, like Crumb, became a major comix creator during the 1970s, though unlike Crumb, he didn't have to go underground to do it. Art Spiegelman's forward to the book describes Tardi as "one of the single most influential comix artists to come out of the French adult comics revolution of the 70's." In spite...
...scowl. In profile, his face appears flat, like a blank wall, except for a bump of a nose and a pipe sticking out of a mouth that never opens, even when speaking. Tardi works in the classic French bandes dessinee style (a close match to the work of Japanese comix master Osamu Tezuka, incidentally) with near-photographic reproductions of backgrounds that the flat, "cartoonish" characters inhabit. The "Tintin" mysteries by Herge are the most famous example of this style, which Tardi updates with the more cynical eye of a newer generation. The themes are darker and so are the images...
...With "The Bloody Streets of Paris," Jacques Tardi and Leo Malet do for comix what the French New Wave did for film: taking the trappings of American pulp fiction and retooling them with a cool, European update. Why the French take seriously what we throw away - detective pictures and comix among other things - remains anybody's guess. Just be glad that they do. Entertaining, adult pulp comix have become all too scarce...
...miss the annual top ten list of comix for the past year, coming in two weeks...