Books, Comics and Paul Dale

Craig Collins & Iain Laurie - Roachwell

A dark, funny and disturbing achievement in self-published comics

24 Aug 2011

(roachwell.blogspot.com) Published online between 2009 and 2010, Roachwell is a fevered and messy collection of obtuse, amusing strips by Scottish writer/artists Craig Collins and Iain Laurie. Cremation and regeneration, house-hunting in the freak…

Arthur Flowers & Manu Chitrakar: I See the Promised Land

Mystical graphic novelisation inspired by the life Martin Luther King

24 Mar 2011

(Tara Books) The life and times of saints and heroes have long been the base for storytelling traditions. With I See the Promised Land, African-American writer and blues singer Arthur Flowers repositions civil rights leader Martin Luther King’s story…

Sophie Crumb - Evolution of a Crazy Artist

11 Feb 2011

(WW Norton) From an early age, Robert Crumb’s maladjusted scion was the beneficiary of her parent’s archivist tendencies. His daughter’s ‘most interesting and expressive work’ was saved and now, 26 years later, the artist child revisits it and lays…

Will Eisner - The Best of The Spirit

8 Jan 2009

SUPERHERO With his domino mask, blue suit, red tie, blue fedora hat and gloves, Denny Colt aka The Spirit was what one newspaper in the 1940s referred to ‘the only real middle-class crimefighter’. Created in 1940 for a strip in a Sunday newspaper…

Boris Artzybasheff - As I See

13 Nov 2008

On a trajectory from the surreal to the satirical Russian-born New Yorker lies somewhere between Man Ray and Gerald Scarfe. First published in 1954, As I See is a collection of striking illustrations reflecting, among other things, the burgeoning…

Will Eisner - Textbooks

30 Oct 2008

Undoubtedly what editor Denis Kitchen calls the 'primary treatise on the theory and mechanics of modern comics', Eisner's influential textbook Comics and Sequential Art and its two companion guides get a makeover for the digital age. Honed from lectures…

Leah Hayes - Funeral of the Heart

19 Jun 2008

SHORT STORIES (Fantagraphics) Welcome to the weird world of Leah Hayes. Where an elderly couple digs mysterious tunnels at night. Where a young male kitchen hand becomes a duck-slaughtering expert when his girlfriend develops an unusual illness. Or…

Jason Lutes - Jar of Fools

22 May 2008

TRAGEDY/NOIR (Faber) First serialised in Seattle’s alternative newspaper The Stranger back in 1993, and anthologised in the US in 2003, Lutes’ remarkable graphic novel is long overdue a decent European release. Jar of Fools tells the story of…

Richard Cowdry & Various - The Bedsit Journal No 2

8 May 2008

COMPILATION (Bedsit Journal) Marshalled together by the artist and writer Richard Cowdry whose previous comic seed bombs include Kartoon Cuts and Knucklehead, this funny, bitter and vulgar collection of new comic book talent proves what can be done…

Marjane Satrapi - Persepolis

10 Apr 2008

AUTOBIOGRAPHY (Vintage) In advance of the Persepolis feature-length animation to be released at cinemas at the end of this month (25 April if you want to note it in your diary) comes this welcome two-in-one paperback edition of Satrapi’s seminal…

Bill Griffith - Zippy: Walk A Mile in My Muu-Muu

13 Mar 2008

CULT STRIP (Fantagraphics) Having made his first appearance in Real Pulp Comix in 1971 Zippy is getting old. For the uninitiated Zippy is a polymath, free associating pinhead who wanders the consumerist besieged wastelands of the US. Griffith’s…

Winsor McCay

Editorial Works (Checker BPG)

12 Feb 2007

NEWS/REPORTAGE Better known for his groundbreaking 1930s animated film Gertie the Dinosaur (a film so exquisitely animated that it upped the game for Disney at the time), and comic strips Little Nemo in Slumberland and Dreams of a Rarebit Fiend…

Harvey Pekar

Ego and Hubris (Ballantine Books)

12 Feb 2007

BIOGRAPHY/LIFE STORY Meet Michael Malice - childhood immigrant, dreamer, short-ass and egotist. In some ways he’s just another mildly schizophrenic man, raised in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, but to Pekar (the graphic novel’s greatest navel gazer) he is…

Joe Sacco

But I Like it (Fantagraphics)

10 Oct 2006

AUTOBIOGRAPHY/COLLECTION Containing some of the same material as previous Sacco collection Notes from a Defeatist, this new selection is a more focused attempt to archive and give order to the reams of material he amassed as a music mad young man who…