What could compel Claire Fauvel, a French illustrator and animator, to create a 220-page graphic biography of Phoolan Devi, arguably India’s most famous dacoit? A question like this would never…
Canadian illustrator, sculptor and writer Walter Scott asks a seemingly simplistic question here: What is it like to study art at university? His answer, spelled out over a little under…
It is always tricky, from a male critic’s perspective, to look at any work of art that has everything to do with a woman’s body and no place for a…
One would assume that everything there is to know about relationships has been talked about or dissected by now. It takes an unprecedented turn of events, however, to show us…
In a world struggling not just with a pandemic but a general aversion towards the cultivation of a scientific temperament, the presence of a new book by Tom Gauld seems…
I had no idea what a deprogrammer was until I read Talking to Strangers. It sounded like the kind of title one would give a computer technician, which is why…
A couple of years ago, Swedish cartoonist and illustrator Disa Wallander was asked to describe her work. It was not an inane question because, as anyone familiar with what she…
À La Recherche du Temps Perdu (In Search of Lost Time) ranks up there, with War and Peace and Don Quixote, a classic that everyone appears to have an opinion…
Benjamin Fraser, professor of Spanish and head of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Arizona, recently published a monograph on how comics represent cities. His book,…
I decided to hand over Lynda Barry’s book, Making Comics, to a 9-year-old. I did this because it made sense to test the former’s long-held hypothesis that we can all…
That space between lucidity and sleep has always been an elusive one, especially for writers and artists who have long tried to pin it down. Kevin Huizenga has made a…
There is something decidedly prosaic about a title like Horizontal Collaboration until one is informed of what the term once meant to the French. During World War II, it referred…
In 1871, the French poet, surrealist, traveller, soldier, trader, arms dealer, and explorer Arthur Rimbaud wrote a poem called Le Bateau ivre (The Drunken Boat). He was 16 at the…
There must be a party going on inside the head of James Stokoe at any given point in time. Or a riot. Either way, I picture a lot of activity,…
Holding the hardcover edition of The Labyrinth in 2019 is a special feeling for a number of reasons. For a start, it shouldn’t even be here, given that it will…
The Toronto Comic Arts Festival (TCAF) has been held since 2003. That piece of information came to us not from Wikipedia, but from legendary artist Seth, who had stopped by…
It is important to keep in mind, whenever one picks up a book by Rich Tommaso, that he began his career a quarter of a century ago with the 3-issue…
Nonsense is an underrated tradition in literature, now relegated to dusty shelves alongside the verse of Edward Lear and lesser-known works by Lewis Carroll. Almost two decades after he passed…
