In ‘Covers Album’ each Tuesday, we ask comics creators, publishers, and commentators to pick three of their favourite comic covers… but with a small twist. One must be chosen for inspirational reasons, one for aesthetic reasons, and one for pure nostalgia! This time it’s the turn of artist, researcher, lecturer and comics maker Damon Herd of the University of Dundee. You can discover more about Damon’s multi-faceted involvement in the world of comics from his website here.
If you would like to contribute to this series please contact our Andy Oliver here.
Inspirational Choice: All My Bicycles (2024) by Powerpaola (Fantagraphics Books)
Bikes, I like riding bikes and I love drawings of bikes! I love seeing how other cartoonists draw bikes. Some are meticulously rendered, while others might be a simple scribble or a few lines that simply suggest a bike, and some artists draw what is in their head but don’t quite know how all the triangles, circles, and spokes join up. I wrote about bikes in comics for Graphixia a while back and mentioned a few of my favourites, including Eddie Campbell’s scribbles, Sophie Yahow’s mere suggestion of a bike in War of Streets and Houses, and Eleanor Davis sketches of bikes in You & a Bike & a Road which are usually complete but often only include a few necessary items such as wheels and handlebars so you know that it is a bike.
I’m always inspired to find new voices and creators in comics (especially if they draw bikes!) and my inspirational choice is a recent discovery for me – Colombian Ecuadorian cartoonist Powerpaola’s All My Bicycles, which was first released in 2021 and recently published in an English translation by Fantagraphics. The cover is brightly coloured and designed to catch the eye and encourage being picked up. It has a bike on the cover being ridden up a countryside hill rich in lush green vegetation with a deep pink and red sky. The bike has a yellow frame and we learn inside that it is a GIANT brand. The stories in the book are named after each bike Powerpaola has owned or borrowed and they seem to drift in and out of linear time as well as occasionally in and out of dream and metaphor.
Powerpaola has a loose drawing style but each bike is a distinct entity and detailed enough to tell them apart. The yellow bike is one of the few instances of colour inside the book as it is mostly painted in thick black flowing ink lines and grey wash watercolour. The other is red which is the colour of a jumper on a boy that a young Powerpaola meets. She falls in love for the first time ‘with the color of his sweater.’ The book has also inspired me to revisit an idea I once had about all the bikes I’ve owned and the stories I can tell around them. I started to compile a list of bikes I have owned or used, however, I’m up to about 22 bikes and at least a quarter of these were stolen from me. Maybe it will be too traumatic but I’m enjoying revisiting all my bikes in my notebook so far.
Aesthetic Choice: Drawn & Quarterly Showcase Vol.3 (2005) by Geneviève Castrée (Drawn & Quarterly)
I first came across the work of Geneviève Castrée in this collection, volume 3 of Drawn & Quarterly Showcase in 2005 (my copy still has the price sticker and date on it). Each edition presented the work of three cartoonists and the others here were Sammy Harkham and Matt Broersma. Castrée is billed inside as Geneviève Elverum, her married name that she may only have used here. Castrée is actually a pseudonym from her self-published punk days that I only recently realised means castrated. Her cover for Showcase caught my eye with its delicate line work, watercolour shading and colouring, and the use of white space around the characters. It’s what I would describe as an illustrative style and it actually only hinted at the beautiful and melancholic story inside.
Her dreamlike 30-page story ‘We’re Wolf!’ begins as a meditation on depression before moving on to thoughts about love and our place in the world. The delicate art explicitly references Tintin in Tibet as an influence although the pages are much more open than Hergé’s work. One spread asks “What will it take to seduce you?” which seems moot as I was under her spell from the first few pages. It took me a few years to find more of her work but her graphic memoir Susceptible is excellent, as is her folky, droney musical work as Woelv and Ô Paon, some of which came with accompanying LP-sized comics. Sadly Castrée died from pancreatic cancer in 2016 but most of her work has been collected in the massive Complete Works 1981-2016, edited by her husband musician Phil Elverum. It includes the complete ‘We’re Wolf’ printed at a larger size as well as some lovely sketchbook material for the strip.
Nostalgic Choice: Nutty #26 (1980) by Tom Williams (DC Thomson)
There are so many layers of nostalgia for me in Nutty comic issue #26. The cover is well designed and laid out but I was never a big fan of Peter Pest. Nutty issue #1 was probably the start of me collecting and keeping comics (I thought there was no point in collecting the Beano as it was already about 2000 issues into its run). I got the first issue of Nutty (with its Space Dust free gift) at the corner shop on my way to school when I was 9 years old. In the late 1970s there seemed to be a new comic title out most weeks but Nutty stuck around longer than most probably due to the success of Bananaman, who survived the merger into the Dandy a few years later and then into the Beano a couple of decades later.
The main reason I picked this particular issue is that it featured my first published work. I sent in a drawing of the character Doodlebug as a vampire – Horrorbug, see? I was very much into the Universal monsters at the time and cartoons like the Groovy Goolies. My Dracula-inspired drawing was printed in this issue and I received a £2 postal order that I probably spent on more comics. Sadly, this is not my original copy but an eBay purchase from years later. The original was kept in a bread crate under my bed along with dozens of other comics. One night my cat Casper was looking for somewhere to sleep and went into the crate and shredded all the comics with her claws to make a comfy bed. Pulling the crate out the next morning was a shock!
Article by Damon Herd
