I have a review of Lilli Carre’s new comic The Lagoon in this week’s Chicago Reader. It should please those who prefer my friendlier, cuddlier writing (hi Miriam!) Here’s a sample:
The frontispiece captures both Carré’s affection for goth and her distance from it. In a circular frame, Zoey, the tween protagonist, sits beside a lake passing flowers to a black, leaf-plastered, faceless humanoid thing. Flowers and tendrils frame the image, suggesting the overripe opulence of art nouveau. But Carré’s linework is spare and even crude—it looks like something Aubrey Beardsley might have drawn when he was six. The creature is cute, creepy, and mysterious, but the scene also has a modernist edge that takes it out of the realm of Victorian melodrama. Beauty is sketched out rather than embroidered; the space between Zoey’s hands and those of the creature is the distance between desire and reticence, the coming contact or its absence.
Whole thing is here.
Also, a brief review of Tom Raworth’s poetry in the same issue.
the art isn't my style, so it's definitely not something i'd've picked up on my own, but your visual descriptions are really absorbing.
i think i will still probably ask for nana for winter holiday, & after that, there is still way too long of a list of graphic novels i need to buy (starting with "essential dykes to watch out for" and "tamara drewe." hooray graphic-chick-lit).
oh, & by the way, your valedictory snark made me smile. i don't know that i've ever seen much of wilson's art, but he did hit on me at ape once, & my experience meshes well with your impressions.
He hit on you? Barf. He had some really creepy off-hand comments about Trina Robbins in the interview too.
I don’t dislike R. Crumb, and I certainly think he’s extremely talented. But you look at S. Clay Wilson, and it’s hard to disagree with what my wife said as soon as she looked at that TCJ cover; “Would that R. Crumb had never been born.”
yes! he said “do you have cherokee blood?” which, if that isn’t the best dried-up-hippie pickup line ever, i don’t know what is.
Oh my god, that’s hysterical. I bet that was the first time he ever used that line, too.
You can more blame Wilson for Crumb than vice versa. Crumb credits Wilson with showing him the way to uncensored sex and violence. Before that, Crumb was more into bigfoot nonsensical cartoony stuff…or politics in Bulgaria…