The wonderful Jason Edwards Harlan of Harlancore has just released series two of his delightful Marvel-themed Boxpunx foldables. This series features the Fantastic Four, the Silver Surfer, Galactus, DareDevil, the Sub-Mariner and Nightcrawler. They’re very easy to assembly and look cute as hell.
Don’t forget to check out Series 1, which is all Spidey and X-Men.
La Galérie du 9e art is currently hosting an exhibition of a series of portraits of classic Franco-Belgian comic characters, as drawn by comic creator Frank Pe. Most of these paintings, featuring Corto Maltese, Lucky Luke, Little Nemo, the Marsupilami and many others, are also present in a book that was published earlier this month by Dupuis. The exhibition also includes a few paintings for which reproduction rights for the book were not secured, namely images of characters by Hergé (Haddock, Alan, Laszlo Carreidas) and Peyo (some quite hilarious smurfs). Worth checking out.
Lowbright, Derek Kirk Kim’s self-professed “Internet’s 2,587,346,987th Diary Comic”, is actually very original. Instead of scanning his daily Moleskine pages, Kim simply takes photographs of his notebook on a desk that looks suspiciously like mine.
His tales are, naturally, autobiographical, and as such never earth-shattering, sometimes quite ordinary, but never bland or banal. And Kim’s art is top-notch.
Nothing to start the day than a great cover by a great artist for a great band.
(found on the internet - © Peter Bagge, I suppose)
Klare Lijn virtuoso and very nice guy in general Peter Van Dongen paraphrases the classic cover to Hergé’s Tintin Au Pays Des Soviets in this illustration for the Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad’s books section. The article was a review of the collected works of Karel Van Het Reve, a Dutch writer and journalist, who for a long time was the Moscow correspondent for the Parool daily.
(illustration © Peter Van Dongen)
I found this ad in my mailbox this morning, graciously provided by the inimitable Stan Jones. It’s more of the same, but I’m always amazed at the verbioseness of interbellum advertising - if you want to read the whole thing, you need to spare quite a few minutes ! By contrast, in these days of internet advertising, you can count on an attention span of, let’s say, 5 to 10 seconds, depending on the amount of animation you provide…
More on real-life lawman “Little Mel” Purvis can be found here. It doesn’t mention his fondness of Disney toys, however.
This ad from 1936 has officially become history : as of this year (about half a century after George got his wings) Kraft no longer produces Postum, the caffeine-free coffee replacement.
The art for this strip was provided by Paul Arthur, an alias used by Milton Caniff and Noel Sickles (according to Alex Toth). There’s another ad after the click (nicked from eBay), for Baker’s Coconut mix this time, which is also credited to Arthur, and follows a very similar story line.
Finnish illustrator Jouni Koponen has created a lovely poster of his illustrated version of Neil Gaiman’s poem, The Day The Saucers Came. You can buy it : even Neil himself likes it.
(artwork © Joni Koponen, text © Neil Gaiman)
Justin Pierce’s Wonderella prank-calls Batman. For God’s sake, woman ! Cut the man some slack - he’s about to die / has died / is dying / is supposed to die but will come back in a few months (take your pick) !
(Wonderella © Justin Pierce, Batman ® and © DC Comics)
The Ephemerist will be at the Angoulème Festival from Wednesday January 28 until Saturday January 31. If you want to meet up, let me know.
