Bailly for Anima

Posted on February 8, 2020 by Wim Lockefeer

Every year in February,  Brussels turns animation crazy thanks to Anima, the Brussels Animation Film Festival. The poster for the festival never fails to be a visual gem (remember Nicholas Fong‘s Zoetrope poster), and this year’s is no different.

This year Belgian cartoonist Pierre Bailly, the co-creator of Ludo (one of the best all-ages BD ever) came up with a sweet image that brilliantly catches the coziness of watching a film together in a cinema, with a certain Wild Things vibe to boot.

The illustration also features a cameo by Petit Poilu, a character Bailly created for his long-running early readers’ book and TV series of the same name.

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Keith Haring, Cartoonist

Posted on December 21, 2019 by Wim Lockefeer

Keith Haring‘s art has always been special to me in that it is immediately recognisable — the broad, clear lines, the cartoony figures and the pop culture sensibilities set him aside from all his contemporaries.

I didn’t know he also made actual comics, however, until I saw them at the current retrospective in the Brussels Bozar museum. One of them is a quick biographical sketch in seventeen panels, bizarrely ending in his ascending up to heaven. It provides a concise but surprisingly complete overview of his influences and themes, including religion, homosexuality,  drugs, money and, of course, Andy.

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A Quick One?

Posted on December 16, 2019 by Wim Lockefeer

“How about a quick one?” — it’s quite easy for this double entendre to be misinterpreted. But poor little Troll in this ad for Belgian craft beer Cuvée Des Trolls ends up getting his wish, in a way.

(From a men’s room ad, art by Alain Poncelet)

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Come to the vintage side

Posted on December 14, 2019 by Wim Lockefeer

Star Wars merchandise is everywhere, and with the new and final episode of the trilogy-of-trilogies, it’s getting even more omnipresent. What I particularly like about these American Tourister suitcases, is that for once they don’t sport the overused standard promotional imagery for the movies, but rather harken back to the vintage Marvel comics that were published alongside the original trilogy

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Youth was everything in 19th Century Germany

Posted on December 7, 2019 by Wim Lockefeer

Last month we paid a visit to the Felix Nussbaum Haus in Osnabrück, Germany, checking one more thing off the list. This museum was designed by Daniel Libeskind and is fully dedicated to the amazing work of this Jewish painter who was killed in Auschwitz during the last months of the second World War. It is also part of the Osnabrück Museumsquartier, a group of exhibition halls aiming at promoting peace by providing information about the peoples and histories of the world.

In one of the other buildings of the quarter, the Villa Schlikker, I spotted this anonymous little comic. It’s more of a postcard-sized picture story, really, but it does shed some strange light on how Germany pre-WWI looked at life. Not only are church rituals and the military unmissable steps in the path of life, you only had to take time off to go wandering. And after you got married, things went pretty fast. Also, “life” is for men only, naturally.

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In Praise of Yahoo Groups : Craig Thompson

Posted on December 5, 2019 by Wim Lockefeer

Back when the web was young and social media were basically mailing lists, the Ephemerist was a Yahoo Group, with some 30 oddballs sharing comics-related scans and pictures from the most unlikely of places. And as Yahoo Groups are scheduled for a permanent move to that Walhalla that also houses Tripod, GeoCities and most of MySpace, I thought it might not be a bad idea to showcase some of the things we shared back then. 

In the early 2000s Nickelodeon magazine was a veritable haven for young and eager cartoonists, who were allowed almost free rein in between the more traditional comics features. A regular contributor to the magazine was Craig Thompson. Later Craig would shout for the sky with graphic novels like Blankets and Habibi, but here he did nifty formalistic tricks, and lovely parodies on the How Things Work type of features, like this one from June 2001.

For the completists among you, there’s more Yahoo Group recap in our backlog, with posts from May and August 2007 

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Joost Swarte’s Grocery Lists

Posted on December 3, 2019 by Wim Lockefeer

Last month a group of friends and I visited the splendid Joost Swarte Everywhere exhibition in the Kunsthal gallery in Rotterdam. It provided a quite complete overview of Swarte’s oeuvre, paying special attention to his “off-the-page” projects, like buildings, stained glass windows, crockery or figurines, but also many draft versions of his contributions to the New Yorker, early publications, etc. We hadn’t planned to spend two hours there, but we did. You get the idea.

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Listen to Death

Posted on December 1, 2019 by Wim Lockefeer

Neil Gaiman’s Death: The High Cost Of Living was one of the first comics that actually hit me on an emotional level. Before that, comics were funny, or adventurous, but seldom about existence on an almost visceral level. I still reread it regularly, although I seldom take the actual issues out of their sleeves.

A band of voice actors now translated the first issue of that series into an audiodrama that quite nicely captures the varied layers of the comic. I particularly like how Mad Hattie (one of my all time favourite Gaiman characters, together with Bilquis and the Marquis de Carabas) comes to life. Death is chilling though, in her lack of emotion.

Hello again, by the way.

(via Neil Gaiman’s Twitter)

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Data comics marries the nerd and the geek in you

Posted on April 3, 2019 by Wim Lockefeer

At first sight this comic by computer scientist Matt Hong looks like one of Randall Munroe’s more elaborate xkcd gags, but it is something completely new.

This is a comic that tells a simple story, while at the same time providing the reader with actual insights on statistical data, in this case the distribution of activities along a typical American day.

To be honest, it took me a moment to grasp the meaning of the darkened frames, but it is really quite brilliant, poetic even. The graph device allows Hong to tell a fairly mundane story, essentially how an average American spends his day, while immersing it in context and suggesting a whole world around the anecdotal.

I was awestruck by this small gem. It was good enough to awaken the forever hybernating beast that is this blog.

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Nancy breaks the comics page

Posted on March 1, 2019 by Wim Lockefeer

With this comic, current Nancy cartoonist Olivia James proves to her (quite strong-voiced) critics that she is the true successor to Ernie Bushmiller’s throne. Who else will pack breaking the fourth wall, a self-referencing Droste effect and storyboard-like graphics in one single Sunday strip?

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