Jonathan Barnbrook is a British graphic designer and typographer perhaps best known for his long collaboration with singer / songwriter David Bowie. The “Everything” image is taken from Barnbrook’s lyric video for the final song “I Can’t Give Everything Away,” on Bowie’s final album, Blackstar (2016). Check out Barnbrook’s CD packaging for Bowie albums Heathen (2002), Reality (2003), The Next Day (2013), and Blackstar (2016). And browse Barnbrook’s website to see his other visual projects.

Courtesy of Avery Kaplan at Comics Beat: Since December 2020, writer Ron Cacace and artist Vincent Lovallo have made Bite Sized Archie for the Archie Comics site. Bite Sized Archie features the Riverdale cast as children in 3-4 panel gags that mix trendy humor (jokes about manga and memes) with the rhythms of a daily newspaper comic strip. (Some of the jokes also depend on readers knowing the personalities of Archie, Betty, Jughead, and the rest of the gang.) As Kaplan reports, Bite Sized Archie is so popular it’s already carried on the cartoon aggregate Tinyview and has spawned a collection of the first sixteen strips on the digital comics distribution site Comixology (though all the strips remain available for free here).

Let’s check in with sites that constantly give us new posts about art and visual culture. On NeoText, the prolific and knowledgeable Chloe Maveal writes about Justice League artist Kevin Maguire (that’s his parade of League faces) and the unstoppable cartoonist Ramona Fradon. (You can find other essays, especially on movies, at the main NeoText page, though not all the material is appropriate for young readers.) If you’ve fallen behind with Steven Heller’sDaily Heller” column at Print, catch up by reading his annual commencement address, his interview with Maurice Sendak expert and friend Justin G. Schiller, and his tribute to British graphic designer Ken Garland (1929-2021). And First Second’s Sketch School videos continue with Ann Xu drawing the main character of Shadow Life, her graphic novel collaboration with writer Hiromi Goto, and “inter-dimensional cartoonist” Dave Roman drawing Doug Hiro, one of the students in his Astronaut Academy series of books.

 

Like so many other museums during the pandemic, the Burchfield Penney Art Museum in my hometown of Buffalo, NY stepped up, providing virtual art activities during months of isolation. Named after painter Charles Burchfield (whose Gateway to September [1946-56] is above), and specializing in artists connected to Western New York (including the underground cartoonist Spain Rodriguez, who work is not for kids), the Burchfield Penney has a number of resources on its website: images from its permanent collection, virtual tours and performance videos, and art projects for children and families. Browse around!

 

King Features Syndicate, one of the biggest distributors of comic strips to newspapers, sponsors a monthly YouTube webisode called Drawn Together, where Rhymes with Orange cartoonist Hilary Price jams with another King Features artist. (So far, she’s teamed up with Rina Piccolo and Brian Gordon.) Also on the King Features YouTube channel are older Saturday morning cartoons featuring characters like the Defenders of the Earth (with The Phantom and Mandrake the Magician), Krazy Kat, and Prince Valiant. King Features also runs a website (Comics Kingdom) that makes available for free recent installments of all the comic strips they distribute, including The Amazing Spider-Man, Bizarro, Curtis, Mutts, Sally Forth, and Zippy the Pinhead. Perhaps the strangest strip I found on the King Features site is Flash Forward, a weekly tribute to Flash Gordon by an ever-changing roster of artists: above is an installment drawn by underground comix publisher and artist Denis Kitchen, and below is a Flash Forward by cartoonist and children’s book illustrator Liniers.

After self-publishing his comic Optic Nerve from 1991-95, artist/writer Adrian Tomine brought the title to publisher Drawn & Quarterly. The stories in both the self-published and D & Q Optic Nerves have been collected in several books: 32 Stories (1995), Sleepwalk and Other Stories (1998), Summer Blonde (2002), Shortcomings (2007), and Killing and Dying (2015). Tomine’s most recent work is the painfully funny autobiographical graphic novel The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist (2020).

Tomine also works as an illustrator for various outlets, including The New Yorker magazine. The June 14, 2021 issue features one of his covers, titled “Easing Back”—it’s the image of the woman hanging a coat in her closet—and New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly interviewed Tomine about the pandemic-themed, cautiously optimistic piece on the New Yorker site.

Below are a few of Tomine’s other New Yorker covers, all exhibiting his understated, ironic humor.

This weekly blog post is written and compiled by Craig Fischer. To send along recommendations, ideas, and comments, contact Craig at [email protected] [.]

Playhouse Comics Club, Issue #59 (June 11, 2021)Playhouse Comics Club, Issue #61 (June 25, 2021)
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