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A weekly round-up of our tweets about comics and education.

Monologues for Calculating the Density of Black Holes is another one of those almost-indescribable works which we seem to like a lot (she figures out after having to try to describe a whole bunch of them). A blank-faced guy and a scribble-headed guy walk through various landscapes, tell jokes, encounter tall hipsters, robots, guys in suits, the occasional woman, and god—who owns a laundromat/health club/daycare center on the Southwest Side, apparently.

If you were at the NECAC conference last weekend and are visiting this site for the first time: welcome, and please have a look around!

“Delia’s Love” is a story of down-and-outness and complicated romantic ans sexual history. It’s told sensitively, and with subtlety, despite the sometimes harsh subject matter. No character comes off as either entirely hero or victim, and that’s how I like it.

This story is about young Corinne and her imaginary witches. Although it’s drawn in a sort of whimsical, children’s book illustration style, it’s really genuinely affecting on an adult level. Maybe it’s because I can imagine my own daughter having fears like this in a few years, it’s hard not to imagine how truly terrifying these witches must have been for Corinne.

I feel very strongly that I have a responsibility, in fact, to young artists trying to break into the business. So, when I am putting together an anthology, I now make a point of including someone whose work hasn’t been published before (or, at least, not in any kind of significant way). It’s a karma thing.

A book/world made of more-or-less interrelated short stories that mix banal everyday rhythms with the absurd and the psychedelic by an author to keep an eye on.

A weekly round-up of our tweets about comics and education.

A series of variations and transformations of what is perhaps the single most-parodied page of comics ever, the famous “Insult that Made a Man out of ‘Mac'” comic used to advertise the Charles Atlas correspondence bodybuilding course in old comic books. The original comic is opened to new vistas of post-modernism, literary allusion, absurdist humor, and even a touch of the poetic.

The thrill of reading Andrei Molotiu’s abstract comics is in watching images and rhythms and hints of narrative coalesce and then dissolve as you read. And each time you re-read them you get a different experience.

Maggie McKnight’s “Swingin'” is a glancing look at a few moments in her life tied together by a family wedding. I especially like how McKnight fluidly interlaces flashback with various contemporary incidents, and how she lets little bits of information pile up without comment to organically create our sense of the event.

This story reads like either the last few or first few pages of a great Mike Mignola occult adventure tale. Perhaps he plans more of the Witchfinder adventures? Oh, wait, that’s exactly what this is: a prequel to the Witchfinder series now running. In classic Mignola style, it inserts a presumably completely fictional character, and (obviously) fictional occult doings, into actual history, in this case, in Victorian England. This opens up new frontiers for him of telling 19th-Century analogues to his Hellboy stories.

A few weeks ago, I had my students draw comics. I paid special attention to the silence in the room. What I learned is that the silence is not just an aural quality, but a posture, and, perhaps an embodiment of cartooning, and one that offers particular advantages in the classroom.

The daddy of a cute adorable bear family has some kind of disorder where his cute adorable big eyes have grown to grotesque proportions. Cute has its limits. But what’s best is that the story is it then takes the silly premise literally, and gets all thoughtful and existential on us.

A weekly round-up of our tweets about comics and education.

Comics are a character-driven medium, so if a character looks and acts exactly the same as all the others—superheroes wearing spandex, alternative types exuding negativity—then something is gravely wrong. Wrong and boring. As someone else put it: “we need to do violence to the cliché, create havoc with the tried, the tired and tested”.

The attention to detail as well as the balance between image, narration, and dialogue make Ellen Lindner’s history of Western civilization’s relationship with eyewear an exemplary non-fiction comic.

Subtitled, “An American Girl’s Adventures in the Israeli Army,” Jobnik! is a memoir about the collusion of post-adolescent hormones with institutional bureaucracy and Middle East Conflict-inspired anxiety. Drawn in an unusual, somewhat-naive pencil style, it’s an inside look at a life most of us will never see.

Digging through old photos is fun, but I also realized there are lots that have some comics, cartoonist, or comics scene relevance, so I decided to start posting them on our Flickr feed. I don’t expect the project to go quickly, but there’s a lot we’ll be doing over the next few months. Here’s the first set, from waaay back in 2000, when I was invited out to the DNC 2000 (in LA) by the LA Weekly to do a comic strip every day for their special “LA Weekly Daily”.

I am…at a loss. How to describe this unbelievably weird, fast-moving, violent, entertaining story? Not sure it’s really possible, but let’s try.

This mini is a two-fer, “Food” a creepy/funny tale of extraterrestrial dinner swiping, and “Fall” a pretty reimagining of the seasonal gods who walk among us, and what might happen if they were to decide to change their minds about things. Very strange layouts that just…might…work at play here, as well. Worthy of study.

Keith Knight’s K Chronicles are consistently funny and worth checking out. This two-pager, comparing parenting to cartooning and available online via MDHP’s semi-annoying flash viewer, is a standout.

A weekly round-up of our tweets about comics and education.

I love the double meaning of the title: Rabbi Kahn dies, and it turns out he’s not a rabbi at all; he’s not even Jewish. His life was a big con. This causes obvious problems for his very Jewish family, especially his oldest son, also a rabbi, who now must question everything, and proceeds to do so.

Victor Kerlow is one of the most prolific and talented young artists we’ve encountered in a long time. Seems like every time I turn around, I run across another of his slightly creepy, off-kilter tales. These two are the strongest of the BAC 2010 lot (meaning of course Sept 1, 2008-Aug 31, 2009).

I Kill Giants is the tale of a very angry 5th-grade girl living in her fantasies (of being a giant-killer) and thus holding the world, and especially any attempts to get emotionally close to her, at bay. It’s told very inventively and convincingly, and Barbara, the main character, is very appealing despite, and because of, her aggression.

A short, sweet, truly horrible tale of soup. You’ll never eat your veggies again!

Jin & Jam is about two disaffected teens creating somewhat-surreal chaos to make their suburban (OK, San Jose) life less ordinary. The details are funny (conjoined twins, fights over french fries) but it’s the elegant drawing that really sets this one apart.

A weekly round-up of our tweets about comics and education. Featuring a series of tweets with links to literary journals that publish comics.

A strange little story about an apparently-medieval peasant woman with a unique problem. It takes a few minutes to orient yourself and figure out what’s going on, but then it’s really quite touching.