Drawn

Gallery Nucleus has a wonderful gallery online of a recent exhibit of original drawings from Sanjay Patel’s book Ramayana: Divine Loophole.

Confessions of a Book Fiend by Grant Snider

Who Ate All the Pies? - a book of football chants from Mark Long

Vancouver’s Robin McConnell hosts Inkstuds, a weekly radio show on UBC’s CiTR where he and his co-hosts interview notable artists from the alt-comics field.

He has recently compiled transcriptions of 27 of these interviews for a new book, the logically titled Inkstuds (Conundrum Press, 280pp, $20, softcover).

Some of the better-known subjects include Chester Brown, Seth, Joe Sacco, Mary Fleener, Jaime Hernandez, and Gary Panter. The interviews are presented without any introductory preamble or parenthetical insertions; McConnell assumes a certain depth of knowledge on the reader’s part.

(via Inkstuds spotlights alt-comics luminaries | Straight.com)

Diary Comics #1 by Dustin Harbin

Are you reading Dustin Harbin’s comics yet? The first volume of his Diary Comics from Koyama Press is one of my favourite books of the year.

As with other diary comics — and I’m thinking of James Kochalka’s American Elf here — their strength is in numbers. It can be difficult to make every day seem interesting, and minutae can only take one so far. But when you read all of them together as a whole, suddenly you’ve got something far greater — like puzzle pieces coming together to form a larger picture. And in the case of Dustin, you can also see how his rhythms and even the art improve over time as he settles into the practice.

Art directors, take note. Judging by the quality of the sketches he includes in each book, he has far too much time on his hands, and not enough illustration gigs. Get on that.

Just in time for Halloween! I am a huge fan of Ryan Heshka’s work, and his new children’s book Welcome to Monster Town looks like another winner.