Category Archives: Words and Pictures
ABC News: Nathan O. Marsh’s Alphabet Apocrypha
Attention abecedarians: absolutely aching to access awesome alphabetic art? Attendez: Alphabet Apocrypha. Formerly titled Alphabet Horror Vacui, Nathan O. Marsh’s illustrated alphabetic cabinet of curiosities is a dark and wonderful marvel. His comic, rendered in crowquill pen and ink and watercolor, harkens back to naturalist engravings of yore, but Marsh’s alliterative inventions bounce back and [...]
On Edward Gorey, George Herriman, and Creative DNA
Eve Bowen’s recent NYRBlog article on collecting Edward Gorey is full of enough eclectic links and images to make any fan happy. It also reminded me that I only had a few more days to catch “Gorey Preserved” at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library. RBML is my former employer, and I’d been seeing [...]
Alison Bechdel: My BFF in the NYT
Everybody has a secret creative BFF, right? Someone whose writing or art you adore, who loves the same things you love, whose aesthetic influences are just the same as yours. Which is not exactly the same as being a fan. And writing a fan letter—almost always a good thing to do when someone inspires or [...]
Something for the Fourth: The Artillery Book
Where once I was the kind of bad urban teenager who bought paper bags of fireworks from shifty kids in Chinatown dealing out of the back of their parents’ kitchens, now I’m the cranky kind of broad who worries about the neighborhood kids setting her roof on fire, and is just as glad if the [...]
Train of Thought: The Underground New York Public Library
I’ve lived in New York for a long, long time, and while there are obvious things to hate about it—the dirt, the inequity, the weather, the armies of the oblivious, both native and tourist varieties—I have never not loved it here. Part of that is about the resources, the ready culture, but a lot of [...]
Naked Nun Marginalia
Just when I thought I didn’t have anything tonight, Kat sent me this fabulous find from Got Medieval concerning naked nun marginalia. Yes, you got that right. Apparently the manuscript in question, the Rothschild Canticles, was written for a nun at the turn of the 14th century. But in addition to the usual devotional illuminations, [...]
A Circus for Your Eyes: The New York Art Book Fair
I spent the last couple of days volunteering at the New York Art Book Fair and I’m pleased to report back that printed matter is alive and thriving. Not just Printed Matter Inc., the artists’ book gallery that sponsors the event—although it’s still flourishing at its handsome space in Manhattan—but the whole of it: art [...]
4CP for You and Me
This kind of straddles the edge of literary, but it’s too beautiful to miss: John Hilgart’s blog 4CP takes fragments of vintage comic books and blows them up into wonderful abstract pieces. They go beyond the evocations of Peter Max and Roy Lichtenstein that you might expect, into a realm of the truly weird and [...]
Words and Pictures: WE3
WE3 Written by Grant Morrison, drawn by Frank Quitely Vertigo Comics, 2004 I first stumbled on WE3 in the Comickazee review section at Paper Darts, stopped in my tracks by the cover art: a cyborg dog, cat, and rabbit in Easter egg-colored armor. While the “Western Manga” label didn’t grab me, the echo of all [...]
