"I am convinced, both by faith and experience, that to maintain one's self on this earth is not a hardship, but a pastime, if we will live simply and wisely."
Henry David Thoreau, 1845

"James Sturm, the director of the Center and editor of the series, gave me a call - he was trying to plan out this series of books. I was flattered. Thoreau is probably one of my biggest heroes and to get to immerse myself in his work and find a way to present it to people today was thrilling. All the text in the book is from Thoreau's published writing. I took the liberty of recontextualizing things - one panel might be from Walden, one from something he wrote at another time. I edited portions of his writing. There is a narrative there, but there is also an impression of his philosophy. I took the liberty of re-aligning things to tell this particular story."
John Porcellino - Read the full interview here.

"Intense but relatively brief, it might have seemed minor and slight in prose only and risked being marginalised or overlooked. But Almond's enthusiasm for the graphic novel form led to Dave McKean being given free rein to interpret and enhance it visually and the resulting fusion, billed as "an extraordinary graphic novel within a novel", proves doubly affecting."
Paul Gravett - Read the full review here.

"Swiss cartoonist Ott employs neither dialogue nor captions in his stories; words appear rarely, usually as chapter titles or signs in the background. Appropriately, Ott uses the early silent cinema as a motif... In keeping with the silent movie motif, Ott uses black, white and grays, enveloping his realistically drawn characters and settings in an expressionistic mood. The characters initially display understated emotions, and their situations seem familiar. Ott's storytelling moves at a slow but steady pace, making his protagonists' extreme reactions more believable when they, and the readers, are caught in Ott's imaginatively conceived, masterfully executed traps."
Publishers Weekly

"A tour de force of line art, we are seduced into another cryptic plot full of understated menace."
RC Harvey, Comics Buyer's Guide

Awkward documents the 9th grade: Ariel's sophomore year in high school in Berkeley, California. Stories revolve around friendships gained and lost and obsessions with Juliette Lewis and bands like L7 and Marilyn Manson. Definition documents the 10th grade: anxiety in excess and frustration to the fullest. It's the tale of one girls plow through this tumultuous year featuring all fervent obsessions from glitter laden girls to ionic charges, and the constant pursuit of the number one score.

"One of the secrets of Potential's appeal is that it cannily combines the drive, raunch, and imagination of the best fiction with near-anthropological realness... a mesmerizing read... a nakedly honets exploation of desire and the whole range of emotions it can set offf... hilarious frankness and a wickedly addictive sense of storytelling... Potential remains a vibrant testament to a year that was both lovely as a kiss and hard as a stone."
Village Voice

"If the Narwhal is the unicorn of the sea, then Invincible Summer is the unicorn of zines. Horny and crass, like a drunken sailor, Nicole Georges draws and writes as eloquently as the reciting of a dirty limerick. She's as funny and wrong as she is rhythmic and catchy. With her trusty companion Bieja the dog, Georges has set out on a journey across Portland and beyond to help animal kind, to gossip and taunt, to sew and discover, and to rock the karaoke mic with her salty salty moves. I love Invincible Summer so much. I suggest reading it on the porch in the rain, with a small menagerie, and a really really strong cup of coffee. Hooray!"
Aaron Renier, author of Spiral-Bound

"The main character of the story works as an “Assistant Language Teacher” (or ALT) at a rural junior high school. I previously worked as an ALT on the Japanese government-sponsored 'JET Program' (Japanese Exchange and Teaching), so it goes without saying that a lot of my own experiences shaped this story. But by and large, I think the similarities between my real life and the story are anecdotal. This is the most fictional comic I've written in years, and crafting the somewhat complex story has been alternately fun, frustrating, and illuminating. I've been working on this thing for a little over four years now. Out of the planned four parts, I've finished the first part and about 8% of the second part, so I'm a little over a quarter of the way through the whole thing. Were I to continue at this breakneck pace, it'd take me another 12 years to finish the whole thing. God, how depressing. Granted, part of the reason it took me so long to get this far is because for the first three years I was working as an ALT full-time. But no matter how you spin it, it takes me a loooong time to finish a comic book. Yet another reason why I feel it's important to devote myself to comics full-time..."
Lars Martinson on Tonoharu

"Visually, I knew from the beginning that I didn't want to draw a book that's all blue. I wanted to do the opposite of what I had seen in comics dealing with the same story premise. I've always hated most of the Aquaman and Namor comics, but loved the idea of them. I remember being especially fond of Namor (Oddly enough, Namor's creator was from Massachusetts like myself) since he was such an anti-hero. I guess the art and direction just never pushed the right buttons for me. So without saying too much, Aqua Leung follows very few "rules" of underwater Atlantis-based comics, and generally throws the book out the window as far as what these characters are allowed to do, and how they interact with their surroundings. Using the opportunity of drawing a book in a different "world" to explore things artistically that homage some of the great fantasy stories I remember as kid, such as Fantastic Planet or the Point."
Paul Maybury discusses Aqua Leung at Newsarama - Read the full interview here.

It's hard to describe the Toon works... except perhaps to say that they're very confident in their comics format; reading them feels new yet also brings with it a notion of 'Well, of course this is what chapter books for kids in comics form would look like.'"
Tom Spurgeon, The Comics Reporter - Read the full article here.

"Chester Gould, who created Tracy, and both illustrated and wrote his adventures for the first 46 of those 75 years, was born in Pawnee, Oklahoma, in 1900. His father was a small-town newspaper publisher, and early on, Gould decided he wanted to be a newspaperman, too. Unlike his dad, though, Gould, fascinated with comic strips from his early childhood, formed an ambition to be a cartoonist. At 16 he made his first sale, a one-panel gag about a soldier and a farm-worker each envying the other, which appeared in the national magazine The American Boy. He went on to do editorial and sports cartoons for his dad's paper, slowly building up his resume. His ultimate goal was to have a nationally syndicated cartoon feature."
Jim Doherty from '75 Years Of Continous Crime-Stopping' - Read the full article here.

"The humor is a wickedly authentic blend of young-professional-bachelor shtick and pets-from-hell high jinks... And, perhaps best of all, the strip keeps getting better."
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

"This strip is the culmination of a life's worth of dreams. I'm using the opportunity to entertain, enlighten, and be the trembly voice of the socially awkward everywhere."
Cory Thomas

"I feel I'm just an illustrator. I have no philosophy behind what I do except to try to evoke the sensibilities of the thing illustrated. I like presenting a world that feels full grown, as if there's more beyond the edges of the picture frame. Fantasy and Sci-Fi Art is easier than Historical Art in the fact that in F&SF Art I can make things up that suggest reality as opposed to doing tons of historical research to nail reality."
Michael Wm. Kaluta - Read the full interview here.

"Anxious purchasers of the lavish Lovecraft art book from Centipede Press may like to know that the European signing sheets have arrived here safely ready to be scrawled upon by yours truly. I was surprised to find that these are big pages which means this book is going to be a real monster in all."
John Coulthart

"Ron English has made quite a reputation for himself as an artist who doesn't play by the rules of polite society. He's been called the Robinhood of Madison Avenue for his seminal work in billboard subvertising and is widely considered, along with San Francisco's  legendary Billboard Liberation Front, to be a founding member of the Culture Jamming movement."
Juxtapoz Magazine

"I'm starting it the same way I started Cerebus. Three bi-monthly issues and we'll see how it goes from there."
Dave Sim

"Simply put, Bob Levin has written one of the best researched and most compelling books ever devoted to cartooning history."
Jeet Heer on Bob Levin's The Pirates & The Mouse - Read the full article here.