"Recipient of last year's Best Book award at the prestigious comics festival in Angoulême, France, this French import is an emotion-packed story about a burned-out photographer struggling to connect with the world and a woman. It becomes a book about family history, class struggle, guilt and forgiveness. Charmingly drawn, from the vibrant colors of the French countryside to the dreary suburbs of Paris, and filled with endearing characters, Larcenet's Ordinary Victories has all the attraction and dislocation of a trip abroad."
Time Magazine - Read the full article here.

"I decided some time ago that the term anti-semitism (a 'coined' term of late nineteenth century origin) is completely inadequate to the abhorrent cultural phenomenon which it attempts to describe. For one thing, Arabs are Semites as well and the prejudice as it is generally understood certainly doesn't apply equally to Arabs and Jews. It was in the early stages of researching this graphic narrative that I first encountered the German term 'Judenhass', literally 'Jew hatered'. It seemed to me that the term served to distil the ancient problem to its essence, and in such a way as to hopefully allow other non-Jews (like myself) to see the problem 'unlaundered' and through fresh eyes. Europe and various other jurisdictions aren't experiencing a sudden upsurge in 'anti-semitism'. What they are experiencing is an upsurge in 'Judenhass'. Jew hatered. So that's what I've chosen to call this story."
Dave Sim

"Judenhass is an astonishing piece of work. Painful and real and unflinching. I don't remember the last comic I read that made me cry, but this did."
Neil Gaiman

"To apply the term 'beautiful' to this book may be a misnomer considering the subject matter, but its impact cannot be denied."
Joe Kubert

"Danijel Zezelj is one of the most unique cartoonists of his generation."
Brian Azzarello

"...grabs you by the throat and crushes your windpipe..."
Tim Bradstreet

"Yoshihiro Tatsumi was 19 when he broke into this market. Two years later he helped set up the pivotal magazine Kage [Shadow]. Eager to distinguish what he and his colleagues were producing from the sweeter, more kid-orientated manga, Tatsumi coined the term gekiga [dramatic pictures] in 1957. Founder and master of the form, he was not afraid to use his short story comics to confront the problems plaguing Japanese society: a father preys on his prostitute daughter for money; a wife stifled by her husband and mother-in-law tries to escape from her marriage; an unmarried mother is pressured by her selfish boyfriend to abort their baby into the sewers. Tatsumi's frank unsentimental exposés and compelling realism made his manga some of the first to be put into English..."
Paul Gravett - Read the full gekiga article here.

"An ultraviolet, psychedelic, sherbet bomb of wit and ideas. The superheroes of the 21st Century are here at last..."
Grant Morrison

"Grant has been amazing. The relationship that he, his wife, and I have is very inspiring. It was like finding kindred spirits thousands of miles away and connecting with them. I feel at times like their kid brother. Grant's advice to me has always been simple: just be myself. He had convinced me that I had the ability as a storyteller to connect with people already, said I had already been doing it for years. So just keep doing what I was doing. Also to be fearless, which is what I think of when I think of his work. He also constantly reminds me that I am on this great adventure because of my work and my lifestyle, and to never forget that. He is always pushing me to get the most out of it. I have heard many writers say that writing is like working a muscle-you have to use your muscle every day. Grant's said this to me, and he's correct."
Gerard Way discusses The Umbrella Academy. Read the full interview here.

"I can't understand them, but sometime in 2000, I came to the conclusion that Mjau Mjau was the finest comic-book series of the late 1990's. It's somewhat unfortunate that a substantial amount of what makes them so great has been lost in the translation and publication of just the series' serialized and thematically connected stories. Hey, Wait... belongs on every art-comics reader's shelf, and SSHHHH! is swell, but they give the English readers the impression of Jason being a melancholic funny-animal-drawing Scandinavian, when that's really only part of his picture. In the magazine, these more serious-minded serials are placed with a few graphically inventive and/or wickedly funny shorts - not unlike Maus's relationship to the other material in RAW."
Milo George, The Comics Journal #253

"On The Road becomes On The Track as Oliver continues to tramp, traipse, stroll and slog from station to station, here a stretch of railway from Lostock to Horwich outside Manchester. He takes us along footpaths that peter out, over bridges (one of them billed as 'sexy'), through retail and carpark wastelands, across sodden fields, to the edges of his two contradictory maps and beyond. In a mix of autobiography and psychogeography, Oliver uses a loose, unfussy ink line and washes of watercolour to illustrate a mix of confidential, opinionated travel diary and a survey of this England's odd, sometimes offputting 'ordinary' modern towns. His narrative techniques vary from wordless sequences, for example as he hauls himself whistling along a fallen tree trunk to get over a dried riverbed, to more text-driven passages about a mysterious remote electricity substation or the dubious architectural charms of Chorley. It's a unique use of comics, almost a time capsule of the unrecorded everyday provinces."
Paul Gravett - see www.PaulGravett.com for more reading recommendations.

"If only Mawil was as good with the girls as he is a cartoonist, then we wouldn't have these fun stories about how he isn't so good with the girls. Which is good for us readers, I guess, and if Mawil's adolescent love life had to suffer for the greater good, I'm okay with that. Thank you, Mawil."
Jeffrey Brown, Clumsy, Little Things

"Rory Hayes was the real thing; a genuine 'outsider' artist working alongside his more self-aware compatriots in the heady days of the San Francisco Underground Comix scene of the 1960s and '70s. His work retains its raw, primitive power to this day, teetering precariously between chaos and control, madness and oddly endearing teddy bears."
Bill Griffith

"For some reason my brain never wants to answer this question, as if when I tell someone what it's about it, will take away what meaning it has. People are always asking me at cons to give them my pitch, and my stomach usually turns. The books, movies and music that have the greatest impact on me are those that leave room for interpretation, allowing the reader/viewer/listener room to find themselves in the work, developing a connection rather than just being entertained. That's why I read, listen or watch... to make those connections and to build upon them, to enrich my existence. And I create... to give back, or at least make an attempt. But the short answer I finally came up with for people that might inquire: Observations of childhood isolation and existence in the American Midwest. With giant robots."
Joshua W. Cotter - Read the full interview at The Pulse.

"The Classics Illustrated series that I worked on was a revival (1990-1991) of the 1940s-50s series of comic book adaptations of classic literature. I did three volumes before the enterprise folded: Great Expectations, Wuthering Heights and The Invisible Man."
Rick Geary - Read the full Comics Bulletin interview here.

"This anthology is the one I always hoped we'd get around to. Anyone that knows me knows that robots are my favourite science fiction concept. So this theme was as inevitable as the creation of the first self aware automaton. Oh. Sorry, we've not built that yet. Have we?"
Colin Mathieson

"I've noticed some common misconceptions about OOP in a fair amount of the press we've been getting, and I just wanted to take the opportunity to clarify a few things...

• Some have been under the impression that Out Of Picture was a Blue Sky Studios project or some kind of studio sanctioned book. Simply put, Blue Sky had absolutely nothing to do with the creation of OOP in any way other than being the place where the artists met each other. OOP is the result of a lot of hard work by a bunch of artists who wanted to do something together outside the daily norm of their jobs. Nothing more. Nothing less. In fact, many of the artists involved in OOP work for other studios like Pixar and Disney.

• NONE of the stories in Out Of Picture Vol 1 are from story pitches or movie ideas that Blue Sky discarded. They're all ideas developed by the artists for the book - some longer, some shorter - depending on what kind of time commitment each artist could make to the project.

• NONE of the artists in OOP are animators. Nope, not a one. We are all artists who work/have worked in the animation field, but none of us are or ever were - animators.

I think that hits the most common misconceptions about the book. I don't think any of this really matters much to the content of OOP, but just for the sake of accuracy, I wanted to make sure we were clear about these points."
Out Of Picture Blog - Read the Out Of Picture blog here.

"A few years ago I was in Paris (sigh), gleefully digging through the bandes-dessinées shops in the area around the Sorbonne, when I chanced on a comic album called Sky-Doll. I knew nothing about it, I was just struck by the wonderful drawing and colors. I was unfamiliar with either the artist, Alessandro Barbucci, or the writer/colorist, Barbara Canepa, both from Genoa, Italy. I managed to conjure up enough halting, clumsy French to convey to the proprietor that I was interested in any other comic albums he might have with art by Barbucci, but finally learned that this was the only volume so far and the artist was new. The drawings were lively, fresh, slightly cartoony but highly rendered and with delightfully realized and very imaginative backgrounds and settings. I was immediately taken with the visual joie de vivre and went home happy with my discovery, but disappointed that I couldn't carry home a stack of Barbucci albums with my Moebius, Beltran and Gillon."
Lines & Color - Read the full review here.