A really lovely Sandman painting by the frankly unbelievable Dave McKean. Will be posting a few of his inspirations today, too.
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And while I’m Alex Ross-ing around, here’s another one of my very favorites (got a bunch of these; will put them all up eventually): a hi-res of his all-Kirby, all the time painting from a few years ago.
Also, here is a page from what I—seriously now—truly think is probably the greatest serial comic book ever created, Groo, by Sergio Aragones with Mark Evanier. It’s funny as hell, drawn with a level of sustained technical expertise totally unmatched at its length on any other title, and it even manages to pack a real satircal wallop in its later issues. I love old-fashioned swords-and-sandals adventure stories, and Groo manages to both fulfill that genre and add immeasurably to it at the same time.
Don’t get me wrong, there are better graphic novels, better story arcs and maybe even funnier humor titles (if you can think of one, by all means tell me), but pound for pound, no series has ever managed to maintain such an incredibly high quality for so long. Read the early issues (back before computer coloring), and you can practically hear colorist Tom Luth screaming across the drafting board, “FOR GOD’S SAKE, SERGIO! AFTER THE THIRD TIER THEY’RE JUST ALL GOING TO BE FUCKING BROWN!”
Most Christians seem to be stuck in a time warp where the most recent cultural touchstones available are the Narnia Chronicles. Somebody please notice Stephen Colbert, practically dripping with righteous anger during what is maybe the funniest bit on the funniest show on television. Go, Stephen, go!
(Source: http://www.colbertnation.com/)
And here, for reference, is a great one by Alphonse Mucha, an artist whose work you’re going to recognize if you’ve ever fawned over a great J.H. Williams III layout or enjoyed a good Melinda Gebbie page. He did posters all over New York in the 1920’s, though he was personally Czech. More on him here; consider this clause a reminder to myself to put up some Virgil Finlay and Arthur Rackham so you know where greats like John Totleben and Charles Vess are drawing from, too.
While I’m posting comic art, here’s one of my very favorites: Gene Ha’s beautiful, beautiful cover to one of the sadly never-reprinted ABC Tomorrow Stories specials that wrapped up the loose ends still hanging after Alan Moore finished the half-dozen series he’d created for WildStorm. Enjoy.
Gorgeous Alex Ross cover painting from an ish of Grant Morrison’s bugnuts Batman run, which is arguably the best stuff done with the character since the days of the great, underrated Doug Moench/Kelly Jones team. Interiors by Tony Daniel, which Sandu Florea inked with his ass.
A page from Paul Pope’s unbelievably good Strange Adventures strip in DC’s awesome, AWESOME Wednesday Comics, a full-blown broadsheet newspaper with work by a couple dozen of the best artists and writers working.
Gustave Moreau, Herakles and the Hydra
Good Paul on Bad Paul
William Saletan wrote what may be the single stupidest column in the history of American electoral coverage, which has a long and lamentable history, over at Slate, on the subject of this complete nitwit Paul Ryan.
Paul Krugman, Nobel-winning economist, has a suitably harsh rebuttal over at the NYT on his blog, which is rapidly becoming the best non-arts writing the Times publishes. Here are the money grafs:
“Look, Ryan hasn’t “crunched the numbers”; he has just scribbled some stuff down, without checking at all to see if it makes sense. He asserts that he can cut taxes without net loss of revenue by closing unspecified loopholes; he asserts that he can cut discretionary spending to levels not seen since Calvin Coolidge, without saying how; he asserts that he can convert Medicare to a voucher system, with much lower spending than now projected, without even a hint of how this is supposed to work. This is just a fantasy, not a serious policy proposal.
"So why does Saletan believe otherwise? Has he crunched the numbers himself? Of course not. What he’s doing – and what the whole Beltway media crowd has done – is to slot Ryan into a role someone is supposed to be playing in their political play, that of the thoughtful, serious conservative wonk. In reality, Ryan is nothing like that; he’s a hard-core conservative, with a voting record as far right as Michelle Bachman’s, who has shown no competence at all on the numbers thing.”
GRAPHOMANIA 