Zadie Smith and Chris Ware looking at a page of Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth at our closing event of the Fall season.
See more photos from the evening by LIVE photographer Jori Klein here…
Here’s a strip from Jordan Speer titled “Test Pilot”, which lives on the fantastic comics site, What Things Do.
Sneaking in another food panel from John Broadley entitled “Summer Peach” because we have a great announcement!
We’ll be providing some food for the audience at Monday evening’s event with Marcus Samuelsson to accompany the conversation! Learn about his technique and intention while cooking a piece of food as you’re eating a morsel of it. Learn more and get tickets here…
An auto-bio comic from Eleanor Davis about joining the Kayak team when she spent a year in Japan. Forget everything you have to do for the rest of the day and check out her beautiful work.
To continue the comics celebration: a page from Lilli Carré’s Heads or Tails. Be sure to also check out her animated films.
Some panels from Vanessa Davis’ recipe comic over at Saveur’s fantastic stash of them.
(Speaking of food! come to our event on Monday with chef Marcus Samuelsson. Learn more and get tickets here…)
Building Stories carries, in its box of 14 books, pamphlets and Möbius comic strips, a certain buffer against criticism. Forster said, “One always tends to overpraise a long book, because one has got through it,” and I’m fearful of a related effect here. Ware’s work is so impressive – the composition, the structure, the detail, the art – that it’s tempting to switch off critical faculties; or, worse, fail to notice that they’ve been switched off. (Hang on though, that doesn’t sound so bad.) At the same time, why should a publication as different as this be judged in the same terms as those anodyne, anaemic books without pictures?
But the format also troubled me a little. A collection of stories to be read in any order always risks seeming like an abdication of responsibility by the writer, though I admit that my response (“Just tell me what order to read it in!”) might be mostly to do with my own completist and obsessive impulses….Yet the conceit worked for me. There seemed to be a direction built in to my random reading order: from the gold-spined hardcover which introduces the main characters, through cycles in the life of the main heroine, to a literally tear-jerking conclusion – spliced with episodes from the life of Branford, the Best Bee in the World.
—John Self reviews Chris Ware’s new collection, Building Stories.
Ware will be at LIVE on December 11 with Zadie Smith to discuss Building Stories alongside NW. Learn more and get tickets here…
“That was only a practice NO, I’m afraid…”
Today would have been Moomin creator Tove Jansson’s 98th Birthday.
