Anders Nilsen Interprets John Wyndham!

Anders Nilsen Interprets John Wyndham!

In lieu of our regular weekly USEREVIEW posts, we at CAROUSEL will be using each Wednesday in December to highlight just a few of the many exciting artistic projects that former contributors have been at work on outside of the pages of our magazine. Up now: Anders Nilsen’s covers for new reissues of classic John Wyndham books! Past CAROUSEL contributor Anders Nilsen is the Los Angeles-based artist & author of ten books including Big Questions, The

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Hey Witch

Hey Witch

In lieu of our regular weekly USEREVIEW posts, we at CAROUSEL will be using each Wednesday in December to highlight just a few of the many exciting artistic projects that former contributors have been at work on outside of the pages of our magazine. Up first: Hey Witch! Pottery & Art by Jessica Bromley Bartram. CAROUSEL contributor Jessica Bromley Bartram is an illustrator, graphic designer and artist based in Ottawa, Ontario. We’ve featured her work

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From the Archive: Cole Closser ‘A Drip in the  Mouth of a Horse’ Interview (CAROUSEL 39)

From the Archive: Cole Closser ‘A Drip in the Mouth of a Horse’ Interview (CAROUSEL 39)

American cartoonist Cole Closser has been called a master of “butchered quotes and borrowed styles” — a man whose ink-stained dreams tend to have a yellowed, nostalgic residue covering them, and whose drawing style is constantly in a state of technical re-examination and flux. Like the abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock — who is said to have noticed a drip in the mouth of a horse in Picasso’s mural-sized oil painting Guernica, and from that

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From the Archive: Jessica Bromley Bartram (CAROUSEL 39)

From the Archive: Jessica Bromley Bartram (CAROUSEL 39)

JESSICA BROMLEY BARTRAM Skyscrapers When the city sleeps, it emerges, unfurling cloudlike from a ravine and stepping carefully over grumbling streets. Bleary-eyed drivers blink it away, their brains filled with thoughts of home or the next city, naming it Bridge Shadow or Passing Tree. Its missteps leave cars covered in stormy grey streaks that refuse to fade, drivers whose peripheral vision is now filled with flickering shadows, almost-forms almost visible if only they could turn

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From the Archive: Dash Shaw Interview (CAROUSEL 39)

From the Archive: Dash Shaw Interview (CAROUSEL 39)

“I wanted to be destroyed … and reborn.” Dash Shaw credits these words to a tattered old comic book, near the end of Cosplayers, a recent collection of his own comics about fan culture, cartooning history, creativity, and female friendship. Shaw’s teen girl protagonists have lucked into a stash of funnybooks by the legendary Jack ‘King’ Kirby (1917–1994), co-creator of the Fantastic Four, Captain America, and, in this instance, the 2001 comic book adaptation. Heedless

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From the Archive: Anders Nilsen Interview (CAROUSEL 37)

From the Archive: Anders Nilsen Interview (CAROUSEL 37)

Anders Nilsen is a notable American graphic novelist whose works include Big Questions, Dogs and Water, Don’t Go Where I Can’t Follow, Rage of Poseidon, The End, and others. In Poetry is Useless, his latest book, Nilsen redefines the sketchbook format, intermingling elegant, densely detailed renderings of mythical animals, short comics drawn in ink, meditations on religion, and abstract shapes and patterns. This expansive ‘sketchbook-as-graphic-novel’ reveals seven years of Nilsen’s life and musings: it covers

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From the Archive: “But the mouse can make a nest in you”: Richard Kraft + Danielle Dutton Interviewed (CAROUSEL 37)

From the Archive: “But the mouse can make a nest in you”: Richard Kraft + Danielle Dutton Interviewed (CAROUSEL 37)

Los Angeles artist Richard Kraft’s Here Comes Kitty: A Comic Opera is a wildly irreverent collage narrative that challenges at every turn. To create his dreamlike paper opera, Kraft worked directly over an issue of Kapitan Kloss — a Cold War comic about a Polish spy infiltrating the Nazis — superimposing a cast of strange new voices and characters on top of it. “A riot of images and words”, the resulting project is arbitrary, inventive and

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From the Archive: Justin Stephenson ‘The Complete Works’ Interview (CAROUSEL 37)

From the Archive: Justin Stephenson ‘The Complete Works’ Interview (CAROUSEL 37)

Filmmaker Justin Stephenson took fifteen years to carefully create The Complete Works — a labour of love that creatively adapts the work of internationally acclaimed avant-garde poet bpNichol. From comic book detective stories & westerns to documentaries & magic realism, and from hand-drawn animation to computer-generated images, The Complete Works wrestles Nichol’s writing off the page and projects it onto the screen. It uses bpNichol’s poetic methods on Nichol himself to create a film that

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From the Archive: gustave morin ‘Clean Sails’ interview (CAROUSEL 36)

From the Archive: gustave morin ‘Clean Sails’ interview (CAROUSEL 36)

Canadian ‘para-literary agent provocateur’ gustave morin has been working in the fields of composition & performance for the last twenty years. As a maker of concrete, found, collage, typewriter & sound poetry, his creative practice always manages to the blur the borders between poetry & visual art, offering up startling hybrid works that resist conventional reading. Clean Sails, a 164 page volume of visually complex, next-generation typewriter poems composed using dozens of different typewriters — the

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From the Archive: Little That Can Be Done with the Pen Cannot Be Repeated with the Typewriter (CAROUSEL 36)

From the Archive: Little That Can Be Done with the Pen Cannot Be Repeated with the Typewriter (CAROUSEL 36)

“The paper has to be turned and re-turned, and twisted in a thousand different directions, and each character and letter must strike precisely in the right spot. Often, just as some particular sketch is on the point of completion, a trifling miscalculation, or the accidental depression of the wrong key, will totally ruin it, and the whole thing has to be done over again.” — Pitman’s Phonetic Journal, October 1898 The typewriter has long signified

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From the Archive: Klaus Pichler ‘All Dressed Up with Nowhere to Go’ (CAROUSEL 35)

From the Archive: Klaus Pichler ‘All Dressed Up with Nowhere to Go’ (CAROUSEL 35)

Viennese photographer Klaus Pichler’s intimate photo series, Just the Two of Us, aims to reveal the people beneath a variety of costumes without unmasking them. For adults, the act of dressing up in costume is most often associated with some form of social activity. It’s a spectacle, a transformative activity that grants us permission to temporarily play out a fantasy role in the everyday world. Costumes and disguises permit people to act in ways that

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From the Archive: Michael Morris ‘City Deluxe’ portfolio (CAROUSEL 34)

From the Archive: Michael Morris ‘City Deluxe’ portfolio (CAROUSEL 34)

Certainly one of Canada’s most recognized artists, Michael Morris first came to prominence in the 1960s as a leading member of Vancouver’s burgeoning avant-garde. Inspired in part by the ideals of Fluxus and Pop Art, he became associated with a generation of artists who consciously rejected the national lyrical landscape tradition that had dominated the region’s art making, opting instead to work in a fully international idiom. As a creator, Morris has worked in a

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From the Archive: Kioskerman Interview (CAROUSEL 34)

From the Archive: Kioskerman Interview (CAROUSEL 34)

Cartoon minimalist Pablo Holmberg — better known in Argentina under his pen name Kioskerman — makes four-panel comics that elude easy description. His darkly romantic strip series Edén appears in Spanish every week on his website, offering readers an ideal mix of weight & whimsy. Interview conducted October, 2014 You’ve been publishing strips on the Internet since 2004; why did you decide to start a web-comic?I was reading Tony Millionaire’s Maakies and Kaz’s Underworld online

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From the Archive: Chip Kidd ‘Gasp! You Did It!’ Interview (CAROUSEL 33)

From the Archive: Chip Kidd ‘Gasp! You Did It!’ Interview (CAROUSEL 33)

Chip Kidd is a man of many talents, with an insider’s perspective on pop culture. Universally recognized as an American master of contemporary book design — USA Today once described him as “the closest thing to a rock star” in the graphic design world — his iconic covers offer an inventive marriage of type and found images. In addition, Kidd’s work as an editor of books of comics for the mass market have helped to

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