Can blog posts go on resumes?

Tom Devlin at the D&Q blog says, “Oh, Jose. Jose Luis Olivares. Our first CCS summer intern this year. Last name eerily close to The Chief’s but we moved past it. As an intern, we rate him most excellent.”

Also, End of Eros has been reviewed by two websites!

Rob Clough from High-Low says, “In particular, he’s fascinated with the way eschatology converges into creation myth… Olivares goes crazy with his monstrous character designs, gleefully approaching this sort of Gnostic idea with a smudgy line and dialogue that devolves into primitive symbology.” In case you need to look up some of those words like I did, start with eschatology.

Ryan Sands over at Same Hat Same Hat says, “The art is rad, and does some really interesting and subtle stuff with panels and layout… Jose is a student at the Center for Cartoon Studies (CCS) and counts heta-uma masters King Terry and Takashi Nemoto among his influences. I also was feeling a definite Hedwig & the Angry Inch animations vibe in this work; Makes sense, since Jose said he’d seen the Hedwig production in Japan!”

Ryan made a sweet flickr set of the book!

Buy End of Eros?

I don’t know anything about Della Humphrey, except that, when she recorded these songs, she was a pre-teen. Which is perfect, a little girl singing idealistic love songs. Her voice is wonderful and sad!

Your Love is All I Need

Don’t Make the Good Girls Go Bad

I’m posting at a group sketch blog, called Joy Teeth, which terms itself a “multi-participant reactive drawing space.” Mmhmm! Check it out!

There’s a really nice Shaun Tan interview this week in the Guardian newspaper. Shaun Tan’s “The Arrival” is one of the best comics I read last year; in fact, it’s one of the few comics that has made me cry (Goodbye, Chunky Rice is another). One thing I love about Tan’s work is that, while it is set in a magical world, it’s grounded. In the interview, Tan says,

“By itself, just to draw crazy creatures has limited appeal – if I had to give up one thing it would be the wild imagination. When the work becomes too detached from ordinary life it starts to fall apart. Fantasy needs to have some connection with reality or it becomes of its own interest only, insular.”

I wrote a little essay for class about the double-page spread pictured above from “The Arrival.” Here’s part of it: “The pages depict giant men vacuuming up terrified citizens in a fantastical European city. It is a terrifying image and really surprised me on the page-turn. It immediately reminded me of the Holocaust. The men are wearing Gestapo-style boots, and their masks look like kilns. The vacuum’s ferocity is a like a gas chamber that kills with grotesque efficiency. The page-spread is like an editorial cartoon against war, with the truth made profound through hyperbole. This is my favorite aspect of the book: it’s a magical universe that recalls reality.”