Nicholas Burman

Dec 17, 2024 | tcj.com | Nicholas Burman

Kate Carew: America's First Great Woman Cartoonist is a carefully compiled, linear history of Carew's career, authored by veteran comics legend Eddie Campbell, with help from the titular artist's granddaughter, Christine Chambers. Packed with examples of Carew's work from across her career, it feels beefier than its 160 pages. Born Mary Williams in the late 1860s, Carew would work for papers and magazines on both U.S. coasts and in London.

Dec 9, 2024 | solrad.co | Hagai Palevsky |Elias Rosner |Nicholas Burman |Hank Kennedy

There are, broadly speaking, two ways to listen to the 1968 song “Do It Again” by the Beach Boys. If you listen to it on its own, paying little attention to the rest of the Beach Boys’ discography up until that point, then all you’re getting is an effort that, though largely straightforward, is incredibly charming and compelling, a highlight of late-’60s pop-rock.

Dec 2, 2024 | solrad.co | Elias Rosner |Nicholas Burman |Hank Kennedy |Hagai Palevsky

Mary Tyler MooreHawk opens, after a publisher’s note about a fictional other publisher, with an introduction from Dave Baker, ostensibly the artist behind this graphic novel, informing us that, no, he did not create this book. It was mailed to him from the future. We learn, eventually, that a different Dave Baker – TWO Dave Bakers, in fact – from the future – a future? – created the contents of Mary Tyler MooreHawk. Perhaps one of them is future him. Perhaps not. It’s unclear. That is fine.

Nov 26, 2024 | tcj.com | Nicholas Burman

Dave Cooper has made a career out of creating work that makes you look twice. At first glance his comics could be mistaken for a still from a Fleischer Studios cartoon, one where the artist has been given a little more free reign than usual, perhaps. Then you check again, and start to see the weirdness of it all - the unusual bulging bodies, characters who seem elated, but are actually deeply disturbed.

Nov 18, 2024 | solrad.co | Nicholas Burman |Hank Kennedy |Hagai Palevsky |Alex Hoffman

The horror genre often draws on illness and disease as a thematic vein made (meta)physical through metaphor. See, for example, how Coppola, in his rendition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, draws attention to how the vampire trope is related to our concerns regarding diseases transmitted by blood. Maybe it is because an illness itself feels alien, so much like an invasion or attack upon our corporal sovereignty, that it is so pregnant with possibilities for those who produce horror.