Today, May 7, is Free Comic Book Day, 2016! Participating comic book shops will be giving away a selection of special promotional comic books, designed to introduce new readers both to those individual titles and to the fun of reading comics in general. Find a local participating shop by zip code on this Store Locator. […]
Tomorrow, Saturday, May 2, is Free Comic Book Day 2015. Participating comic book shops (which you can look up by zip code on this Store Locator), will be giving away a selection of special promotional comic books, designed to introduce new readers both to those individual titles and to the fun of reading comics in […]
Here in the U.S., tomorrow, Saturday, May 5, is Free Comic Book Day, a yearly opportunity for those who love comics to pick up some free promotional titles prepared by publishers large and small to promote their lines. More importantly, it’s an opportunity for those who aren’t familiar with the current state of comic books […]
Tomorrow, Saturday, May 7, 2011 is Free Comic Book Day here in the U.S. Once again a chance for comic book shops to open their doors to the curious and unaccustomed, hold special events, creator signings and sales; and for publishers to show off their wares in special titles and editions created for the occasion, […]
Once again, the first Saturday in May, this Saturday, May 2, 2009, is (Hooray!) Free Comic Book Day! Comic book shops across the U.S. will offer a number of free comics, published specially to be given away as examples of the publishers’ lines. Many shops also hold creator signings, sales and other special events. For […]
Today is, once again, Free Comic Book Day! Comic book stores around the U.S. are giving away free copies of comics that a variety of publishers have created just for the occasion. Aside from the obvious pleasure of picking up a free comic (or two, or more, depending on the store), is the nature of […]
OK, so maybe you haven’t picked up a comic book since you were 12, and you’re so past that; or maybe you’ve never picked up a comic book and you’re so beyond that; or maybe you just associate comics with steroidal aberrations in spandex bashing into one another like runaway freight trains and you’re so […]
Update: This year’s Free Comic Book Day! is past, but you may still find this post worth reading, both for my suggestions for why comic books may be more interesting that you suspect, and my introduction to comic book specialty shops. Here are some photos from the event at Captain Blue Hen in Delaware from […]
There will be no new posts today on Lines and Colors about art or artists, no lovely images of art to inspire or amuse you. This is perhaps a portent of things to come, but today it’s just a protest. Lines and Colors is on strike today in support of the J20 Art Strike, calling […]
Now here’s a terrific idea. Toon Books is an imprint of Candlewick Press dedicated to “Easy to read comics” aimed at early readers. Divided into three levels for grades K-1, grades 1-2 and grades 2-3, the comics are meant to be tools to encourage reading both in the home and in the classroom. Titles include […]
Chris Ware, who I wrote about here and here, has just released The Acme Novelty Date Book, Volume Two: 1995-2000. For those of you who are only familiar with Ware’s precise, carefully controlled marvels of precision comic art, these two volumes are something else altogether. Basically they’re sketchbooks, not that different in essence from sketchbooks […]
Like many cities, Philadelphia has a “gallery walk” (two of them in fact), in which galleries within close proximity of one another arrange simultaneous openings and encourage an evening of gallery-hopping. The one in Philadelphia’s Old City neighborhood is one of the longest running organized gallery walk events that I’m aware of, having started in […]
In 2005 Sunday Press Books published a remarkable collection of Little Nemo in Slumberland, Winsor McCay’s astonishing early 20th Century comic strip, printed at the size of the original full page newspaper comics. (See my post on both McCay and the book.) Thanks to the risky but brilliant choice of format, So Many Splendid Sundays […]
In spite of a personal schedule that I thought would prevent it, I managed to catch Scott McCloud’s lecture at Drexel University here in Philadelphia last night. McCloud, for those of you not familiar with him, is a popular comics creator and writer, who is best known as a writer about comics, not in the […]
Ten years ago, the landscape of comics on the web was a vast empty plain dotted with a few (very few) examples of what we now call webcomics. One of them was my own online comic, Argon Zark!, which was the first long-form comic created specifically for distribution on the web (started in June of […]
Here’s a little diversion for a Saturday morning. Fresh on the heels of Free Comic Book Day we have a free comic with prehistoric theme, in either HTML or downloadable PDF from, called Piltdown, from Wide Awake Press. Naming the book after one of the great scientific hoaxes of the 20th Century gives you an […]
Just to put things in… context, the history of graphical perspective goes back further, but the system of geometric perspective we use today can be traced to an important point in the beginning of the 15th century, when Filippo Brunelleschi — the brilliant Renaissance architect and designer who solved the seemingly intractable problem of spanning […]
Long before the relatively recent advent of the iPad and the digital painting apps for it that have ushered in a new wave of “digital plein air painting”, some artists, myself included, were painting digitally from life using laptop computers and pressure sensitive tablets. Most of these artists had backgrounds in other types of digital […]
I spent some time trying to select the right images for this post. I found the top one particularly appropriate; if there’s any artist that I associate with magic coming to life from the pages of a book, it’s French comics artist, illustrator and movie concept artist Jean Giraud, more commonly known by his pen […]
It’s unfortunate that, in spite of the cross cultural potential of the internet, the exposure to American audiences of illustrators, comics artists and gallery artists from other continents is still limited. I’m certain that if the work of Bulgarian illustrator Iassen Ghiuselev received more exposure here in the U.S., he would be quite popular, or […]