There's a fundamental problem underlying all erotic work done in the comics medium, one even more difficult to get past than the lack of audible sound and visible motion bedeviling the action-oriented material that dominates the form's American market. How does one create art that reproduces a physical sensation created by bodily contact without being able to reach out and touch one's ...

I took a plane from Hollywood across the country to the third annual Brooklyn Comics and Graphics Festival. One weekend. A lot of hassle, a lot of money, a lot of time that could be spent doing much more responsible things. I didn't even have a zine out. My L.A. friends wished me well and my Brooklyn friends bid me welcome and they both went "dude, why?" Because I missed it by a week last year? ...

Like the act of reading his wonderful comics, the act of interviewing the manga-ka Yuichi Yokoyama, the most talented and exciting cartoonist working in any country today, is harder than it sounds. As someone who lives 6,000 miles away and speaks a completely different language, the process is a byzantine one. The reason I mention the travails of interviewing Yokoyama is because the element of ...

When something truly unique and unexpected hits the comics world, there's always a strange silence that takes up the aftermath. Michael DeForge is sitting in that silence right now, after hitting comics like an atom bomb over the past year and a half or so. Blisteringly fast, shockingly young, and seemingly intent on making appearances in every place that matters in the medium (up to and ...

I read X'ed Out by Charles Burns at a laundromat in a torn down section of Los Angeles. Have you ever been in one of these places? Mildew in the corners of the particleboard ceiling, broken greenish lightbulbs that pop and fizz and sputter out with the sweltering condensation of the dryers, identical velvet-canvas portraits of the same hideous clown-painted gangbanger at the end of every aisle. ...