The Junior Woodchucks are everywhere

The Junior Woodchucks of Carl Barks show up in the oddest places. From The Patience of the Spider by Andrea Camilleri with the footnote by translator Stephen Sartarelli, available in Arlington County library. They're also back on Disney's streaming service now as Ducktales returns.

Another comic movie contest

Until 5 pm today, you can enter to win tickets for Priest from the Washington Examiner. The movie is based on a Korean comic book, and the advance showing is for May 12th with the movie opening on May 13th.

Also in the theaters now, based on Italian comic books, is Dylan Dog, but it wasn't screened for reviews. Thor opens on Friday.

OT: More fashion in comics

Years ago, Isaac Mizrahi did an expensive booklet series called Sandee the Supermodel. Last year, there was an exhibit on superhero fashion (or lack thereof) in New York. And now the press release that follows points out this new Italian book which seems interesting... AND has another cartoon picture of Obama!

Available in the best bookstores as from February 2009
aleXsandro Palombo
VANITAS, INSHALLAH
XI years of dreamlike color

The fashion world portrayed in the incisive and brilliant illustrations of aleXsandro Palombo in a poetic and colorful universe, surreal and provocative in a new book in the series "Chic et Simpliciter" from Hazard Editions. The first catwalk-book ever.

VANITAS, INSHALLAH is a veritable illustrated tale, extravagant and provocative right from the title, which leads into the imaginary and poetic universe of aleXsandro Palombo, revisiting eleven years of his creations: colors and memories, places and icons, slogans and insights.

A journey into the world of fashion in which real and surreal pursue each other along the lines traced by one of the most original and surprising talents in Italian and international fashion, a succession of illustrations with an unmistakable line that conveys with utter simplicity the thoughts and inner world of the artist, an endless moving archive, a gallery of relics and surreal hypotheses, precognitions and fantasies.

One hundred unpublished plates, composing a hymn to the poetic of color and epitomizing Palombo’s whole development, enable readers to experience a dream called fashion between imagination and provocation.

Accompanying readers on this adventure is Vanitas, the clown whose task is to act as a guide to memories and dreams, until the fateful moment of the fashion show in which the journey culminates. And it is at this point that Vanitas reveals Palombo’s new creations in the world’s first illustrated fashion show.

The reader becomes a privileged guest who can share the rituals of fashion - the show and favored guests, backstage and the catwalk, the creations and provocations, models and fashion writers…

As in a powerful snapshot, Palombo’s rapid, profound line illustrates the vices and virtues of the fashion world, building up with scathing irony to a surprising finale.

The power of the pages illustrated by Palombo needs no commentary and for this reason the volume contains no critical texts but only a series of intimate and private presentations written by those with a close knowledge of his personality, rich and intuitive, retiring and reserved.

This volume reveals the dreams of Palombo as illustrator and narrator of anecdotes, revealing an artistic temperament, unknown even to those who follow carefully his many-sided activities, which he has always maintained complete reserve.

He does so in the simple language of dreams, of fantasies that are joyous and sad, rich and allusive, original and profound, while always preserving that elusive and unrepeatable element which is a trait of his style.

The publisher Giovanni Miriantini declares: "I at once realized I was dealing with a great artist. His illustrations, graphically and chromatically perfect, create a sort of interplay between earthly and celestial, human and divine."

Founded in 1986, Hazard Editions is distinguished by the high quality of its publications in the field of comics d’auteur and artistic illustration. Its publications include works by authors such as Dino Battaglia, Enki Bilal, Silvio Cadelo, Philippe Druillet, Federico Fellini and Milo Manara, Hans Rüdi Giger, Dave McKean, Leiji Matsumoto, Lorenzo Mattotti, Sanpei Shirato, Josè Munoz, Posy Simmonds, Jacques Tardi and Osamu Tezuka.

The series "Chic et Simpliciter", devoted to great fashion illustrators, over the years has brought out volumes devoted to Maddalena Sisto, Ruben Toledo, Antonio Lopez and François Berthoud.