Patchwork Earth

Comics Column #4 is Live!

As always, visit The House Next Door for me talking comics. This time around, it’s another familiar commentary: comics as mapmaking and the nature of time, with a sideline on the “art comix” accepted by the general public. Horrocks, Huizenga, Ware, Larson, Bertozzi, Kindt, Moore, and Prince of Persia.

Huizenga is perhaps the great humanist of the “indie cartoonists” (Los Bros Hernandez does a different sort of work, and I tend to count them separately despite their general brilliance)—his work has the clean lines and formal experimentation of Ware with a more full-bodied emotional range. Curses, his one hardcover collection, is focused on wanting children and losing them, and despite the pain inherent in the story is at times very funny, very moving, and even occasionally creepy. When it comes to formalism—and the cartography of time—however, you can draw a line from Ware’s history diagrams to Huizenga’s short story “Time Travelling.”