#benjamin schipper

Joe Death and the Graven Image by Benjamin Schipper is Bananas. I love this comic to death. The most immediately striking thing about Joe Death is its illustrations, which are drawn in an incredibly individual style born of an amalgamation between Mignola spot blacks, rubber hose style cartooning, an incredible eye for abstraction and appealing simplification, and gorgeous flat coloring which makes ample and ingenious use of gradients to hint at lighting, accent shape, and give scenes greater depth. Benjamin Schipper is also consistently innovative and impressive with his page layouts and paneling, frequently breaking panel borders and otherwise playing with the conventions of comics presentation to the benefit, usually, of both the flow of a page and its aesthetic appearance as a whole. The dialogue in Joe Death is also highly commendable for its style. Schipper writes in an archaic and lyrical style, peppered with aphorisms and bits of folk wisdom, which I found incredibly delightful and impressively literate and genuine, reading like a blast from the past rather than a modern writer putting on airs. The world-building in Joe Death is similarly engrossing. There's a sense of mythos, personal history, and social ecosystem permeating every new location, character interaction, and new piece of information. A world made wholly new, like the art style, from familiar pieces and a fascinating individual sensibility. If Joe Death stumbles anywhere it's occasionally in readability, as the style once or twice obscured certain details from me and caused me to lose track of what was happening. That's a minor gripe though, especially in a story where obscurity often seems to be the point and vibes, environment, and again that pervading sense of mythology take precedence. Joe Death was an incredibly exciting and enjoyable read, and I can't recommend it highly enough.

A Wrinkle In Time by Madeleine L'Engle is one of my all time favorite books.

‘Joe Death’ Presents a New Kind of Hero

When you hear something described as a mix of Mike Mignola, A Fistful of Dollars, and Johnny Cash’s Ghost Riders in the Sky, you pay attention. That’s the way Dark Horse Comics described Joe Death and the Graven Image, a new original graphic novel from Benjamin Schipper focused on the gray man, consequential king, Joseph Bones, Shadow of Death. That’s quite a long moniker.

Joe’s used to cleaning…

Dark Horse Schedules 'Joe Death and the Graven Image'

Dark Horse Comics has a new book that they’re now starting to talk about with…