Gez Fry

Gez Fry is a half-British, half-Japanese illustrator and art director currently based in Japan.

Lovely cinematic-inspired pieces with inevitable anime/manga influences, but with a softness and an intricate sense of detail.

Jesus For President

Jesus For President, by Shane Claiborne and Chris Haw

I would buy this book just for the cover alone.

Obama Approves

thanks to Roy

Comics are cool. They are not the domain of geeks, nerds and pasty-faced teenagers who spend hours in front of the computer.

Read comics. Because Obama approves.

“Obama has said that as a child, he collected Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comic books. His Senate Web site used to have a photo of him posing in front of a Superman statue.

The Obama story is a bonus in Marvel Comic’s Amazing Spider-Man #583, available in comic book shops nationwide on Jan. 14 for $3.99 and is expected to sell out, with half the covers devoted to Obama.” via Yahoo

Kieron Gillen’s Top 40 Tracks of 2008

Kieron Gillen, Purveyor of Pop Music, Games Journalist & Occasional Comic Writer

Yep, I’m finally back from my hiatus – not that I had any time to rest, it was just one mad frenzy of card-writing (or rather, envelopes) and flailing about trying to keep up with all the festivities.

Gillen’s Phonogram is still lying around unread, but here’s his take on the forty best  pop tracks of 2008, “chosen on [his] objective scale of objectiveosity”. It’s always easier to read someone’s smarter take on the ever-shifting face of music, because you can then roll the words and thoughts off your tongue as if it it were yours.

It’s not much of a dilemma, really. CTRL+C and CTRL+v takes only one hand and not even half a brain.

“Los Camp’s problem’s never been a lack of emotion – but rather a surfeit. The problem – and this is where they lose people yet again – is that it’s married to an equal surfeit of ideas, albeit ones inside their own self-sufficient aesthetic universe. It’s never shown better than this title track, which is as internally-conflicting, confusing, overwhelming, graceful and contradictory song as life being lived.

Which is what I like about Los Campesinos – they’re unafraid to be Los Campesinos, to be themselves. Which is a different thing from the boring old issue of authenticity. This is about transparency, the idea that you can throw your obsessions into art’s frame and, by doing so, demonstrate the blessed democratic nature of experience and existence. And some people will never forgive you for that.

Los Campesinos: Beautiful. Doomed.”