By: Michael Dooley Forget about who’ll walk away with Eisner Awards on Friday at San Diego’s Comic-Con. Sure, there’ll be worthy winners. In my feature on Emil Ferris’s My Favorite Thing is Monsters, which garnered multiple well-deserved nominations, I wrote that it would easily top any comics and design “best of” award. More on that notion momentarily. But honestly, the Eisners are much more a popularity contest among comics industry professionals than it is any real gauge o

Enter PRINT’s Regional Design Awards for your chance to see your work in an all-new book by PRINT, and to win a Big Ticket to HOW Design Live, a main-stage trophy presentation and other exclusive opportunities on-site, including a lunch date with a HOW Design Live speaker and an invitation to the official Speaker Reception with industry movers and shakers at HOW Design Live. Chris Ware’s Building Stories was one of the best books of 2012. And that’s not just me talking. That’

If there was a designer “best of the best ofs” list for comics, My Favorite Thing is Monsters would easily be 2017’s winner. As it is, Emil Ferris’s breakthrough, groundbreaking graphic novel—set in a hardscrabble late-1960s Chicago and in the rich interior life of a ten-year-old girl—seems to have appeared on practically every comics-centric books-of-the-year list. And publications from The New York Times to The Guardian and from Forbes to Mother Jones have joined the chorus

Cartoonist Will Eisner was such a life force that it’s difficult to believe that he’s not with us to celebrate his 100th birthday on March 6th. For seven decades, he was vitally instrumental in creating and shaping the comic book form, in elevating the quality of its writing and art, in revealing and expanding its graphic potential, in popularizing its respectability on a global scale, and in educating and inspiring generations of aspiring comics artists. And yet he died in e

You survived 2016 without having your head explode. So congratulations: You deserve at least one book by and about artists of comic strips, comic books and graphic novels. And here are some recommendations for designers who may also be animation addicts, history and/or biography fans, the politically and/or satirically oriented, the internationally inclined, eggheads, and/or just oddballs. And again: This was the oddest of oddball years, wasn’t it? See you in the funny papers

Robert “R.” Crumb is one of my favorite artists. Underground cartoonist, designer, illustrator, “drawer”—they all seem like inadequate titles when attached to his body of work. There was a show recently at the Society of Illustrators in New York City that solidly put a piece of punctuation on all the admiration I have for his artwork and talent. Seeing his original art up close, with all its detail, was a thrill. The shine of the ink on the paper, the white-out used to correc

Since 1914 - The 1940 #403 Johnson Smith & Co. catalog. With Chicago’s “C2E2” 2012 ComicCon (http://www.c2e2.com/) approaching this week from April 13-15 at McCormick Place, it seems fitting that I do a piece on an aspect of comic books that everyone even remotely acquainted with the realm knows well – the Johnson Smith & Company of Detroit, Michigan. You may not recognize the firm’s name, but I’ll bet you know some of its wares, its advertisements, and have seen its influenc