Just got an advance copy of the next Tillie Walden project which around here, as it it should be in any locale that enjoys and covets the very best comics, is event level circumstance.
Walden’s Are You Listening? hits shelves this September but it’s accompanying me poolside now and if it’s as good as any of her previous graphic novels it’s going to be one of best reading experiences of the year.
Her On a Sunbeam is one of best pieces of speculative fiction I’ve ever read, a true science fiction tour de force that feels like a topshelf Christoper Nolan film that was completely thought out by an actual human with real human emotions before being released.
I’m a mark for great science fiction but you don’t have to be slanted toward any genre or mode of fiction to enjoy a Tille Walden comics, everything she has released is at least great: The End of Summer, Spinning, I Love This Part, A City Inside. It’s all worthwhile, any of her catalog would be almost anyone else’s masterpiece,
I got into the work of Tillie Walden a few years ago when finding pleasures in american comics was becoming a more infrequent happenstance. This is not a statement I mean to defend or litigate in anyway, it’s a personal cycle, but I was just finding myself more engaged by comics from Inio Asano, Posuka Demizu, Oda-sama, and Kerascoët among others.
Enter Tillie Walden.
For the initiated I’m not breaking news, Walden has awards and accolades that are remarkable for a cartoonist her age and for the uninitiated Tillie Walden is simply your next sequential obsession. I’m an art collector. Original art, not so much prints (they are kind of anathema to me to be honest – though I maybe wrote the longest post about a print ever for the love of DEFIANT Dave Lapham), but I guess I missed out on when Walden sold her originals. That in itself usually won’t drive me to purchase a print but in this case I had to scoop it.
I just caught that feeling you get when concluding an experience and wanting more, to have a part of it, that sensation that propels capitalism and had us in earlier days watching cartoons and then begging your parents to buy you the toys of what you just watched. This is a signed print of Lars and Nemo from the aforementioned The End of Summer, her first work, to extend the Tillie art experience in my house.
I can’t wait to dig into Are You Listening?