…in the English-speaking world. Good thing Gary Groth likes him and put him on the cover of Mome. This is old news to many, but when I first opened Mome 12 last fall, I was stunned by this quiet and fuzzy (as in “out of focus”) comic called “Hair Types” by Olivier Schrauwen.  Then I looked him up on the internet and learned he’s been at it for a while and I got angry that I never found this guy before.  This story in Mome is subtle and absurb and Beckettian and I want to read a lot more comics like it. It’s astounding to me how few of the comics published in Europe get either translated or distributed in America.  I’ve often considered problems with nationalism and regionalism in written literature (it was one of our main concerns when we started Action,Yes) but the geographic ghettoization of comics seems to be on another level all together.  I hope more publishers follow Fantagraphics and Buenaventura and D&Q’s leads and publish more non-American and non-commercial-manga comics.

(Check out our feature on the Canicola collective that was in Action,Yes several issues ago.  They’re an international collective of artists living in Bologna, Italy, including the Finnish cartoonist Amanda Vähämäki – her collaboration with fellow Canicola artist Michelangelo Setola Souvlaki Circus is a glimpse into what comics should and will become.)