Comics I love: Nine Antico

I don’t know how it is where you live, but around here I find comic is a very underrated art. I guess comics are seen as too geeky (Big Bang Theory, anyone?) and maybe people still can only think of comics like Superman and Pokemon. I am an avid comic reader, but not liking particularly superhero comics and most of the popular manga, I sometimes find it hard to find new artists that I love.

At the last Comic fair in May I came across Nine Antico’s work, published in Spain by Ponent Mon. I’ve been making impulse buys just based on the cover for a while and so far it’s worked great, so when I saw the simple cover art for The Taste of Paradise I knew I would like it, and obviously I did!

Antico has already published four albums. I love the fluid lines of her drawings and her subtle and ironic storytelling, her work focuses on the daily lives of young girls and women. The Taste of Paradise is an autobiographic view on adolescence growing up in a suburb in France. In Girls Don’t Cry and its sequel Tonight she draws the relationship between three friends and Coney Island Baby is a sort of biography of Bettie Page.

She is currently working on a story following the life of famous 70s groupie Pamela Des Barres and, having read her gossip-filled biobgraphy, I can’t wait to read it! On the music theme she also has a cool little book with drawings she has done at live shows of bands like Animal Collective, Art Brut, Jeffrey Lewis or Adam Green.