James Avis has been putting together a series of video adaptations of some of my poetry comics, and I will be posting a new one of them here each week. This week’s installment features Oscar Wilde’s atmospheric evocation of a London morning, “Impression du matin,” read by the English actor Sean Barrett.
I really like what this kind of “semi animation” brings to the illustrations. It reminds me, and I mean this as the highest compliment, of the Japanese anime series that I watched as a child, which derived a lot of what I now recognize as their grace and poetry from the use of panning shots and zooms over single beautifully painted images. Unlike full-blown animation, which is really its own thing, this technique feels like in a way like the ultimate amplification of an illustration. It seems to me to bring the illustration a step closer to what H. P. Lovecraft once called “the realisation of that always-beckoning and bitterly-tantalising conception of imaginative infancy– a fairy-tale picture into which one can actually walk.”
I should mention that the style of the drawings here is heavily indebted to that of the great Italian comics artist Dino Battaglia.
Here’s my chat with John Swiminer on the subject of my upcoming debut book, “Poems to See By: A Comic Artist Interprets Great Poetry,” coming March 31 from Plough Publishing, and now available for pre-order: 
A steady hand on the tiller of the Presidente Sarmiento, an 1897 Argentine naval cruiser moored at Puerto Madero, Buenos Aires. Photo credit to my Porteña guide in Buenos Aires and up-and-coming Borgesian autora, Belén Debuchy.
julian peters comics 