Happy New Year to all! Eight pages from my comics adaptation of T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” comic were featured in yesterday’s issue of BLink, the arts and culture supplement to The Hindu Business Line, an Indian business newspaper published out of Chennai. Many thanks to Aditya Mani Jha for making this happen.
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/blink/cover/the-prufrock-project/article8054561.ece
One hundred years ago today, on the 23rd of December, 1915, Giuseppe Ungaretti wrote what would become one of the most famous Italian poems of the First World War, the very short but infinitely moving “Veglia” (“Vigil”). The 27-year-old poet had spent the previous night in a trench atop Monte San Michele (near the present-day Italian-Slovenian border), under a full moon, next to the body of a recently killed comrade. “Veglia” takes its inspiration from this grisly experience, a prolonged close encounter with death that is nevertheless transmuted by the poet into a tenacious celebration of life.
As a result of my creation of a comics adaptation of an English translation of “Veglia” by Marco Sonzogni and Ross Woods of the New Zealand Centre for Literary Translation, I was recently contacted by Mario Colombo, a native of Borsano (Busto Arsizio) in Northern Italy, who, after much in-depth investigation, believes he has discovered the identity of the dead soldier next to whom Ungaretti held his macabre vigil. As Colombo demonstrates in the article below, the soldier was almost certainly Simeone Silci, a 33-year-old man from Borsano who was drafted into the 19th Infantry Regiment, into which Private Ungaretti had enlisted as a volunteer. A foundling in the Brefotrofio (foundling institute) in Milan, Silci was adopted by the family of Giovanni Puricelli, a weaver in Borsano. At the age of 23 he married Adele Caprioli, and left three children behind at the moment of his death, which probably occurred in the early evening of December 22, 1915, while on a patrol mission.
For those of you who read Italian, I have posted Mario Colombo’s moving and exhaustively researched article below:
(To see my comics adaptation of Veglia, and other WWI poems by Ungaretti, both in the original Italian and in English translations by Sonzogni and Woods, click here: https://julianpeterscomics.com/veglia-by-giuseppe-ungaretti/)
“Veglia” di Ungaretti. Identificato il compagno morto?
di Mario Colombo
Borsano, che oggi è frazione di Busto Arsizio, durante la Grande Guerra era un piccolo comune con meno di duemila abitanti. Nel corso della guerra furono chiamati alle armi 286 suoi cittadini delle leve dal 1876 al 1900 e 34 di loro persero la vita[1]. Il primo di questi fu Pietro Colombo, venticinquenne morto il 2 dicembre 1915 per malattia nell’ospedale da campo 230 a Langòris (ora detta Angòris) nei pressi di Cormòns[2], mentre il primo caduto “per ferite riportate in combattimento” fu Simeone Silci, la cui storia è molto speciale. Il cognome insolito e con la stessa iniziale del nome è chiaro indice della sua origine: trovatello del Brefotrofio di Milano o, come si usava dire, figlio dell’Ospedale o figlio di Santa Caterina, poiché il brefotrofio dipendeva dall’Ospedale Maggiore e si trovava nell’ex convento di Santa Caterina alla Ruota[3]. Continue reading
An illustration to accompany an article by Q. V. Hough on the essential loneliness of Frank Sinatra, published in Aklasu Online Magazine. You can read the article here: https://aklasu.co/mag/deep-dream-sinatra-100/
I recently gave an interview to Michalis Limnios of Blues.Gr, an online forum dedicated to the promotion of blues music in Greece. I’m feeling quite honoured, as Limnios has conducted interviews on behalf of Blues.Gr with a number of the comics greats, including Robert Crumb, Gary Panter, Bill Griffith, and Pat Moriarty. You can read the interview here: http://blues.gr/profiles/blogs/artist-illustrator-julian-peters-talks-about-arthur-rimbaud-w-b?xg_source=activity
An illustration to accompany an article in Aklasu Online Men’s Magazine on the subject of that great taboo of the Kennebunkport set: Daring to wear white after Labour Day. You can read the illuminating article by Justine Smith here: https://aklasu.co/mag/white-labour-day-history-guide/
Once again this year I will have a table at Expozine, 
Montreal’s comics and zine fair, FOR THE SUNDAY ONLY (November 15). The fair takes place in the basement of L’église Saint-Enfant-Jésus du Mile-End (5035 St-Dominique Street), from 12h-18h.
My adaptation of a passage from the poem “Dora Markus” by the great Italian poet Eugenio Montale (1896-1981) appears today in “Atelier”, Italy’s leading online poetry magazine. View the full 1-page comic on their website here: http://www.atelierpoesia.it/portal/poesia-arte/comics-by-j-peters/dora-markus-di-eugenio-montale/313
Curiously, Montale originally wrote this poem (now one of his most famous) in honour of a woman he had never met. In 1928 he received a letter from a friend who was staying in Austria at the home of this Dora Markus. The friend was particlarly taken with the beauty of his hostess’s legs, and suggested that Montale write a poem about her. For inspiration, he enclosed this photograph of Dora’s legs, from the mid-thigh down.
In honour of Remembrance Day, I am reposting my adaptation into comics of “In Flanders Fields) the famous WWI poem by John McCrae. The poem was originally created as part of my residency at the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand earlier this year: https://julianpeterscomics.com/2015/04/26/entrenchments-2015-daily-drawings-and-an-interview-with-radio-new-zealand/
See also my comics adaptation of a poetic response to McCrae’s poem written by Vincent O’Sullivan, New Zealand’s poet laureate: https://julianpeterscomics.com/2015/05/20/all-right-there-soldier-by-vincent-osullivan/
Here is an image I produced to illustrate an article for Aklasu Online Magazine, on the subject of the “new Golden Age of action hero TV.” You can read the excellent article by Dylan Moses Griffin here https://aklasu.co/mag/good-bad-badass-golden-age-action-hero-television/
The image is done in watercolour, a medium that I am only really now really beginning to discover. I’m taking a watercolour class at the moment, and I’m hoping to integrate these new techniques more and more into my work going forward.
Last year, I illustrated “Stairs Appear in a Hole Outside of Town” a poem by the American poet John Philip Johnson: https://julianpeterscomics.com/stairs-appear-in-a-hole-outside-of-town-by-john-philip-johnson/. The poetry comic was included in Graphic Poetry, a groundbreaking collection of visual interpretations of Johnson’s surreal and stunningly lyrical poems: http://www.amazon.com/Stairs-Appear-Hole-Outside-Town-ebook/dp/B00V4FY4T8
Here now is a second collaboration between myself and John, a comics adaptation of his poem “There Have Come Soft Rains”, published today on Rattle.com, the online version of Rattle magazine. You can read the complete poetry comic here: http://www.rattle.com/poetry/there-have-come-soft-rains-by-john-philip-johnson-and-julian-peters/
julian peters comics 