Pires + Diotto team for ‘Youth’ digital weekly series

‘Olympia’ creators Curt Pires and Alex Diotto team with Dee Cunniffe and Micah Myers for a new comiXology Originals series.

The co-creators of the excellent Image Comics series Olympia are reuniting for a weekly four-issue digital series that will debut from comiXology Originals May 12.

Youth tells the story of Franklin and River, who “struggle to navigate family, friends, high school, work, drugs and all the pressures of growing up. As a queer couple, they yearn to escape their lives in a small, bigoted Midwest town. They steal River’s stepfather’s Mustang and hit the road. Their destination? California. But along the way, the car breaks down. They meet some kids who are traveling the country, partying and attempting to find themselves. They party some more … and soon everything changes.”

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Smash Pages Q&A: Kevin Huizenga

The creator of ‘The River at Night’ discusses insomnia, his process, endings and more.

In Kevin Huizenga’s book The River at Night, his main character Glenn Ganges has insomnia. One of Huizenga’s great gifts as a cartoonist is the way in which this is the entire plot of the book, but it’s not the point of the book, as Huizenga uses this scenario as a way to explore memory, our experience of time, death, deep time, the writing of John McPhee, how we experience change and those moments where people are able to step outside of themselves for a moment.

Huizenga has always been a formalist. He’s been compared to Chris Ware, but the two have very different interests in how they work. Huizenga is interested in consciousness and the subconscious, with perception and understanding, with finding ways to explain and understanding how the world works and how the mind perceives it. Glenn has been the protagonist of much of Huizenga’s work, but he uses the character as a way to explore ideas and experiences and we spoke recently about some of these ideas and trying to explore and depict these ideas visually.

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