Emily Carroll

EmCarroll.com is an oft-updated website collecting the various comics of horror storyteller Emily Carroll. Some are quick illustrations, as nasty as a bad dream, and others are longer works designed to crawl under your skin and live there, and fester. All of them will haunt you for days.

The weekend is here! Put down your paperwork, throw your stationery out of the window, and do a victory spin in your office chair, because it’s time to catch up on that greatest of all media: comics! What’s been going on this week? There’s so much comics that there’s no way anybody can keep up with all of it — so Weekender is here to catch you up on some of the stories you may have missed, and some of the best writing about comics from the past few days.

The Eisner Awards at San Diego Comic-Con back in July were a great night for women in comics, but this past weekend's Ignatz Awards at Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland, recognizing achievements in small press and independent creator-owned comics, went one step further in celebrating women's contributions. Women claimed victory in every category.

The 27th Annual Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards took place at the Indigo Ballroom at the Hilton Bayfront San Diego on Friday night, and it was a great night for diversity, for women in comics, for comics aimed at a younger audience, and for the future of the industry.

If you haven't been following it, Youth in Decline's Frontier is a comic that you should buy every single issue of --- and you can start anywhere. Frontier is created by a different cartoonist every issue, and the only real through-line is that it highlights talented creators. For that reason alone, it's worth checking out. Each one also offers the opportunity to see those creators do an interesting story that maybe they don't have another space to publish. Some of the great creators that have told stories in Frontier include Emily Carroll, Sam Alden, Jillian Tamaki, and Hellen Jo --- with creators like Michael DeForge and Becca Tobin to come.

Being a subscriber to Youth in Decline's excellent Frontier series of monographs by artists such as Hellen Jo, Sam Alden, Emily Carroll, and more, doesn't make me any less excited whenever the publisher shares sneak peeks and information about upcoming books. The sixth (and final for 2014) installment of Frontier is a new, original comic work by the amazing Emily Carroll titled 'Ann by the Bed,' and once again promises to be another perfectly executed slice of eerie horror from the cartoonist.

Emily Carroll’s collection of horror comics, Through the Woods, operates largely on the alienation of the inexplicable experience. More specifically, with one exception, it explores that alienation in women, particularly young women. The struggle for many of these characters is the insidious horror of trauma, and all of the ways that trauma pulls you apart, both from yourself and your community, and leaves you susceptible to further terrors. This trauma that suddenly makes you unreliable to the world around you, and indeed unreliable to yourself, provides much of the claustrophobia that characterizes the slowly closing trap of Carroll’s flashlight-whispered tales. These are spellbound stories through which every strength of the comics medium is put into employ. There are frankly very few writers in comics who can go toe-to-toe with Emily Carroll in this regard. The totality of these comics is a testament to the largely untapped potentials inherent in this medium.

2014 promises to bring a flood of amazing work from a raft of talented cover artists, writers, web cartoonists, interior artists and mangaka. ComicsAlliance has looked at the new projects on the horizon and made a pick of 14 comic creators who we think will make an impact in 2014. Our hope is that this is just the tip of the iceberg, that there are 140 amazing creators on the cusp of creating something great in 2014 -- but these are our picks of the creators to keep an eye on.

This week, First Second Comics releases Fairy Tale Comics, a hardcover anthology of classic stories adapted by 17 prolific cartoonists. To celebrate, we've snagged an interview with Emily Carroll, whose adaptation of The Brothers Grimm's perhaps lesser-known tale "The 12 Dancing Princesses" graces the book's pages.

We make a regular practice at ComicsAlliance of spotlighting particular artists or specific bodies of work, but because cartoonists, illustrators and their fans share countless numbers of great images on sites like Flickr, Tumblr, DeviantArt and seemingly infinite art blogs that we’ve created Best Art Ever (This Week), a weekly depository for just some of the pieces of especially compelling artwo