Today on the site, Rob Kirby reviews Michiel Budel's Francine.
Dutch cartoonist Michiel Budel’s wildly idiosyncratic webcomic Slechte Meisjes stars a rotating cast of Lolita-esque girls in surpassingly strange, hilarious, often Sapphic adventures that are mixed with political allegory. The comics first made it to U.S. shores in two full-color comic books, Wayward Girls and Wayward Girls 2, published by Secret Acres in 2012. Since then, Budel has honed his cast down to one main character, the tempestuous Francine, and her circle of friends and enemies. This new eponymously titled book collects eight issues of Budel's self-published Franzine, with a few extra one-off strips thrown in. While Budel's comics are perhaps known and discussed mostly for their seriously pervy qualities, they should also be appreciated for their great humor and wonderfully wrought, even lyrical, dream logic. Many folks will immediately correlate Budel’s work to artists like Henry Darger and Balthus, who also trafficked heavily in pre-adolescent sexual imagery. But like Darger himself, Budel has a guilelessly bonkers sensibility that keeps itself to itself.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—At Paste, Seth Simons writes a detailed story about the decline of the Cartoon Bank, the online marketplace for New Yorker cartoonists' work.
New Yorker cartoonists are paid in two tiers. More established artists receive $1,450 for a cartoon, while the rest receive $700. The sales of original artwork bring cartoonists some of their largest one-time payments, often as high as $2,000 or more. Until January 2017, sales made through the Cartoon Bank were split 70-30 between cartoonists and Condé Nast. In December, cartoonists were sent a contract revising that split to 50-50. Condé Nast also recently stopped warehousing original artwork, leaving that responsibility to the cartoonists themselves. “They just, like, fired all their archivists,” said one cartoonist. “There was no place to put it. People who were trying to reclaim their archived cartoons were being told that they had been lost. So now we’re at a place where it’s just, ‘Make your own high-res scan at home, email in the high-res and that’s what we’re going to run in the magazine. You’re responsible for storing and archiving your own artwork. We will let you know if a collector wants to buy your cartoon.’”
—Dan Gearino interviews longtime comics retailer Dick Swan, about the comic shop he co-owned and opened in 1969, Comic World.
DG: How old were you?
DS: I was 15. We opened on June 26, 1969 and I turned 16 a month later on July 28. The other guys were all 17. We got the stock from the HoustonCon which ran from June 20-22 in 1969. We drove home, went out and rented a store the same week.
—At Quill & Quire, Andrea Bennett checks in with Librairie Drawn & Quarterly on its 10th anniversary.
Librairie Drawn & Quarterly opened in 2007, nearly 20 years after the press was founded in the same Montreal neighbourhood. Staff had noticed that English stores in the city carried mostly English comics, and French stores carried mostly French books. “At each store, there was a little lonely shelf that would be like, ‘Local Publishers,’” says Peggy Burns, D&Q’s publisher. D&Q’s goal was to open a store where readers could find not only their books, but also titles from other popular independent presses, like McSweeney’s, that were hard to find in the city. The timing was unfortunate – right before a recession, and just as Amazon’s influence was rising – but the staff felt confident. “It was a crazy time to open up a bookstore,” Burns says, “but we always just felt that there were books here that we wanted to read and other people wanted to read.”
