Joe McCulloch is taking a much-deserved vacation this week, so we've brought in a ringer to fill in for his usual guide to the Week in Comics: Katie Skelly. She highlights the most interesting-looking new releases to comics stores, and her spotlight pick is Sasaki Maki's Ding Dong Circus. She also talks a little bit about a topic usually underrepresented on this site: fashion.
"Rei Kawakubo/Comme des Garçons: Art of the In-Between" opened at the Metropolitan Museum of Art last week, and I still haven’t been up to see it. A stalwart of avant-garde fashion, Kawakubo’s designs tend to extend or distort the human form with unnatural volume and raw, unfinished materials and rejection of demure feminine beauty. A Kawakubo dress both protects and alienates the wearer; for example, a CDG puffer coat broke my fall a few years ago when I got hit by a tow truck, but no one could squeeze next to me on a subway bench.
But of course silhouette- and beauty-obsessed Hollywood rejected the theme (except, always except Rihanna!) at this year’s Met Gala, probably because everyone just wants to keep their jobs and no one wants to land on some basic’s “worst dressed” list in hindsight. I turned to my comic book collection to see which characters might fit the Kawakubo theme better.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—Interviews & Profiles. Quill & Quire talks to publisher Annie Koyama.
I started Koyama to do art books the same year [local bookstores] David Mirvish Books and Pages Books & Magazines closed. Where else do you sell art books in Toronto? In the ’80s all the big gallery shows had catalogues, but pretty much no one makes gallery catalogues anymore. So the art books stopped.
I met Chris Hutsul at the Toronto Outdoor Art Exhibition. One day he put this hilarious comic online about a little kid hanging out with Kraftwerk. I convinced him to make that into a chapbook and I published it. It’s long out of print now but it was pretty fantastic.
The most recent guests on Process Party are Bill Kartalopoulos and Austin English.
—Commentary. Friends and colleagues (including many writers on comics who readers of this site will be familiar with) remember the recently departed comics blogger Tim O'Shea. Here's an excerpt from Brigid Alverson's remembrance:
Tim faced the trials, the indignities, and the uncertainties of brain cancer with incredible grace. He found humor in the most unlikely places, often cracking up his doctors and the other medical staff who cared for him. (In this we are kindred spirits—I laughed my way through my cancer treatment, not because I wasn’t scared but because it made me feel better.) Comics fan that he was, he wore a carefully selected comics-themed T-shirt to each one of his radiation treatments. In between treatments, he enjoyed life, taking a trip to Nashville and going out for karaoke with friends.Even after he went into hospice, he remained gregarious, and his Facebook page was a parade of well wishes and photos of visitors.
The horrifyingly titled website Nerdophiles features a guest post from Hope Nicholson on five prominent female comics publishers.
A product of the traditional model of work (that has now since faded!) Helen Honig Meyer worked her way up from a clerk in Dell Publishing to vice-president, to president. A practical and strong-willed woman, Helen is best known for the way she cut through the bullshit at the hearings for comic book delinquency hearings in the 1950s. Rightly pointing out, with some beautifully arranged data, that her books were few in number but accounted for most of the comic industry sales, without any horror at all, she clearly saw no need for the assumption that comics in of themselves were detrimental. Sniffing at the rest of the comics industry that decided to enforce a code of conduct, Helen kept her company doing what it did best – selling good comics. Negotiating deals with top licenses (yes, movie and tv show tie-ins were essential to comics even at the very beginning!) Helen was responsible for one of the most significant and powerful publishers in comic book history – and one that was notable for marketing directly to the all-ages market.
—News. As has been widely noted, in the Fantagraphics comic released for last weekend's Free Comic Book Day, Matt Furie portrayed the funeral of his now infamous character Pepe the Frog.
“A lot of the Pepe controversy has really troubled him,” [Eric] Reynolds said of Mr. Furie, who did not reply to requests for comment on Monday. “I think the strip was less about saying Pepe the Frog is dead — because Pepe is a fictional cartoon character — and more about him just sort of processing everything that’s going on.”
You can see the strip in question at The Nib (which is I believe the only site publishing the strip to have paid for the privilege.)
