There’s an immediate laugh to be had with the extended title of Ho! The Morally Questionable Cartoons of Ivan Brunetti. This is a slyly hilarious understatement, a clever counterpoint to contents as there’s nothing “questionable” about these jokes. That’s their strength, although I say that within the clinically quarantined confines of a cartoon laboratory. They are as unconscionable, uninhibited and unimpeded as can be imagined and the fact that you couldn’t have imagined them unaided only adds to their stature (and yours).

Ho! is a collection of Brunetti’s single-panel gags including selected pieces from Haw! (2001), Hee! (2005) and Hotwire #2 (2007). So some have seen print before, but for anyone like me, who has been able to repress them successfully, they will again stand fresh and toxicologically uncut, just as they are likely to remain in perpetuity. Their fury, glee, glory and ability to repulse have not dulled and do not fade. Age does not wither them, nor custom stale their infinite variety.

There’s unequivocally a shock-and-awe aspect to Brunetti’s humor, much of it tied to uncommon forms of sexuality and spectacular instances of depravity. It’s so immediate and overwhelming that there’s an urgency to ignore what fine lines he does walk. For instance, his cartoon styles — plural — are accomplished and scrupulously polished. Any less refined and they become more disturbing still for their associations with a child’s very troubled scrawlings. Any more refined and they lurch too close to a more representational realism that undercuts their humor: It’s essential to remember that no actual living creature was harmed, assaulted, abused, tortured, dismembered, degraded, defiled, scarred or irreparably humiliated in the drawing of this book.

These one-shot cartoons don’t necessarily represent Brunetti at his very best (I prefer the oversized Schizo #4 for its fly-bys at Olympian heights or, alternatively, the Misery Loves Comedy compilation for its view of the heights from Stygian depths). But these are certainly superlative examples of one thing that Brunetti does that, to my sheltered knowledge, no one else can do as thoroughly. Single pictures often carry within themselves their own additive, accentuating “topper” (or two) (or more). A relatively tame case in point comes no later than the second cartoon in the book. An embarrassed, milquetoastish guy has his hand down the pants of an upset, burly figure next to him and says, “Ooh, I’m terribly sorry sir … I thought you were a lesbian.” Now, if this cartoon isn’t running with this entry, you can only guess at the precise visual tenor of the scene. Regardless, I invite you to contemplate the number of levels on which the situation offends and the number of ways the transgressive joking works (or, if you’re looking over your shoulder, the number of levels on which it could theoretically work). I’m hardly a moral tripwire, but I count at least three affronts to human decency, which right there ought to help you judge how seriously you want to take my opinion of what’s funny.

Now a Tiptree Award has just been given to Fumi Yoshinaga’s manga Ooku, the first time a Tiptree has been awarded to a comic.  The Tiptree, you may not have heard of.  Named after groundbreaking New Wave science-fiction writer James Tiptree, Jr., who rocked the literary sci-fi community in the 1970s when he was discovered to be a woman named Alice Sheldon, it’s given out each year at the feminist sci-fi convention WisCon to “science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender.”  The winner gets $1,000 and a tiara.  The Tiptree organizers raise money each year with femininity-reclaiming bake sales.

Frankly, it blows my mind that the comics industry is producing work even worth consideration for this award.  My expectations for the comics industry in the field of expanding or exploring our understanding of gender are not high.  But, on reflection, there are a lot of interesting comics that explore gender and sexuality–maybe fewer specifically in the genre of science fiction, but the stuff is out there.  It just doesn’t always get much attention.  Ooku has a small following among the comics intelligentsia, but greater TCJ bloggers than myself have lamented the generally mild praise greeting the most imaginative and challenging work to date from Fumi Yoshinaga, one of the top talents in manga.

Which is one of the interesting things about these non-comics awards: the comics they notice.  The Tiptree website notes, “We chose Fumi Yoshinaga’s Ooku, Volumes 1 and 2 as our Tiptree winner with some trepidation.  No one on the jury has read much manga; no one is an expert in Japanese history. “  They just knew what they liked.  The first comic to win the Graphic Story Hugo was Phil and Kaja Foglio’s Girl Genius, which has a large and loyal following online but, like a lot of webcomics, tends to get overlooked in comics industry rolls.  Another webcomic, Howard Taylor’s Schlock Mercenary, was also nominated.  Some of the other Hugo nominees were debatable (note to the nerd community at large: I liked “Buffy” too, and it was cool when Spike got turned into a Muppet, but at this point the Joss Whedon worship has just gotten weird), but overall the list was a lot stronger, and a lot more reflective of the diversity of work produced by the comics industry, than the Harvey nomination list that came out around the same time.  No NASCAR comics: that was the key.

Then again, sometimes the outside world gets everything horribly wrong. You kind of have to roll with the punches.

“In the long run, it’s not whether or not you can meet the minimums, it’s what all of these promotions are doing to give a false bottom to the market. 10% to 50% of the books ’sold’ through Diamond may actually be sitting around gathering dust on the shelves of dealers that can not be taught that ordering $400 worth of something to get the $25 premium doesn’t work when most of the $400 doesn’t get sold — or gets jettisoned for cost a week after release.”

“The [Amazon/Diamond Book Distributors] take-down happened sometime between the 8th and 9th, so that means the problem took exactly one week to fix. Not terrible, all things considered.”

Contact me: dirk@tcj.com
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Panel from Nola.

Recently posted to our homepage:

• R.C. Harvey reviews the first volume of Bil Keane’s Family Circus Library, and contemplates the origin of comics.

 

• Rob Clough reviews the thirteenth issue of Anders Nilsen’s Big Questions.

 

• Gavin Lees reports from last weekend’s Emerald City Comicon in Seattle.

 

• Over at The Hooded Utilitarian, Richard Cook reviews Chris Gorak, Pierluigi Cothran and Damian Couceiro’s “Katrinasploitation” crime comic, Nola.

And in the news…

Above the Fold

Life in interesting times

• “The Research Institute for Publications, a Tokyo-based industry group, reports that sales of manga magazines and compiled book volumes dropped 6.6% to 418.7 billion yen (about US$4.63 billion) in 2009 — the largest yearly drop in sales in the market segment’s history.”

 

• The family feud over Frank Frazetta’s paintings is headed for court.

 

• Kevin Melrose recaps and explains the return of the “buy” buttons on all the Amazon.com pages for books managed by Diamond Book Distributors.

 

• Speaking of whom: Diamond has launched a second comics-shop locator for the general public to ignore.

 

• Japan’s Asahi Shimbun has more on the protests by high-profile cartoonists against a proposed decency ordinance in Tokyo.

 

• Ada Price speaks with a number of retailers about how the recession has affected their business:

  Looking back on 2009 Holiday season, St. Mark’s Comics [owner Mitch] Cutler said, “This year did not suck as much as last year, Christmas 2008 was the worst ever. [In 2009] no one was buying high end collectibles, but at least they were buying.”

 

• Alameda, California librarian Eva Volin discusses the kids’ graphic-novel collection in her library:

  The Pokemon train is still chugging along with no slowdown in sight. I also get a lot of requests for tie-in comics, like the Warriors titles from Tokyopop, the Star Wars: Clone Wars digests from Dark Horse, and the Alex Rider books from Penguin.

  What’s most interesting to me are the stealth titles. These are the books I know I purchased, but I never see on the shelf; the books are checked out, they come back three weeks later, and go out again the same day. For example, we’ve owned Eric Shanower’s Adventures in Oz for only two and a half years and it has already circulated 45 times. My Mommy is in America and She Met Buffalo Bill, by Jean Regnaud, has been in the collection for less than a year, but it has already circulated twelve times.

 

• And now, three words from our sponsor: Go, Matt, go!

Format Wars^TM technobabble collage… obfuscate!

• According to this press release: “The board of the Audit Bureau of Circulations modified its definition of a digital magazine in the U.S. and Canada to accommodate new reading devices such as the Apple iPad.” As Paul Biba explains, “This is important stuff, because unless the ABC will audit a magazine many advertisers won’t consider placing ads with it.”

 

• Peter Ha notes that the release of “the iPad keyboard and 10W USB power adapter are being pushed back until sometime in May.”

 

• Rich Johnston looks at the beta-launch of the Longbox comics-reader software.

 

• Dave Burstein examines the new FCC broadband plan, and finds it wanting. Further links and discussion are available at Slashdot.

 

• Craig Teicher catches word from an article by Wade Roush: digital-screen manufacturer E Ink has essentially increased production fifteen-fold since 2008.

Profiles

• Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer on Lynda Barry

  A student-led discussion with the What It Is author.

• Brian Heater on Ryan Alexander-Tanner

  The To Teach: The Journey illustrator discusses his work.

• Apocolyte’s World of Comics on Pappy

  A Q&A with the comics-scan blogger.

Reviews

• Andrew Wheeler on Market Day

  “[James Sturm's graphic novel] is a short book with a pointed moral — but I’m not entirely sure if I took the moral from it that Sturm wanted me to.”

• Nina Stone on The Sword #22
  
  ©2010 Luna Brothers.

   

  “Welcome to another installment of ‘Holy shit, I can’t get enough of The Sword.’ (Also known as, ‘Moderation, A Foreign Term.’) I’m your host, Nina.”

Also

• Johanna Draper Carlson on Rip Kirby: The First Modern Detective
• Johanna Draper Carlson on Mysterius the Unfathomable
• Greg McElhatton on DMZ #51
• Timothy Callahan on American Vampire #1
• Sean T. Collins on Weird Schmeird #2
• Tucker Stone on various titles

Commentary

• Jeet Heer on comic-book stores

  “The Beguiling is, if the concept makes sense, a curated comic book store. The staff is knowledgeable and opinionated, as are many of the customers. You can learn more about comics just by hanging out there.”

Also

• Jen Gruskoff: The Little Lulu mystique
• David Brothers: Unforgiven, One Piece and suspended expectations
• Olivia Putnal: Eight comic strips worth taking another look at

Business and Craft

• Todd Klein: Plop! logo study

  “Plop! was very odd for publisher DC, a mix of humor and horror with some of the most grotesque covers by Basil Wolverton ever published over a frame of tiny cartoon figures by Sergio Aragonés. Sergio was the creator and driving force behind the book, also contributing all the framing stories and many others as well. Between were stories of comic horror or dark humor by comics greats like Berni Wrightson and Nick Cardy. I assume Sergio also came up with the name; perhaps he just thought the word was funny.”

Comics and Art

• Ger Apeldoorn: Gus Arriola’s Gordo
  
  ©1958 United Features Syndicate, Inc.

   

  Why the hell isn’t any of this stuff in print?

• Maria Stuart: Mrs. Stuart’s Dailys
  
  ©2010 Maria Stuart.

   

  Finally, art comics for your grandmother.

  (Link via John Martz.)

Also

• Harry Lee Green: Dedini and Interlandi originals
• John Adcock: Robert Seymour sketches
• John Glenn Taylor: Lloyd Gola’s “Middle Class Poverty is…”
• Diversions of the Groovy Kind: Steve Ditko’s “Moonshift”
• John Glenn Taylor: Joel Beck’s “The Great Comic Book Conspiracy!”
• Atomic Surgery: Reed Crandall’s Blackhawk in “Madame Butterfly”
• Doug Gray: Two by Walt Kelly
• Pappy: “The Strangeness of Mr. McGillicuddy!”
• Jacque Nodell: “Bride and Broom”
• Chuck Wells: “The Deathmaker!”
• Publishers Weekly: Body World previewed
• Jorge Cham: Égalite de Chance, part one
• Xkcd: Google results for various phrases
• Least I Could Do: Lo, tho I walk through the Silicon Valley
• Allan Holtz: Granny and Slowpoke
• Golden Age Comic Book Stories: Five George Evans Aces High covers
• Laz Marquez: Reimagined Hitchcock movie posters
     (Link via Johnny Cat.)
• Sam Henderson: Yet still more of my college sketchbook
• Doug Wheeler: Casting out snakes
• Nathan Yau: Famous movie quotes as infographics charts

Multimedia

• YouTube: Guy Delisle draws a page
  
  Screenshot from the video.

   

  Bonus points for speeding up the video, you know, likes those old documentary shorts where they’d show you a flower grow or that guy from A Clockwork Orange have sex?

  Update: Vicodin. Why do you ask?

  (Link via Tom Devlin.)

• Ladygunn: Phone call with Harvey Pekar

  “Listen to phone call. It’s really long and bad static but I tried to make it entertaining by the Harvey Heads [...]“

  (Link via Mike Rhode.)

Comics Culture

• ICv2: Lance Fensterman

  Another conversation with the Reed Exhibitions vice president.

• Anime News Network: Mari Yamazaki’s Thermae Romae wins Manga Taisho Award

  “Unlike many other manga prizes which are chosen by the editors of the manga publishers themselves, the Manga Taisho nominating committee is dominated by the bookstore staffers who are in charge of their respective stores’ manga sections.”

• Heidi MacDonald: Emerald City Comicon

  A report from last weekend’s big to-do in Seattle.

• Your Not-Comics Link of the Day:

  As Neatorama describes it: “The blog 2m40 is about one underpass in Paris that has a clearance of only two meters and forty centimeters. Many truck drivers either do not read, do not understand, or do not believe the clearance warning. Several times a month, the underpass wins the battle against these drivers and 2m40 posts the pictures.”

• Your Scans_Daily Link of the Day:
  
  From Mad #18, ©1954 EC Publications.

   

  Harvey Kurtzman and Wally Wood’s “Stalag 18!“

Events Calendar

This Week:

• March 18 (Washington DC): Jules Feiffer makes an appearance at Politics and Prose on Connecticut Avenue, beginning at 4PM. Details here.
• March 18 (San Francisco, CA): Paul Pope makes a presentation at the Cartoon Art Museum on Mission Street, with doors open at 6:45PM. $5 suggested donation. Details here.
• March 19 (Auckland, New Zealand): Hicksville author Dylan Horrocks will attend the launch of a new edition of his book at the High Seas on Beresford Square, beginning at 6PM. Details here.

Want to see your comics-related event listed here? Email a link to dirk@tcj.com and let me know. Please include an online link to which I can send people for more information. No sales-only events, please — it’s nice that you’ve marked things down at your store or website, but I won’t be listing it here.

On Feb. 29, Bil Keane’s The Family Circus reached and passed the 50-year mark, and Jeff Keane, the founder’s son and heir, celebrated the anniversary the day before (a Sunday) with a reprise of his father’s 20th birthday cartoon, adding a taboret next to the drawing board on which he placed a photograph depicting members of the original cast — i.e., the Keane family. The Family Circus began in 19 papers and is now in over 1,500, and its widespread popularity doubtless inspired IDW to add the Keane cartoon to its elegantly produced Library of American Comics: the first volume of The Family Circus project reprints in strict chronological order the first two years of Keane’s cartoons (many of which have never been reprinted), ending with the release for Dec. 31, 1961, and beginning with a short biography that traces the cartoonist’s early career with the Philadelphia Bulletin and his first syndicated feature, Channel Chuckles.

In 1954, Chuckles was the first newspaper cartoon about the medium that newspapers at first feared would render them obsolete; by the mid-1950s, however, newspapers had reconciled themselves to living with their competition and had introduced TV program listings and gossip columns in special television sections, into which Channel Chuckles fit handily.

The biographical text, written by Keane’s fourth offspring, Christopher, is accompanied by samples of Keane’s other early works, including Family Circus’ immediate predecessor: called Spot News, it was a pantomime gag that highlighted some recently reported event. Unhappily, given the lead time that syndicated cartoons require, 4-5 weeks before publication date, Spot News couldn’t be very topical, and it soon faded. But an aspect of its design lingered: the cartoon appeared always in a smallish circle, which newspapers could insert as an “ear” above their front page masthead. Keane liked the circle — a visual novelty that almost guaranteed attracting a reader’s attention no matter where it appeared in a newspaper — and he next produced family jokes in a circle. Now, he had arrived at a subject he was intimately familiar with.

In 1948, Keane had married the girl he met while stationed in Australia during World War II, and he and Thelma (née Carne) started a family, which, by 1960, included five children, four boys and their older sister — a circumstance fraught with gag material for a family-focused cartoon. (Bil’s brother Bob lived next door with his nine children. Those Keane boys, gluttons for punishment.) Keane had continued to do Spot News while preparing The Family Circus: the syndicate’s plan was to launch Family Circus by switching it for Spot News, slipping it into the syndicate pipeline while hoping client papers would continue the circular cartoon with its new focus. And it worked: “Newspaper editors hardly grumbled about the swapped feature. They liked the new material and found room for the new comic inside their papers.” The feature’s title, however, created a small surmountable problem.

Keane had christened the cartoon The Circle Family, but his editor at the syndicate thought The Family Circle would be better. Within six months of its launch, the cartoon attracted the attention of the legal department at Family Circle magazine, which threatened to sue. Keane had his editor pondered a host of other title possibilities before Keane opted for The Family Circus, which, he said, “better described his own life experience.” The new title made its debut Aug. 15, 1960.

The Family Circus cartoons in the book are all dated, a boon to historians. In the early years of the cartoon, as we can see from the samples I’ve collected near here, the pater familia has a somewhat different look — a much more bulbous nose being the most conspicuous. “He looked like a big fat clumsy guy,” said son Jeff.

In appearance, he evoked the star of another earlier Keane cartoon called The Master. “The title,” Christopher explained, “was an ironic take on a father being more of an indentured dupe than master of the house. The gags focused on a constantly bemused, bewildered and often put-upon dad.” But the father of The Family Circus was no dupe: He was simply an ordinary dad, and over the ensuing years, he eventually looked more and more like Bil Keane. The nose got smaller, and “Father” started wearing horn-rimmed eyeglasses. “Mother,” however, didn’t change much (although her hair-do achieved its stylized set after just a year or so). And in deference to her model, Thel, she always had a superb figure.

Jeff Keane began an apprenticeship on the panel some years ago and now does the cartoon solo. His father helps — “He’ll send me some roughs and some ideas and things,” Jeff told ICv2.com recently. “He’s not as involved as he used to be. My mom passed away on Memorial Day 2008. Since then he’s been less hands-on than he used to be. But he’s still there, he still reads, and he still tells me if I do anything wrong.”

The ICv2.com interviewer estimated that more than 18,000 Family Circus cartoons have been published and wondered how Jeff keeps the feature fresh.

“We don’t necessarily avoid repeating,” Jeff said. “I think a good thing with our cartoon is that families don’t change much as far as their feelings for each other and the love and all of that stuff. The environment certainly changes around them. I will redo cartoons that have been done before but have them seem more current — change the TV to a flat screen TV or have them talking about Facebook or change the dialogue. There are always new things. My dad has a whole file of gags and things that he had saved from when we were growing up. I’ve got a whole file from when my kids were growing up. So I use those and play off them.

“The main thing is to maintain the family feel,” he continued. “It’s not necessarily a ‘ha ha’ joke. My dad always said it’s a tug at the heart or a lump in the throat. Sometimes that’s a more effective cartoon, and that, I think, is the unique quality of Family Circus. With the IDW book, you can see in those early years it was much more of a gag-a-day type of cartoon. As the years go by, all of a sudden you’ll see where there’s a sort of a sentimentality that’s there and a true love for each other that starts to get expressed. I think that really came through from my mom. My dad realized that sort of the unique quality of this particular cartoon was his ability not to be afraid to make something emotional as opposed to just a joke.”

Asked which cartoonists his father admired, Jeff said: “He idolized George Lichty [Grin and Bear It] and George Price [New Yorker] when he started cartooning. He says his favorite cartoonist working today is me.”

A mystery unexplained in the book is why Keane’s first name has only one “l.” Fellow cartoonist Mell Lazurus claims Bil used to have two ls but he, Lazurus, appropriated one of for himself.

Of the lot of IDW’s “complete reprintings,” only Terry and Scorchy have been completed (the latter in a single volume), but that isn’t stopping IDW. Another classic is George McManus’ Bringing Up Father from 1939-40; subtitled “From Sea to Shining Sea,” the volume features Jiggs and Maggie and their daughter Nora on a tour of the U.S., which McManus and his long-time assistant Zeke Zekley reported by including in the strip recognizable landmarks from every city their cast visited. The second volume of Alex Raymond’s revered Rip Kirby is in the works, as is Jack Kent’s supremely fanciful King Aroo, which has been available up until now only in an antique Doubleday reprint of 1953, is out and available. And another collection of never-before-reprinted Krazy Kat daily strips by George Herriman is in the offing: Krazy and Ignatz in Tiger Tea revisits the daily sequence in which Krazy acts krazier than usual because he has imbibed a psychedelic brew. The first volume in IDW’s Bloom County series by Berk Breathed came out last fall, reportedly equipped with ample annotation to explain the topical references that lace Breathed’s strip.

Comics don’t necessarily look like comics at all. They can be found, usually, in a nimbus of light at the far end of a darkened room, where they stand, entirely alone, when gripping a microphone in one sweaty hand, delivering themselves of bad puns, all manner of verbal incongruities, and assorted manifestations of syntactic surprise, which they accompany, sometimes, with distorted facial expressions. For this, they are rewarded with the laughter of a multitude that has assembled before them for the purpose of laughing.

But as every schoolboy knows, comics do not stand alone at microphones in the dark. Indeed, we cannot even read them in the dark. We need light, the more, the better. And we enjoy comics best in solitary, by ourselves, not in crowds; although large numbers of people read comics, they generally do it by themselves, in silence.

Our seeming bewilderment about comics has its roots, as do most bewilderments, in ancient history. Today’s comic strip is the lineal descendant of the nineteenth century humorous drawing that appeared in weekly humor magazines like Puck, Judge, and Life in the 1880’s. Toward the end of the century, great metropolitan newspapers battled for readers, and, in the attempt to attract readers and build circulation, they began publishing extravagant Sunday supplements. The most famous of these circulation wars took place in New York, and comic drawings were on the frontlines of the battlefield.

The potential of the Sunday newspaper as a profitable venture was first in demonstrated in New York by Joseph Pulitzer who invaded the city in 1883, purchasing the New York World with the profits from his St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Pulitzer fleshed out the Sunday supplement idea by concentrating entertainment features in the Sunday World —material for women and young readers and for sports enthusiasts, the offerings of literary syndicates, and humorous drawings and other illustrations.

Pulitzer had run comics in the supplement as early as 1889, but when he acquired a four-color rotary press in 1893, new vistas opened. Morrill Goddard, who headed the Sunday staff, saw in the new technology a spur to circulation: he proposed to capitalize upon the popularity of the weekly humor magazines by imitating them but to improve upon the original by adding more color. Goddard did just that and inadvertently perverted his native language forever.

Offering comical drawings and amusing short essays and droll verse, the humor magazines Life, Judge, and Puck were dubbed “comic weeklies” in common parlance—or, even, “comics.” So when the World launched its imitation “comic weekly” in November 1894, it was lumped together in the popular mind as another of the “comics.”

And then, once the World had shown the way, papers in other cities began publishing humorous Sunday supplements full of funny drawings in color and risible essays and verse. In a relatively short time, obeying the dictates of demand, newspapers eliminated the essays and verse and concentrated on comical artwork, which was increasingly presented in the form of “strips” of pictures portraying hilarities in narrative sequence.

It was but a short step to the use of comics to designate the artform (comic strips) as distinct from the vehicle in which they appeared (the Sunday magazine supplement itself).

Once that bridge was crossed, meaning deteriorated pretty rapidly. Storytelling (or “continuity”) strips arrived soon after, and even when the stories they told were serious, they were called “comics” because they looked like the artform called comics and they appeared in newspapers with all the others of the breed.

Thus, did the medium acquire its name from the conveyance that brought it to its audience.

Just one of the misapprehensions that cluster around comics. Next time, how we mistakenly began to think that comics were intended solely for kids.

With the thirteenth issue of BIG QUESTIONS, Anders Nilsen is clearly starting to bring a narrative and thematic conclusion to his sprawling series.  This is the first issue that I can recall that had a guide to the expansive cast of characters on the inside flaps, reminding the audience of who’s doing what and why.  There is a density to this comic packed into its 48 pages that we hadn’t seen in most of the recent issues that plays out in the way Nilsen depicts light and dark.  Above all else, BIG QUESTIONS has been about belief and doubt, and the ways in which things we can’t understand inform our belief systems.  The interplay between light and dark has been a reflection, at a basic level, of the ways in which various characters have approached existential conflict in the series.

That trend continued in the first story, “The Seat of the Soul”.  A number of the birds still worshiped the airplane that fell from the sky, and this densely cross-hatched story finds a number of birds sleeping on the plane at night.  One of them accidentally turns on the radio, which causes home base to try to talk to the (absent) pilot.  This scene is fascinating for several reasons: it’s a moment where the bird (Eusippius) is struck by both the fear of god and utter bafflement that the plane sounded like a person; it’s a moment of high slapstick as Eusippius frantically tries to shush the radio; and it’s a bit of an infodump from Nilsen as plot points start to get filled in as to whom the pilot is and why he crash-landed.

The long segment with the pilot forms the center of this issue’s structure, as the birds try to come to terms with the pilot’s nature.  Some view him as being hatched from the giant bird (the plane) and hence as a sort of messianic figure.  To his great bafflement, one bird even left him worms outside his tent as a form of obeisance.  Another bird reasoned, from a more narcissistic point of view, that the humans were jealous of the birds for not being able to fly, and that the “giant bird” was nothing more than a “flying house” built by the humans.  There’s a fluidity to these pages, as Nilsen crams up to 10 panels on a page yet doesn’t use panel borders.  That creates a continuity between each panel, playing up the stippled detail on the ground (as well as the rubble, which Nilsen loves to draw) and contrasting it with the panels where he zooms in either on the pilot or on one of the confused birds.

The final segment of the book swings between darkness and light, as Algernon, a bird nursed back to health by a snake with mysterious motives, finally decides to head back above ground after being tended to beneath a tree.  This has been the most interesting but vaguely defined relationship of the series, as a natural predator went against its instincts to help what should be its prey back into a robust state.  The mysteriousness of the snake is subtly portrayed by its blank eyes, reflective of its environment and in direct contrast to the black dots of Algernon’s eyes.

With the series ending after #15, this current issue felt like a series of set-ups for a final collection of confrontations.  What will be most interesting is to see how the physical confrontations will affect the spiritual and philosophical dilemmas that have formed the backbone of the series.  Are the belief systems so hardened that physical manifestations will have no impact on them, are they mutable enough to incorporate new information or are they brittle enough to fall to pieces if enough temporal evidence is amassed to smash them?  Those are the questions I’m most interested in seeing Nilsen answer as BIG QUESTIONS, one of my favorite series of the past decade, winds down.

In the shadow of Southern California

March 13^th and 14^th saw the eighth annual Emerald City Comicon take place in Seattle.  Since moving to the Washington State Convention Center in 2007, it has rapidly gained critical mass with the hall feeling almost overcrowded this year — the legions of attendees had to be let in 15 minutes early on Saturday due to the fire risk they presented —and most exhibitors hosting more guests than previous years.  The list of creators in attendance was impressive with several top drawer names from the mainstream and independent scenes, many making their first trips to Emerald City.  The difference from previous years was palpable from the start, so much so that two words were on a lot of lips: San Diego.

“You can’t compare — this is a comic book convention,” said Jill Thompson, “San Diego is no longer a comic book convention, it’s a media convention.  Without knowing it, San Diego is going to revitalize a lot of smaller, regional conventions.”  Making her debut at ECCC, she delighted in the more intimate atmosphere and seeing fans carrying around stacks of comics.  Her sentiments were echoed by many of her peers, some of whom — like Tim Sale and Steven T. Seagle — refuse to go to San Diego now because of its focus on film and video game promotion.  “You feel like a second-class citizen,” Matt Fraction told us, even though he’s someone who, in the comics world, is seen as fairly high-profile and media-friendly with his work on the Iron Man franchise.

At Emerald City, it feels very much like a level playing field with indie and mainstream creators side-by-side, enjoying much the same foot traffic at their tables.  For popular creators, this is a welcome break from swarms of conventioneers, allowing them more time for fan interaction, without the pressures of promotion — given its place at the start of convention season, ECCC is relatively announcement-free — and for indie artists it exposes their work to a wider audience.  Jeff Lemire expressed surprise at how diverse the crowd was, seeing as much interest in Essex County as there was for his Vertigo project, Sweet Tooth.  The pervading feeling of the weekend was very that, big or small, it was a good time for comics.

…or most comics.  In light of a recent interview, it’s no secret that Image’s Phonogram series was hard-hit by poor sales.  Its writer, Kieron Gillen was jokingly modest about the fallout: “People have been very sweet. They’ve just come over to hold me and stroke me — but not in a sexual way.”  He was in attendance with one of the few new product launches of the weekend, the trade collection of The Singles Club, which had arrived from the printers just in time, “We’re used to a high-level disaster, that’s the way Phonogram operates.  What’ll happen now is they won’t sell…”

Northwest All Stars

“You can really stub your toe on people around here who are working in comics.”  That was Joelle Jones’ impression of the embarrassment of riches that the Northwest has in terms of comics talent.  One of the nice things about Emerald City is that it acts as a hub for these creators, bringing them together in an impressive way.  Almost every other artist or writer at the convention was based in Washington or Oregon, which certainly helps to give Emerald City its local identity.  “Once Dark Horse started, people began to gravitate toward the company they work for,” Jamie S. Rich explained, “and with Fantagraphics being based in Seattle, too, people just moved in that direction.  I think there’s also something in the fact that the weather is the way it is and it’s conducive to just having to stay indoors and draw.”  Greg Rucka, a fellow Portlander, was eager to concur: “It’s wet – we stay inside! And then the beer’s good and the coffee’s liberal and the cost of living’s not bad.  You’ve got a perfect storm for creators here – cheapskates who can get drunk and caffeinated and don’t have to go out and be social.”

In spite of Rucka’s fairly tongue-in-cheek remarks, there is a healthy sense of community between the writers and artists and even the fans, who seems to delight in the success of local creators.  Seattle’s Matthew Southworth spoke of the reaction to Stumptown, on which he is collaborating with Rucka: “My local comic shop have done a lot to promote the book, so I know a lot of people are aware of it because those guys like me.  In a way [Stumptown] feels like a local book about a local phenomenon by local people that just so happens to be nationally distributed. So I think there’s a feeling like, ‘Yay, one of our boys is doing something and people like it!’”  Buoyed by his success on the Oni-published title — the first issue sold out, as did his print for the convention — he’s keen to now work his way into the mainstream: “If you meet Jimmy Palmiotti at a show, tell him I wanna do Jonah Hex. I also really wanna draw Lobster Johnson for some reason…”

As well as the creators, the publishers were out in force, too: Top Shelf, Oni, as well as the aforementioned Dark Horse and Fantagraphics. The latter brought one of the biggest guests of the weekend, Gilbert Hernandez, who was launching his new Love and Rockets collection, The High Soft Lisp. He entertained a steady stream of fans with signing and sketching, ably assisted by daughter Natalia who showed signs of continuing the Hernandez legacy with her own mini-comic that she was selling.  Another Fantagraphics stalwart and Seattleite, Peter Bagge, was also there albeit as a guest as Vertigo who are set to publish his Other Lives graphic novel in April.

And the winner is…

For all the triumphs of Emerald City, the one that really seemed significant was that of the web cartoonists.  Alongside regulars like PvP and Girl Genius, e-commerce store Topatoco had an impressive presence with no less than 13 creators housed in its cardboard castle booth.  While it’s nothing new for web cartoonists to attend conventions, what was surprising was the line forming in front of Kate Beaton, creator of Hark! A Vagrant, which even rivaled the likes of Ed Brubaker and Mike Allred.  How did a small strip about history and literature manage to garner such a following? “Word of mouth is all.  Online it’s so easy to read someone’s comic – all it is is, ‘Check this out!’ in an email to your friend.  You don’t have to go anywhere – it just spreads that way.” Beaton’s humbleness belies the intelligence that permeates her work, an uncanny ability to draw the inherent humor out of historical figures, whether it be Poe and Verne’s bromance or Queen Elizabeth’s excessive ruffs: “I think almost everyone is interested in history, even if they read other types of comics, everybody likes a certain story or has a favorite character.  When people like something, it gets infectious.  I really like history so maybe that’s why it shines through.  I make comics about what I want to make comics about and I’m glad that everyone else likes them.”  The future looks bright for her, as The New Yorker are preparing to run a series of her cartoons, but whether she’ll ever make the move from the web to more traditional comics seems doubtful, “The problem with longform is that I don’t like putting up things that aren’t finished.  I like putting up comics that are self contained.”

Next year, Emerald City will expand to a three-day event, given the unprecedented success of this weekend’s event. Attendance was up nearly 50% on last year and several retailers were noting record sales for the event, a healthy sign of the endurance of printed matter in the comics medium — how would you sign an iPad anyway? — and economic recovery in general.

Oh yeah, and Stan Lee was there, too…

Top image: ©2010 Mike Allred
Middle image: ©2010 Greg Rucka and Matthew Southworth
Bottom image: ©2010 Kate Beaton

PHOTO GALLERY:

Click on image to view Flickr Gallery.

“I love comics; I grew up wanting to do comics; I got to do comics. It was almost always fun. But the world that happened in isn’t here anymore.”

Contact me: dirk@tcj.com
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From Indestructible Universe Quarterly, ©2009 Morgan Pielli.

Recently posted to our homepage:

• M. Thomas Inge concludes his two-part look at Harvey Kurtzman and modern American satire.

 

• Rich Kreiner reviews minicomics by Morgan Pielli and Jen Vaughn.

 

• As always, R.C. Harvey covers the funny pages.

 

• Over at The Hooded Utilitarian, a round-up of comments from the recent copyright/Free Culture roundtable.

And in the news…

Above the Fold

Life in interesting times

• Daily Cumhuriyet cartoonist Turhan Selçuk died last Thursday in Istanbul after undergoing surgery. He was 88 years old. The wire report calls Selçuk “one of the leading names in Turkish cartooning.”

 

• Mike Lynch brings word that New Yorker cartoonist John Kane died last Wednesday. Derek Van Giesen offers a remembrance.

 

• A suspect has been arrested in last week’s murder of Brazilian cartoonist Glauco Villas-Boas and son Raoni:

  College student Carlos Eduardo Sundfeld Nunes, identified by witnesses as the killer in the double murder that shocked Brazil, was arrested on Friendship Bridge after a brief shootout with Federal Police officers.

  The accused, who was carrying an unregistered weapon, fired at police, hitting and wounding one, when they tried to inspect the stolen vehicle he was driving.

 

• “Irish authorities said Tuesday they have charged two men who were reportedly part of an international plot to kill” Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks over his drawing of Muhammed with the body of a dog.

 



 

• As expected, heirs to the legacy of Marvel universe co-creator Jack Kirby have filed suit against Maervel Entertainment and Disney for copyright termination and a share of profits the contested characters have earned.

  Remember back when this would’ve been the lead story, rather than death and murder and shit? Those were good days…

 

• This blog post (Google translation) and subsequent comments section appear to be airing discontent among translators of comics for the Italian market.

  (Link via Gianfranco Goria.)

Format Wars^TM collectors-card shuffle… traded!

• “Copyright holders have given up legal efforts to force Norwegian ISP Telenor to block filesharing site The Pirate Bay, one of the parties to the case said.”

 

• Brad Stone and Miguel Helft examine the increasingly acrimonious grudge-match between Apple and Google.

 

• Your latest color e-book reader vaporware announcement.

Joe McCulloch: New this week

A look at the best-sounding books scheduled to hit the comics shops tomorrow.

Profiles

• Christopher Irving on Al Jaffee and Peter Kuper

  Transcription of a panel discussion in November of last year.

• Amanda Mears on Kevin Fagan

  Yes, it’s a big spotlight on the Drabble guy. You’re welcome.

Also

• Terry Hancock on Nina Paley
• Josh Wigler on Jeff Parker and Steve Lieber
• Brian Heater on Graham Annable
• Tim O’Shea on Jimmy Palmiotti
• Michael Cavna on Mike Manley
• Mike Rhode on Matt Dembicki

Reviews

• Tom Spurgeon on Map of My Heart

  “The great thing that Map of My Heart does is shake the reader out of preconceptions shaped by [John] Porcellino’s long career — for instance, in my case, that King-Cat is about sublimely well-observed autobiography more than it is about the work where Porcellino encounters nature more than it is about the Buddhist strips more than it is about the letters pages and single drawings.”

• Tim O’Neil on Tom the Dancing Bug
  
  Sequence ©2003 R. Bolling.

   

  “Ruben Bolling hardly sidesteps these contradictions, but he is at least aware of the uphill battle facing any ostensibly independent cartoonist wishing to maintain relevance in the face of an omni-powerful media-industrial complex. The strip’s most endearing quality is its unflinching commitment to dragging the reader through the figurative mud of our crap-stained national character: the strip may look cute, but Bolling pulls no punches.”

Also

• Andrew Wheeler on Crogan’s March
• Andrew Wheeler on Cyanide & Happiness
• David Welsh on Ristorante Paradiso Vol. 1
• Richard Bruton on Talking to Strangers

Commentary

• John Adcock: As to cartooning

  Reprinting a 1900 essay by Ambrose Bierce.

• Stephen Bissette: Forgotten Comics Wars continued

  In which the Forgotten Comics Wars… are continued.

Business and Craft

• Sean T. Collins: How not to write comics

  “On her blog, Ryan and a few of her comics-making chums are offering advice for writers on what not to do when writing comics scripts for others to draw.” Yes, it’s a link to a link round-up, but what can you do?

Comics and Art

• Asaf Hanuka: The Realist
  
  ©2010 Asaf Hanuka.

   

  “Weekly documentation in comics-form of one family’s search of a home.”

  (Link via John Martz.)

• Joakim Gunnarsson: Rune Andréasson’s Teddy
  

   

  1951 samples from the classic Swedish comic strip.

Also

• Online portfolio: Amanda Crawford
• Kelly Thompson: Spotlight on Gabrielle Bell
• Susan Lenox: Vintage German commercial art
     (Link via Charley Parker.)
• Ger Apeldoorn: More Mort Walker gag cartoons
• Magic Carpet Burn (one, two and three): Bob Hope #98
• Big Blog of Kids’ Comics: Dennis the Menace #62
• Big Blog of Kids’ Comics: Chip ‘n’ Dale #24
• Gold Key Comics: Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery #12
• Star-Studded War Comics: Warfront #34
• Ten-Cent Dreams (one, two): Simon & Kirby superhero/circus comics
• The Horrors of It All: “The Corpse Springs Alive!”
• Chuck Wells: “The Gold Maker!”
• Chuck Wells: “Tumult on the Exploding Island!”
• Chuck Wells: “Flames of Fury!”
• Allan Holtz: Facts and Figures
• Thom Buchanan: Fantasia Centaurette concept art
• John Porcellino: Heat lightning
• Ryan Sands: Happy Monday from Shintaro Kago
• Somersault: Two cartoonists meet
• A Journey Round My Skull: Wildlife incursions into modern cover design
• John Adcock: Die Karikatur poster art
• David Donihue: Monsieur X
• Novelty blog: Comically Vintage
     (Hat tip: Osamu Nomura.)
• Brian Hughes: The Bearded Gentlemen’s Club of Metropolis

Comics Culture

• Tom Spurgeon: Lance Fensterman

  The Reed Exhibitions organizer talks C2E2.

• Award round-up
  • This year’s Doug Wright Award nominees.
  • The winners of this year’s Scripps Howard Journalism Awards.
  • According to Jeff Baker, “Joe Sacco won the $10,000 Ridenhour Book Prize, given in honor of Ron Ridenhour, a Vietnam veteran who helped expose the My Lai massacre and later became an award-winning investigative journalist.”
  • Congratulations to Chriss Sharron, who won $10,000 and the Charles M. Schulz Award “for a diverse entry of traditional, alternative and humorous editorial cartoons,” according to award judges.

• Mike Rhode: Act-i-Vate in Washington DC

  Photos from the webcomics collective’s recent appearance at Politics and Prose.

• Your Not-Comics Link of the Day:

  Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World in ten words.

• Your Scans_Daily Link of the Day:
  
  ©2002 Phoebe Gloeckner.

   

  Excerpts from Phoebe Gloeckner’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl.

Events Calendar

Today:

• March 16 (Albany, NY): Jules Feiffer will give a Seminar at 4:15PM, followed by a lecture at 8PM, at the New York Stae Writers Institute. Details here.
• March 16 (Ann Arbor, MI): David Carter moderates a discussion on the graphic novel, featuring participants Phoebe Gloeckner, Jim Ottaviani and Eric Rabkin, at the University of Michigan’s Shapiro Library Building on University Avenue, from 7-8:30PM. Admission is free. Details here.

This Week:

• March 18 (Washington DC): Jules Feiffer makes an appearance at Politics and Prose on Connecticut Avenue, beginning at 4PM. Details here.
• March 18 (San Francisco, CA): Paul Pope makes a presentation at the Cartoon Art Museum on Mission Street, with doors open at 6:45PM. $5 suggested donation. Details here.
• March 19 (Auckland, New Zealand): Hicksville author Dylan Horrocks will attend the launch of a new edition of his book at the High Seas on Beresford Square, beginning at 6PM. Details here.

Want to see your comics-related event listed here? Email a link to dirk@tcj.com and let me know. Please include an online link to which I can send people for more information. No sales-only events, please — it’s nice that you’ve marked things down at your store or website, but I won’t be listing it here.