One of the great comics historians, Ron Goulart, begins a new column for us. Remembrance of Comics Past will feature Ron’s correspondences with cartoonists, beginning this week with Howard Sherman. As he explains:

Over the years I persisted, writing to comic strip artists, comic book artists and a few sports cartoonist. I heard from Bill Everett, Bob Lubbers, Will Eisner, Bart Tumey, Norman Maurer, Frank Godwin, George Storm and a host of others. Being a packrat by nature, I held onto the all the letters and drawings that I got. Tacked many of them on my bedroom walls, until I moved across the Bay to play the ad game at a San Francisco agency when I was 22. By the time I left advertising in the late 1960s, I had gathered a substantial collection of letters.

It’s an honor to have Ron aboard.

And Brandon Soderberg reviews the new Conan the Barbarian series from Wood and Cloonan.

Elsewhere:

-A very intriguing account of stolen Joe Simon art.

-Drew Friedman opened an art show in Brooklyn.

-I agree, this is a gorgeous comic book cover.

-Jack Kirby: Dance!

-The time NYC was briefly not in love with Milton Glaser.

Over the years I persisted, writing to comic strip artists, comic book artists and a few sports cartoonist. I heard from Bill Everett, Bob Lubbers, Will Eisner, Bart Tumey, Norman Maurer, Frank Godwin, George Storm and a host of others. Being a packrat by nature, I held onto the all the letters and drawings that I got. Tacked many of them on my bedroom walls, until I moved across the Bay to play the ad game at a San Francisco agency when I was 22. By the time I left advertising in the late 1960s, I had gathered a substantial collection of letters.

We—my wife and son—moved to the East Coast in lute 1968. I concentrated on writing science fiction novels, initially for Doubleday and Ace. I added mystery novels a few years later. And I started selling nonfiction books, chiefly about comic strips and comic books. I also got to know Jerry DeFuccio, who was an associate editor at MAD. He was a gung ho Golden Age comic book fan and it was his ambition to do a definitive history. He amassed a large collection of material, comic books, letters, original art, etc. But Jerry just could never get around to writing it. In fact, the pieces on C.C. Beck and Norman Mingo that he was supposed to write for the Overstreet guides and which he signed, he could never quite get around to writing. I ghosted them for him. In the final years of his life, when he realized that he’d never do the Golden Age book, he turned over a great many of the letters he’d gathered over to me.

For my initial outing I’ve decided to reprint a letter that I unearthed recently from the stuff DeFuccio had sent me some years ago. Its dated 11/8/84 and is from Howard Sherman, who co-created Doctor Fate for More Fun Comics #55 (May, 1940). Jerry had asked the artist questions about his work in comic books. I think he was disappointed that Sherman was not as enthusiastic about the Golden Age as he still was. On the envelope he had written  “not much here” Actually there’s quite a lot of information in Sherman’s four-page hand-lettered reply. Some of it informative, some of it rather sad.

The early Doctor Fate adventures offered somewhat grim, spooky and unsettling yarns to the young readers or More Fun, creepy stories that added some horror pulp criteria to the comic book’s definition of fun. An early caption spoke of the good doctor, who wore a blue and gold costume and a golden helmet that completely covered his face, as “a man of mystery, possessor of ancient secrets.” He dwelled “apart from mankind in his lonely tower north of ghost-ridden Salem” and called “upon ancient sources for the power with which he fights unusual crimes.”

The scriptwriter, and co-creator, was the impressively prolific Gardner P. Fox. who also invented The Flash, Hawkman, Zatara and the Justice Society to name but a few. A dedicated reader, and sometime contributor, of pulp fiction, Fox borrowed quite a bit from Weird Tales and H.P. Lovecraft and his followers. Howard Sherman had the ideal style to illuminate Fate’s arcane caseload. In the doctor’s first year or so in business he tangled with a green-tinted wizard bent on destroying the Earth, went for a boat ride on the River Styx, called on someone called Wisdom who had some of the attributes of God, Doctor Fate overcame mean-minded lost souls, invaders from another planet, killer robots, fish-men, an evil Mayan god and a faux leopard woman.

Doctor Fate’s constant companion was an attractive young woman named Inza Cramer. Alays well dressed, whether casually or formally, she shared many of his supernatural encounters and he frequently saved her from fates far worse than death. Sherman enjoyed drawing these weird tales, his layouts were inventive and added to the unsettling fantasy elements. He says in the following letter that he was “slower in production than some of the other artists. It look me about 10 to 14 days to pencil and ink 6 pages.” For that two weeks of work, he was earning, according to the early page rate he mentions in his letter, $72.

Despite his meticulous and thoughtful approach, his pages are fast moving and rich in aptly gloomy settings, monumental explosions, huge fireballs, furious storms and many another Saturday matinee serial touch. In the letter you’ll learn quite a bit about his career from a talented artist who labored in comic books during the Golden Age, before anybody was calling it that, then moved on to other things.

NOTE: In 2007 DC added The Golden Age Doctor Fate Volume 1 to its hardcover Archival Editions series. Over 350 pages of Howard Sherman’s work. You might also glance at the few Fate stories done by other artists to get an idea how much better he was than quite a few of his contemporaries.

Don’t look now, but a couple of indie comics nerds are messing around with Conan the Barbarian — and it’s the best thing to happen to Robert E. Howard’s legendary galoot since Marvel Comics retrofitted him for the rogue male-centric mid-’70s. Writer Brian Wood and artist Becky Cloonan’s Conan the Barbarian, based on Howard’s “Queen of the Black Coast” short story — in which a young Conan becomes romantically involved with Belit, an “ebony-haired,” living breathing angel of death — features a fairly talkative warrior, built more like a long distance runner than a linebacker. This Conan is totally hot — in a youthful badass, Peter Pan kind of way.

Issue #3 begins with a flashback to the disconcertingly slender Conan hunting in his native Cimmeria. It’s a context-free scene from Conan’s past, there to parallel a sex scene later on — making explicit the creation/destruction themes that tug this tale along — and to illustrate Belit’s idyllic vision of the Cimmerian. Also, it’s the only moment of the story arc where we get to see Conan in his natural habitat, doing what he does best: masterfully murdering things. And that’s important because “Queen of the Black Coast” is all about Conan screwing up. Issue #1 starts with Conan forcing himself onboard a ship called the Argus, assuring protection to the angry crew, then confidently and idiotically leading them into the seas patrolled by the vicious Belit and her ship, the Tigress. Everyone on the Argus, save for Conan, is killed by Belit’s crew.

While downplaying the pulpmeister’s worshipful Romanticism, Wood and Cloonan honor the strange contingencies of fate that are at the core of Howard’s tough guy mystical storytelling. “Queen of the Black Coast” is a story about sex and violence, love and reptile-brain attraction, and the brutal fact that we cannot control our base impulses no matter how hard we try. Was it simple hubris, or more mysterious matters of the heart that sent Conan towards Belit’s ship, in the first place? Later on, we learn that Conan would’ve been killed along with the Argus’ crew, had Belit wished for it to happen.

Wood and Cloonan’s approach to the Conan legacy is conservative (see issue #2′s extended fight scene, a gleefully violent mix of cheap thrills and grace under pressure), perhaps even reverential (the narration appears in a typewriter font, reminding readers of the source material), but quietly subversive, as well. When Conan bounds onto the Argus uninvited in issue #1, he pretty much hustles the angry crew into accepting him, first with his sword, and then with some smooth-talking about his predicament: “And perhaps more than a few quarts of ale had passed my lips. You men must surely know the place, the bone in the throat, that inn down the old wharf road?” It’s our hero as fast-talking twerp.

That bit of dialogue isn’t in the original story and here, it’s delivered by a less than cocksure warrior, so everything is slightly shifted and modernized with just enough respect to tradition and expectation. A touching, full page image in issue #3 shows Conan and Belit, post-coitus — their naked bodies comparable in size, subtly correcting to the usually out of control body images present in fantasy comics. With the doom that will inevitably befall their romance in upcoming issues temporarily at bay, the two share a genuinely tender moment. Belit rests on the bed, her foot is half-wrapped around Conan’s leg. It’s a type of intimacy that cuts straight through Howard’s lofty vision of romance as two myths falling in love with one another’s mythos.

Moynihan provides a helpful family tree at the beginning of the book but otherwise plunges the reader square into the mining operation begun on earth by the alien “god” named Mithras in 10,000 BC. Moynihan has a way of quickly catching the reader up on what they need to know through character interactions, but just when the reader seems to have a clear handle on what’s going on, he throws in another new character who further complicates matters. Mithras winds up bedding an earth woman named Gaia who bears a special mark and spawns a number of strange and threatening children. After she defends them by saying things like “they just need more attention” and “they’re sensitive,” Mithras thinks, “These Earth mothers are mentally deranged when it comes to their kids!” That line slew me.

Moynihan connects alien mythology (the aliens in the book are from the planet Dogon, as in the alien conspiracy theory), Greek mythology (in the form of the Titans), and Judeo-Christian theology (Noah as a hilariously sleazy slacker), in the form of the “angels” who come from space but go native under the leadership of trans angel/assassin Serapis—not to mention the presence of Lucifer at the center of the earth. Every one of these origin stories is “true” in the sense that they overlap and influence each other. In between crazy fight scenes, lurid sex scenes, and hilarious dialogue, Moynihan actually explores a number of philosophical ideas. Foremost is Moynihan’s take on language.  The humans in the story initially communicate by a form of pictorial thought-projection before the aliens give them the “gift” of language, and it’s clear that their former means of communication is far more in tune with their environment.

Other themes involve free will vs divine destiny, the will of the individual vs one’s place in the greater whole (which is personified in a debate between Lucifer and the young titan Arges in which Lucifer says, “You’re all high and mighty now, but wait ’till you experience real death. You’ll change your tune then. That shit will rock your ass.”), and the tension between progress and conservation. Many of these topics are debated in almost Socratic fashion, but written entirely in Moynihan’s hilarious modern lingo. Throughout, the further any race tries to interfere on earth, the more resistance they receive in the form of the “Great Beasts” and mysterious forces in earth determined to oppose them.

Midway through the book, the second-rate assassin Atys is introduced to kill the rebellious Serapis, and this musclebound blowhard is by far the funniest character in the book. Intensely jealous of Serapis, there’s an unforgettable scene where he’s psyching himself up in the mirror prior to his mission to earth where he masturbates and covers himself in jism, paradoxically uttering hate-filled epithets regarding Serapis’s status as a transsexual while promising to rape him/her (“RIGHT IN YOUR FUCKING STAR FRUIT, SERAPIS! GET IT MOIST FOR ME!”). Of course, Atys gets his ass kicked and sent packing, tries it again and his dreams of Forced Dry Anal are forced off earth once again. At the climax of this volume, Atys goes through a journey with master assassin Marduk (one of many Babylonian mythological namesakes in this book) and actually has Serapis on the ropes before a mysterious creature in charge of the rebellious beasts announces itself and turns Atys into a rock.

The volume ends with Serapsis’ crazy son Cain finding the power buried in Atys and threatening to become a dangerous new wild card in the various petty conflicts at play. That’s the takeaway from this first volume of the rise and potential fall of Atlantis: that all of the machinations of the “gods” are nothing more than a series of cynical power plays to get at earth’s precious mining resources. When in doubt, follow the money. The book takes an interesting turn when forces present in and on earth are more than willing to take on the gods, though they mostly work behind the scenes in the first volume. Forming may be more accessible and less personal than Follow Me, but it’s a project worthy of his talent and ambition.

Tezuka Osamu, Manga College (August 1950), cover.

The original cover of Tezuka Osamu’s Manga College, which is no longer used for copyright reasons, can be read like a cipher, like a diagram of Tezuka’s artistic identity at around the time the book was published, in the summer of 1950. If you have read Manga College or similar intro books by Tezuka, you know that Professor Manga is basically a wizened stand-in for the artist. Here he sports a cap bearing the logo of Tezuka’s Mushi Pro, at this point just a name not an operation. He has drawn on the chalkboard a fairly faithful image of Mickey Mouse, as if this is where instruction in “Comicology” (the title of a book on his desk) shall begin and always return. Below on the ground is his partner. He is also modeled on Mickey. He has the big shoes, the ears, and generally the face, but he is definitely not Mickey. He is just a rodent. This impostor, this scrawny pot-bellied wise-ass wanna-be, he also makes art. He has drawn a picture of the professor, and it stinks.

What is going on here? Professor Tezuka is so good at cartooning that he can simulate Disney. Pseudo-Mickey is so bad that he makes a mess of Tezuka. This is not teacher versus student, for the students are sitting over here, on our side, facing the teacher and the board. So much is illustrated on the first page of the book, showing a standard college lecture hall, with tiered seats in a semi-circular arrangement, looking down upon the professor and, at his foot, the little mouse. How is it that the fake Mickey is Tezuka’s aide? Or conscience? How is it that he teases Tezuka with maladroit yet effective caricatures?

Is it that Tezuka draws the rodent as the rodent wants to be seen, while the rodent does just the opposite, rendering Tezuka as Tezuka wishes not to be seen?

How is this the face of Comicology in Japan, 1950? Is it significant that in that very spring Tezuka had begun his first serial for a Tokyo magazine, and that perhaps he could begin to look away from his akahon roots and the rodents living within them? Is it significant that just the previous year, Daiei Film Co. President Nagata Masaichi had signed a personal deal with Walt Disney to be the studio’s sole licensing agent in Japan, thereby bringing to Japan the first official Mickeys in bulk in well over a decade?

Tezuka Osamu, Magic House (February 1948), cover.

Thesis: From his arrival in Japan in the early 30s, Mickey Mouse was an icon of humor. To some, he was also ambassador of American ingenuity and American quality in production. But thanks to lax copyright protections for foreign properties, and his rendition by goods-makers that did not necessarily privilege the faithful or even skillful reproduction of his image, Mickey also became in Japan an icon of appropriation and its side effects, like modified personality and degraded design. This continued into the early postwar period. But towards the end of the Occupation, a series of forces colluded to “correct” Mickey’s image. Amongst them was Tezuka Osamu. For Tezuka, rectifying Disney went hand in hand with a number of things. It meant denying the akahon rodent of his roots and the production ethic on which its inventiveness fed. It meant recalling Mickey from appropriation and putting him back in the hands of authorship. It meant repositioning Disney as a light of genius and industriousness, against a mainstream that viewed him primarily as a talented showman and joker. It meant seeing himself more and more in the image of Disney. It meant expelling the rodent from the classroom, however much he had been there for the professor in his youth, and teaching straight from the Mickey on the board.

For what follows, let us take the rodent as akahon and the blackboard Mickey as manga industry at the dawn of the Fifties. This allegory, as you will see, is based on more than my imagination.

Note: On akahon, see “An Introduction to Akahon Manga”

(Continued)

Above we see a detail from Suicide Joe, an enormous 11 3/4″ x 16 1/2″ comic book, just 20 pages, which I picked up from the Danish Consulate General at MoCCA the other week. I was unaware at the time that the Journal’s own Matthias Wivel — or, at least I’m presuming that’s him writing — had previously named it one of the best Danish comics of 2010, though it actually dates from 1984; I’m not sure if it was actually published back then, though it is certainly available now from Fahrenheit. There are many things I don’t know, though I’m certain I like the comic.

The artist is Peter Kielland, presently a contributor to Wivel’s Kolor Klimax: Nordic Comics Now collection from Fantagraphics, though some might recall the 2004 Kim-Rehr Productions release of his wordless Fish. This, in contrast, is mostly in fragmented, elliptic English, following an artist who specializes in desecrating other people’s work and slashing up bodies for exhibition in his lucrative Suicide Gallery. Yet these deaths are demonstration not suicides, and Suicide Joe remains dissatisfied as his lack of comprehension of art, money, life and death, an unease that sets him down a path of discovery through bars, whores, psychologists, religion and medicine, all of it rendered in a slashing style evocative — so Matt Seneca told me — of classic RAW, its large pages accommodating upwards of 23 panels per shot, yet never seeming more crowded than the nervous story requires.

Matt and I are going to get into this a little more pretty soon, so I don’t want to go in too deep, but I have to mention how young and anxious a comic this feels, eager to segue from noisy groupings of panels to comparative quiet, if always crossed through with shadowing lines; there’s never a moment where Kielland’s Joe seems to stop thinking, and so there is never a page where the artist is not anxious about art as desecration, and desecration as nonetheless a failure to grasp something profound. The ending then seems inevitable, as Joe realizes that his art can embodies stillness to him only when divorced from the reality of his creation of it, when placed in a gallery where even sensitive minds and able curators can only analyze what it could have meant to him. From there, the artist too becomes part of the exhibition, frozen in time by the narrative of aesthetics, and truly dead. If Suicide Joe is only now being published in the ’10s, laid down on paper and set out for sale, then maybe it’s finally dead to Kielland, though I wonder if divesting himself of such youth isn’t now a relief.

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PLEASE NOTE: What follows is not a series of capsule reviews but an annotated selection of items listed by Diamond Comic Distributors for release to comic book retailers in North America on the particular Wednesday, or, in the event of a holiday or occurrence necessitating the close of UPS in a manner that would impact deliveries, Thursday, identified in the column title above. Not every listed item will necessarily arrive at every comic book retailer, in that some items may be delayed and ordered quantities will vary. I have in all likelihood not read any of the comics listed below, in that they are not yet released as of the writing of this column, nor will I necessarily read or purchase every item identified; THIS WEEK IN COMICS! reflects only what I find to be potentially interesting.

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SPOTLIGHT PICKS!

Best of Enemies: A History Of U.S. and Middle East Relations, Part 1: 1783-1953: Certainly the first thing I’d look at this week – a new 120-page SelfMadeHero translation (distributed in North America through Abrams) of a 2011 work by L’Association co-founder David B[eauchard], collaborating with Jean-Pierre Filiu to draw “striking parallels between ancient and contemporary political history,” per the publisher. My understanding is that it blends some of the fable style of The Armed Garden with the essay narration of the artist’s unfortunately stalled Babel, which is to say it’s a completely “David B.” kind of comic, despite its sober ‘relevant political topic’ packaging. Sample; $24.95.

Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama: And elsewhere in big box bookstore hits & floridly digressive narration, Alison Bechdel follows up 2007′s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic with a 224-page Houghton Mifflin Harcourt examination of her relationship with her mother. Bechdel has since become something of an axiom online, so I find it helpful to recall that Fun Home was not altogether warmly received in dedicated comics crit circles upon its release, in that such chilliness was tied, I think, to the work’s qualities as a constructed narrative; Bechdel is not a ‘natural’ cartoonist by the typical understanding, shooting photo-reference for apparently every panel and drawing her story together as if forming a scrapbook of her past, chapters organized as discreet thematic units — often riffing off some pertinent literary exposure in that segment of her youth — yet pregnant with images and text that recur throughout the work in updated contexts, and a narration that tends to comment reflexively on its own citations. It’s an obsessively analytic approach to comics creation — at odds with the freewheeling, hugely vivid, visceral, iconographic approach of a David B., despite working in an ostensibly similar essay mode — inseparable from the disposition of the work itself, and I’m interested in seeing how it develops. Samples/interview; $22.00.

–

PLUS!

100 Months: I’ve highlighted this one before, the final longform work by John Hicklenton — maybe my all-time favorite 2000 AD artist, with Nemesis the Warlock and Heavy Metal Dredd credits of some note — “a parable of environmental devastation” created during his prolonged struggle with multiple sclerosis, which the artist concluded on his own volition shortly after the book was completed. Cutting Edge Press initially released the 172-page hardcover in 2010, but I believe this is the first time any edition has been made available in North American comic book stores via Diamond. Samples; $29.95.

But I Really Wanted to Be an Anthropologist: This is a second SelfMadeHero offering for the week, collecting 176 pages of humorous color comics and illustrations from the Paris-based Margaux Motin, I believe culled from her website. Very pleasing linework on this; $24.95.

The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde Vol. 5: The Happy Prince: Being the newest release from P. Craig Russell, an original 32-page, 8 1/2″ x 11″ hardcover album, its format designed to match prior installments of the series dating back to the early 1990s (though vol. 1, The Selfish Giant and the Star Child, is also seeing new hardcover and softcover editions this week). The Wilde story dates from 1888, concerning money and satisfaction; its adaptation marks Russell’s Opus 66, if you’re keeping track. Preview; $16.99.

The Complete Dick Tracy Vol. 13: 1950-1951: Yep, IDW’s still got this going on; $39.99.

30 Days Of Night: 10 Bloody Years – Treasury Edition: But as much as I like the Library of American Comics stuff, I’ve gotten pretty piqued by this short-form, large-sized reprint effort they’ve been spreading across their wares, offering samples of elsewhere-collected materials in a 9 3/4″ x 13″ glossy format at a pretty low price, presumably due to the already-done state of the work. This time it’s the complete original 2002 Steve Niles/Ben Templesmith vampire miniseries — arguably the work upon which the publisher’s fortune was built — getting the oversized treatment, which should prove interesting with all that blood and smudging; $9.99.

Deadenders: In which DC/Vertigo suddenly reminds you of a project you couldn’t even place exact years on without help, specifically here the 392-page entirety of a 2000-01 series from writer Ed Brubaker and artist Warren Pleece (inked, at different points, by Richard Case, Cameron Stewart and Jay Stephens), concerning combative teenagers of the shitty future. Sixteen issues seems like an enviable run today, given the circumstances; $29.99.

B.P.R.D. – Hell on Earth: The Devil’s Engine #1 (of 3): Notable for marking the return of the series’ arguable primary artist Tyler Crook, following some really striking part-time Hellboy universe contributions by James Harren (of The Long Death) and Tonci Zonjic (over on Lobster Johnson: The Burning Hand). Written by Mike Mignola & John Arcudi, as usual. Preview; $3.50.

The Flowers of Evil Vol. 1: This is Vertical’s newest manga series, an ongoing shōnen high school comedy (its sixth volume imminent in Japan) that might seem like a sop to orthodox fan tastes, until you realize that ‘fan tastes’ run to scenarios involving a nervous middle school kid’s accidental theft of a crush object’s gym clothes and his subsequent blackmailing by a foul-mouthed weird girl classmate — apparently based on a real childhood acquaintance of creator Shuzo Oshimi — into situations poised to needle his most severe anxieties. The result is basically male humiliation porn for junior high-schoolers that appears to have won its fit-for-12-year-olds designation solely by virtue of avoiding any on-panel nudity, an effect cheerily enhanced by the f-bombs and miscellaneous other profanities sprinkled over the English translation. Or maybe everyone down at Bessatsu Shōnen Magazine knew it’d be impossible for any real heat to rise from Oshimi’s stone-boring, anime dōjinshi-looking artwork, his anti-heroine enough of a Rei Ayanami/Yuki Nagato fetish clone icon to make one wistful for draconian copyright enforcement. Nonetheless, you probably won’t see another mainstream comic this week depicting a flush-faced schoolgirl ripping a screaming boy’s clothes off and forcing a pair of sporty ladies’ bloomers onto his writhing body, unless Hulk Smash Avengers goes rogue; $10.95.

Saturn Apartments Vol. 5 (of 7): But if that’s a little too rich for you, Hisae Iwaoka has a really soft, round cartoon style I’m always happy to see, and now Viz has another 192 pages of her 2006-2011 slice-of-life-in-space series from its SigIKKI line of older-skewing series. Sample chapter from vol. 1; $12.99.

Kamen: Speaking of digital manga efforts, last year saw the launch of GEN, a monthly collection of actual dōjinshi efforts — which, setting aside my derogatory reference above to anime fan comics, is a term encompassing any self-published Japanese manga — aimed at older audiences. I can’t say I’ve read any of it, but it’s nearly a year old now, and Kamen appears to be the first collected edition of applicable materials, a 258-page story from Gunya Mihara concerning a masked man of justice. You can also buy a digital edition for two bucks, if you so choose; $9.95.

Walt Kelly: The Life and Art of the Creator of Pogo: Finally, your book-on-comics of the week, a 224-page Hermes Press tribute to the man of the title, promising art from the comics and animation arenas, as well as essays, appreciations and other coverage; $49.99.

From his arrival in Japan in the early ’30s, Mickey Mouse was an icon of humor. To some, he was also ambassador of American ingenuity and American quality in production. But thanks to lax copyright protections for foreign properties, and his rendition by goods-makers that did not necessarily privilege the faithful or even skillful reproduction of his image, Mickey also became in Japan an icon of appropriation and its side effects, like modified personality and degraded design. This continued into the early postwar period. But towards the end of the Occupation, a series of forces colluded to “correct” Mickey’s image. Amongst them was Tezuka Osamu. For Tezuka, rectifying Disney went hand in hand with a number of things. It meant denying the akahon rodent of his roots and the production ethic on which its inventiveness fed. It meant recalling Mickey from appropriation and putting him back in the hands of authorship. It meant repositioning Disney as a light of genius and industriousness, against a mainstream that viewed him primarily as a talented showman and joker. It meant seeing himself more and more in the image of Disney. It meant expelling the rodent from the classroom, however much he had been there for the professor in his youth, and teaching straight from the Mickey on the board.

Joe McCulloch refrained from exploring the swamplands this week, and has his usual Tuesday report on the most interesting-looking new comics ready to go.

And Rob Clough continues his tour through the output of Nobrow Press with a review of Jesse Moynihan’s Forming.

Also, we have continued to add new Maurice Sendak tributes to our page for him, many of which you may not have seen if you haven’t looked at the post since last week. Some of the more recent contributors include Megan Kelso, Dylan Horrocks, Cathy Malkasian, and Victor Kerlew.

And of course, the tributes to Sendak have continued to grow everywhere else on the internet, too. Some highlights not previously noted in this space include Chris Mautner at Robot 6, Ellen Handler Spitz at The New Republic, Neil Gaiman at The Guardian, and a whole slew of artists at the New York Times (don’t miss the attached slideshow at that link). Philip Nel, who of course wrote an excellent Sendak obituary for us, has penned another short remembrance at his own site, at the end of which he has also gathered an extremely thorough collection of links to the best and most informative memorials.

It also just came to my attention that Lance Bangs and Spike Jonze’s Tell Them Anything You Want, their 2009 documentary on Sendak, is available for viewing at Hulu:

—Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, the esteemed cultural critic Mark Dery writes about a recent collection of Edward Gorey’s correspondence.

—Roger Langridge has revealed a little more of what was behind his recently announced decision no longer to work for DC or Marvel.

—Derik Badman uses a critical roundtable on Wonder Woman as an excuse to take a closer look at the overlooked, underdiscussed importance of style in cartooning.

—Tom Spurgeon has the first (that I’ve seen) big interview with Joseph Remnant, the collaborator on Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland who has taken a lot of people by surprise.

—Blake Bell continues to cater to that small part of the Venn diagram where superfans of Steve Ditko and superfans of Dave Sim meet.

—Leonard Pierce writes about Pogo.

—And finally, via Mike Lynch, Jules Feiffer reads from “Boob Noir”:

On the site today we have a preview of Gary Groth’s expansive interview with the late Maurice Sendak. It will see full publication this autumn in TCJ 302. And yesterday Frank Santoro reported back to us from deep within cartoonist Jim Rugg’s Pittsburgh-area home. Frank is embedding himself in different locations.

The big story of the moment is perhaps the news that longtime independent cartoonist Roger Langridge, who recently wrote, among other comics, a very popular Thor series, has announced that he will not work for Marvel and DC any longer due to ethical concerns. Langridge currently writes Popeye for IDW besides doing his own comics.

There’s been a whole slew of book previews:

-Eric Reynolds writes about a project he’s very happy with — Significant Objects.

-Gilbert Hernandez’s upcoming Fatima: The Blood Spinners looks pretty great.

-Drawn & Quarterly has a very handsome new petit livre on the way.

-And finally, closest to my heart: There’s yet another new Wally Wood collection coming.

But, to begin at the beginning: I had previously spoken to Maurice nearly a dozen times by phone over the previous three years: initially desultorily, and later, when I decided that I was prepared to interview him for The Comics Journal, more earnestly and purposefully. When I formally approached him about an interview — perhaps in 2009 — he didn’t decline, exactly, but he was standoffish. He told me he didn’t like talking on the phone, and he politely but firmly declined my offer to conduct it at his home, which left me without many (that is to say, any) options. I finally persuaded him to do several short interviews by phone. He asked me how much time I needed, and I explained to him that my interviews could go on for hours because I wanted to do a thorough job. I heard a visible gasp on the other end of the line. He told me he couldn’t talk that long on the phone because he got tired. I quickly regrouped and suggested that we could talk for, oh, say 30 minutes at a time and just do a number of different sessions (hoping, even as I said it, that I could slyly turn 30 minutes into 60). He grumbled. He would commit to a couple. I remember mentioning to him that we’d already been talking that day for 40 minutes without any signs of his slowing down, which was true (I wish I’d had my tape recorder on at the time!), but which didn’t seem to impress him as an argument in favor of two hour interview sessions. Once he’d realized we’d been talking for 40  minutes, he quickly got off the phone.

From King Grisley-Beard; pictures by Sendak

The fact is, we got along incredibly well. We had several 30-40 minute conversations that ranged all over the place, but which usually centered on the state of the world and how much he loathed it. He was quite cheerfully and gregariously grumpy about it all, an attitude and a point of view that I appreciated, and even shared. It was obvious that he took no small measure of delight in inveighing against contemporary degradations, and I have to admit that I took no little delight in listening to him. He would cite specifics about the world going to hell in a hand-basket and I would inevitably, and truthfully, concur. I can’t say we became fast friends, but I can say that we got on and established a genuine rapport. (We also talked about more substantial matters —such as politics— and about things he loved— mostly old cartooning and old films.)

He agreed to sit still for a phone conversation and perhaps more than one. But each time we set a date, something came up to thwart it. He had to cancel twice, once due to a deadline and once due to momentary health problems. On the third date that we’d agreed upon, I was sitting at my desk, my notes in front of me, the recorder plugged in, prepared to keep the imminent conversation chugging for as long as I could. I dialed the number — and discovered that Hurricane Irene had downed his phone lines! Truly, it appeared as though the fates were conspiring against us, or at least, against me. I was becoming demoralized. Perhaps it was not meant to be.

When I casually mentioned to his assistant and close friend, Lynn, that I was planning a trip to New York the following week, she told me to come on up and conduct the interview in person. This surprised me because I’d learned, subsequent to my offering to visit him earlier, that he was wary of visitors and never let anyone he didn’t know visit his home. My theory is that he simply took pity on me and distrusted any future attempt to communicate by modern or semi-modern technology. The following week, on November 8, I boarded a train from Penn Station headed for Ridgefield, Conn. I had with me my trusty three-ring binder full of notes, ready to get as much of a career-spanning interview as I could, but nervous because I wasn’t entirely certain he wouldn’t throw me out after 20 minutes; he didn’t seem like the kind of artist who would sit still for a conventional interview.

He didn’t throw me out; in fact, quite the opposite, he spoke animatedly all afternoon and into the evening, mostly while we walked around his property, sat on a bench in his sprawling backyard (more like a private park), and strolled down the street, the tape recorder going much the time, and yielding the most unconventional, conversational interview I’ve ever done. (I could’ve left my binder full of notes at home.)

I had an unforgettable time. Maurice and I spoke a half-dozen times since; he’d agreed to a few follow-up questions, but all our conversations were casual, consisting of good-natured badinage. His fatalism was couched in a blithe spiritedness, and he was funny. The last time I spoke to him, in April, he actually sounded robust despite suffering from flu-ish symptoms, and told me to call him back in a couple weeks to ask him short follow-up questions. I put it off, and then learned that he passed. I had hoped to see him again soon, and despite knowing him briefly, I will miss him.

The full interview will appear in the next print Journal, #302, but below are a few choice excerpts.

Gary Groth, May 10, 2012

SENDAK ON HIS COMICS CAREER

SENDAK: I would take my stack of papers back home, shut the door, make [my parents] believe I was doing my homework, and what I was doing was backgrounds for Scribbly, backgrounds for Mutt and Jeff, backgrounds for Tippy and Captain Stubbs. And there would be a weekly down below, one strip, and I would take it and cut it up, and make it fit on a comic page so that I would have to extend the drawing to fit the size of the comic box. Oh, God. I loved it. But I lost that because — What did they ask me to do? They asked me to do a more moderate thing, where the drawing was more Prince Valiant-ish. And girls were sexy, and it’s like, “You can’t draw sexy girls.” I failed. I failed. I loved it. I was really gonna be a cartoonist. I had a cartoon in my high school newspaper magazine. Terrible, terrible shit. [...]

GROTH: Didn’t you work on Mutt and Jeff? In comic books?

SENDAK: Yes, yes: small things like smoke coming out of heels.

GROTH: This is one of the things I wanted to ask you, which was how you became the artist you became and how you had the career you did. When you were a kid, you read comic strips. You must have read comic strips.

SENDAK: Yes, yes.

GROTH: And comic books came along around the mid-1930s, and you read comic books as well. But you didn’t become a comic-strip artist or a comic-book artist. You went an entirely different direction.

SENDAK: I would have liked to become a Big Little Book artist.

GROTH: But they died. [Laughter.]

SENDAK: They died, yes, they died. Although I have my collection.

Kenny's Window, Sendak's first book

GROTH: But I was curious as to why you didn’t — I mean, the dream of many artists back then was to have a syndicated strip. That was the Holy Grail. And those who couldn’t do that went into comic books. And so I’m wondering why you didn’t move in either direction.

SENDAK: I have no idea. I think part of why it happened had nothing to do with the actual craft. It had to do with meeting Ursula Nordstrom at Harper’s [Harper and Row] and knowing instantly my life was with her.

GROTH: I see.

SENDAK: And she said, “You do a book.” I would do anything she said. If she said do a comic book, I would have done a comic book. So she was integral, she was so important to my life. 

IN HIS TIME

SENDAK: We cannot, I think, separate ourselves from our time. Like when I began in the ’50s … Of course, I’d had the privilege of having great siblings. So me as an artist was with my brother as an artist, learning from him, copying him, living in the same house with him. It was unbelievable to have such a brother, and on top of that, I had such a sister. She wasn’t an artist. She had no impulses in that direction, but she was a great sponsor of. She was delighted with me and delighted with my brother and her brother. And then I grew up and lived through all of that Auschwitz time, and then we won the war. Hitler might have won the war, but he didn’t. That doesn’t sound like much now, but it sounded like a hell of a lot then. We won the war! My God! And we ran from Brooklyn to New York City to get ahead of the soldiers, and those doors opened, and we were welcomed. Young people were welcomed. New things were happening, a surge of energy: a surge of hope. A surge of happiness. And now it’s all dwindled. And so I say, look, I’m very lucky that’s when my time was. What a blessing that I could be there then and be with editors and people in the publishing world who appreciated young people and wanted them to be crazy like I was. Nobody wants them now.

WHY SO SERIOUS

SENDAK: Well, I get criticized for doing too serious books. Why is there a dead child in so many of your books? Why is there a chagrined mother? Because that’s the way it is. It works both ways. You either become very superficial, and do it strictly for the money, or you become very serious and turn people off. And if it’s a book for children, my God! I would not know how to write a book for children. I’ve never written a book for children. And yet I’m known as a children’s book writer and illustrator, OK? Why did they define me that way? I used to object much more when I was younger, much more. But I don’t care any more. I’ve thought that’s all part of this third-rate worldly thinking that should not be of interest to me and truthfully it’s not. Thank God I can still read. Thank God I can still hear music. Thank God I don’t mind being alone. I am very alone, and I’m lonely and there are very few people who satisfy me and what do they have to be, they have to be artists, for the most part [rooster crows]. They have to understand what it means to be a serious person in an unserious society.

Drawn while listening to Brahms: from The Art of Maurice Sendak

SENDAK THE ANARCHIST

SENDAK: Bush was president, I thought, “Be brave. Tie a bomb to your shirt. Insist on going to the White House. And I wanna have a big hug with the vice president, definitely. And his wife, and the president, and his wife, and anybody else that can fit into the love hug.”

GROTH: A group hug.

SENDAK: And then we’ll blow ourselves up, and I’d be a hero. [Groth laughs.] To hell with the kiddie books. He killed Bush. He killed the vice president. Oh my God.

GROTH: I would have been willing to forgo this interview. [Sendak laughs.]

SENDAK: You would have forgotten about it. It would have been a very brave and wonderful thing. But I didn’t do it; I didn’t do it.

One of my riffs these days is that cartoonists don’t know how to compose in color. Usually the cartoonist only understands the coloring book approach. Heavy black outlines that contain the color. Color is an afterthought. Composing directly in color in cartooning is uncommon. That’s how I see it anyways. A generalization for sure but so what. A truism in my book.

So seeing Jim Rugg the cartoonist blossom into Jim Rugg the draw-er has been really exciting for this Jim Rugg fan. He is composing directly in color these days, almost exclusively, and the marks he is making in color are far more embroidered than any brushed black outline. He is filling the space in such an interesting way. I can’t wait until this approach seeps into his comics. Go Jimmy Go!

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Jim’s art show in L.A.

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how Jim spends his time

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Jim’s current favorite book – More Things Like This

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selections from Jim’s collection

RAV by Mickey Z

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Danger County / The Dudes

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O.G. Kramers

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Galactic Breakdown

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Yellow Submarine

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Low Jinx #3

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Brian Ralph parody

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2491 A.D.

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Alexis Ziritt original art

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Jim’s ballpoint pen collection – Divine drawing here.

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on Jim’s wall

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PeepoChoo

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Jim and I agree that Hewlett is the greatest. He can do it all. Who else in comics has this reach? Look how simple it is – how clear.

——-

DON’T FORGET

Frank Santoro Correspondence Course for Comic Book Makers
Summer 2012

New Course Announcement

June 4th start date

8 week course

“Full course” – layouts, color, figure drawing – you will make a 16 page comic over the 8 weeks.

500 bux. Payment plans available. No money down! Totally serious.

To apply, email me and I will explain the submission guidelines.

Deadline to apply is May 30th

Only ten spots available
capneasyATgmailDOTcom

Check out one of my student’s work – he just finished his comic and posted it to his blog.
———–

SENDAK: I think we assume that only children have this incredible flexibility — they talk to newspapers; they talk to tablecloths; they talk to bowls of water; and we say, “How charming, how cute.” We do it, too, but we don’t do it aloud. Because we have grown up and we have gray in our beards and we’re supposed to be adults and we’re all just nervous wrecks, basically.

Children have the privilege because we have endowed them with the privilege of having this fantasy life. So they move in and out of fantasy all the time. But, I think, people always say how wonderful that you can do books for children; you have your childhood intact. They give me this really ridiculous sentimental aspect, because I think we all do; I think it’s a survival tactic; if we didn’t live in fantasy most of the day, we’d all be off your famous [Golden Gate] bridge over here, for the most part.

So I think this trick you’re talking about is no more than the observation of real life.

QUESTION: I was referring, though, to how you can have that baby talk but make it believable. Some of the editors would say, “Well, this is a little contrived to think that a fish can rescue a jade bracelet.”

SENDAK: Well, this conviction has to come from you. If your fish is talking, then it’s got to be a perfectly reasonable thing that your fish is talking. If your fish is talking and it doesn’t come really from you, then your editor is correct. That’s a contrivance. Children will know instantly. Kids know instantly when you’re patronizing them, when you’re giving them ersatz fantasy or it’s coming genuinely from the middle of your gut; they know. They are not impressed with the fact that you’ve won the Caldecott Award or that you like Mozart or any of those things; they could not care less. The book goes flying across the room. You notice from their letters; “Dear Mr. Sendak: I hate your book. I hope you die soon. Cordially…”

We also have the latest column from Tucker Stone on the world of genre comics, which this week includes a report from Abhay Khosla on fans’ reactions to a tepid review of their new favorite movie. Pretty horrifying stuff.

And we’ve finally convinced Dash Shaw to join our roster of contributors. Today he reviews Jeffrey Brown’s cat comics, which gives him the opportunity to discuss what he calls “cat appreciation art” in general.

And of course, there are things on the internet that aren’t on this site.

—Mark Evanier reports the death of Jonah Hex co-creator Tony DeZuniga.

—Another day, another set of Alison Bechdel interviews, this time a brief one in the New York Times, and another on the Paris Review‘s website.

—In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Michael Tolkin, Dallas Clayton, and Howard A. Rodman offer their memories of Maurice Sendak.

Speaking of whom, Stephen Colbert has released more outtakes from Sendak’s excellent appearance on his show:

—Matt Seneca has just launched a new weekly column over at Robot 6 in which he plans to list and discuss what he considers to be the “greatest comics of all time.” First up: Kirby and Lee’s Thor #160.

—Drew Friedman is interviewed by Ralph Gardner at the Wall Street Journal, on the occasion, though I don’t think the article actually mentions it, of Friedman’s newly republished Any Similarity to Persons Living or Dead is Coincidental (co-written by his brother Josh). It’s a beautiful book, and I’ve been thinking a lot about it recently. There’s a certain brand of mean-spirited, petty humor that’s been pretty popular over the last few decades, in which the main point seems to be laughing at some celebrity or another who no longer has a thriving career. As if failing to maintain A-list status in as fickle and luck-dependent as Hollywood was a valid reason to be mocked. At first glance, some of Friedman’s work, with its cast of has-beens and never-weres, can seem to be another example of this kind of comedy, but it isn’t–most of these strips cut a lot deeper than that. The reader feels the sting and pain of failure and despair too strongly to feel superior. In other words, we’re all Rondo Hatton.

—The movement to properly honor Jack Kirby for his achievements grew a little wider this week, stepping its toes into the mainstream with an Alex Pappademus profile of Stan Lee for Grantland, and a Ruben Bolling strip revealing the plot of the next Avengers film.

—Andrei Molotiu echoes 1965 Susan Sontag with an interesting (if somewhat vague) wish for more demanding, worthy, and artistically innovative comics.

—And finally, Jeet Heer discussed the politics of comics, at a panel with Sean Carleton and Franke James at the LeftWords festival. You can listen to it here.

Friday marked the release of a movie based upon Jack Kirby’s Avengers comic book, featuring various Marvel Comics characters teaming up to “avenge,” specifically by battling various computer-generated skeksis and boogums. The highly anticipated release marks the beginning of everyone’s favorite time of year: Death Threat to Movie Reviewer Season, when scary, enraged superhero comic fans (or as they’re commonly known, “superhero comic fans”) lose their shit over the fact that the “Rotten Tomatoes Score” of a superhero movie has been reduced from a perfect 100% score by a bad review.

This year’s celebration-of-humanity kicked off with a review written by Amy Nicholson of Box Office Magazine, so we got to skip straight to the rampant misogyny.  Here is a brief sampling of the comments her review triggered, in response from BOM and the Rotten Tomatoes site:  

You’re such a joke right now that even major movie and entertainment sites are starting to point out how inept and out of touch you are with the majority of your “peers” and how one tragic hack has brought down The Avenger’s score from a perfect 100% to 96%. … When is this writing thing going to fizzle out, so you can start making your own jewellery? … See internet, this is what happens when you give your PA the change to write reviews because it’s cheaper than hiring a proper male writer… She asked her boyfriend what score she should give. Just stick to rom-coms, bitch… Her boss/lover says it’s better than having her make the coffee and answering phones and besides what else was she going to do with that creative writing degree daddy paid for?…I know the first bad review was gonna come from a woman…she liked Green Lantern because Ryan Reynolds, rom-com mainstay, was shirtless in that film. That’s why she liked it…  self-masturbatory garbage by a self-absorbed cunt … Bitch what the fuck is wrong with you…This broad is dumbass … As Loki might say ‘a mewling quim’ … Clearly MS.Nicholson has an agenda… You must of been looking in the mirror and got confused because yes you have a bad face but the avengers was a great film… your poor ratings (you enjoyed Twilight – enough said) simply prove how much of an ignorant, uncultured cunt you really are. Please get a real job or consider killing yourself… This dumb cunt even likes Twilight for fuck sakes… DAMMIT WOMAN!!… Amy, grow a pair and change the review.

After that, there was nothing left to be said. Well, except to tell other women who expressed concern about the sexualized nature of the complaints to shut up. Here’s a sample of that:  

There is real abuse going on out there in Nigeria, Somalia etc… If you had bothered to read Amy’s review, you would know that her writing skills are not that of an “intelligent woman” lol. … aren’t there more important things you could be writing about? … While the misoginystic comments are out of line, THIS IS THE INTERNET… Sweetheart, do you know WHY she was lambasted by the fans for that amateur ridiculous review she posted, not to mention RT for posting it?? … As an older gal, I will admit I can be pretty harsh on my fellow females, but that’s because I really hate females who give the rest of us a bad name…Though I harshely condemn the kind of language most of the attackers have used for this female journo, but I would also like to ask her “How much do you know about the Marvel superhero universe?” And if your answer is not ‘Everything’ then you shouldnt have written that review. … i bet you blame men for the bad weather… Patriarchy is men being reduced to cannon fodder while women stay safe in their homes. … To be fair though she was a dumb bitch.

Unfortunately, as of press time, the Robot 6 blog at the Comic Book Resources website has not yet picked up on Ms. Nicholson’s perfidy. Commenters on the Robot 6 blog (or as they’re commonly known in my apartment, “those awful maggots”) are expected to explain in precise detail that (1) Ms. Nicholson’s children should be poor, because what did they ever do?, (2) she should have no legal rights to express opinions about The Avengers because of contracts and legal principals and what’s law school?, (3) she and every other person who’s ever written anything all “had it coming,” (4) capitalism is a really great system and is being threatened and quit attacking capitalism and how come you don’t like capitalism, huh, (5) some of us are still waiting for Native Americans to thank us for those smallpox blankets keeping them warm, and (6) all stories ever written were all stolen from Charlton characters that haven’t been published in 200 years, but apparently everyone is a Charlton Comics expert all of the sudden.

This is all, of course, a prelude to the shitstorm that awaits the arrival of the upcoming Batman 3 movie. My guess is the first negative review will be greeted by writers for ComicBookMovie.com wiring the reviewer’s car to explode like the beginning of Martin Scorsese’s Casino, while the Merry Marvel Marching Society parades through the streets with the heads of the reviewer’s friends and loved ones placed upon spikes; I have $50 on writer for HitFix, in the library, with the lead pipe, in my office pool.

The fan comments are especially shocking in light of the fact they’re about a movie concerning superheros,  fantasy characters that, as one mainstream comic writer has sold them, speak “loudly and boldly to our greatest fears, deepest longings, and highest aspirations.” Sure! Well. Okay, there was supposedly an Avengers comic where Ms. Marvel, like, got raped, then gave birth to her rapist (it’s complicated), who she then shacked up with while the other Avengers looked on approvingly…?  Plus, Hawkeye’s wife Mockingbird got raped. And yeah, there were those Iron Man comics where Maria Hill (or as she’s commonly known, “Kids, Your Aunt Robin”) got “mind-raped” by some robot and ended up in shower all, like, “Oh no no oh no must be clean” or whatever– sure, sure, that comic even won Eisners. Tigra ha her clothes ripped off while she was videotaped getting gang-”beaten” by villains.  There was a cover for whatshername, Iron Fist’s girlfriend, getting tentacle-raped. Girl version of Hawkeye–totes raped. Spider-Man’s ladyfriend Black Cat, raped. On the other hand, the X-Men’s Storm escaped her attempted rape, and Captain America’s ex-girlfriend Diamondback was only “possibly raped,” while being kidnapped, starved, and “abused.”  Et cetera, et cetera.

But besides all of that, it’s a real mystery where the audience learned those kinds of attitudes from. Hopefully, somebody will call Columbo (or as he’s commonly known, the late Peter Falk). But until then, did Ms. Nicholson fully appreciate the value-filled culture of aspirations and longings that she was cruelly attacking when she only gave The Avengers three stars out of five? That is still to be—oh, ha ha, hey, wait, I forgot to mention that: This was all because she only gave The Avengers THREE out of five stars. Fortunately, Marvel Comics has not been distracted by all of this froofrah over Tomato scores and has instead followed the enormous success of The Avengers by getting back to business and focusing its energies on publishing crossovers and firing its long-time employees, a move Robot 6 commenters are expected to describe as an “orgasmic Christmas miracle, like a department store Santa Claus covering my body in sticky Yuletide cheer.”

Congratulations, comics! This is the moment it’s all been leading up to!

Ah, throwing some Nate Bulmer and his Eat More Bikes in with Abhay always hits the spot. We should move onto the comics, right? That’s the system!

Crossed Badlands #5
By Jamie Delano, Leandro Rizzo, Digikore
Published by Avatar

What would happen to you if your father died while you were wrestling with him? What kind of person would you be if you grew up and your boyfriend died from shitty drugs while you were attaching Office Depot binder clips to his naked body while he was tied to a chair for some sweet sexuals? Would you go on to make big dogs fuck Iraqi detainees because that was the only way to get turned on? What if that’s how that stuff happens, man? Why shouldn’t there be a comic book that answers those questions? It could be a comic book that also feature naked sisters who spoon, because that’s what life is like for some people, sometimes. Stories like that might have kayaks, or redneck survivalists who love their dogs more than they love their own flesh and blood. It could have all of those things, and it could include the line “your vag smells like rotten fish,” because sometimes a girl has to say that to her sister, because life ain’t no bed of roses, especially when you’re getting ready to have sex with your sister and she hasn’t bathed in a while.

Too Many Nitrous
By Billy Burkert, Samuel Rhodes
Self-published, 2012

This is a totally unofficial and yet wholly accurate prequel to the Fast and the Furious film series, featuring the up-until-now-unnecessary “origin” of Dominic Torreto, a character played by actor/skin-covered Roomba Vin Diesel. Rife with pop culture references and unusually clever puns, it’s a legitimately funny comic that vastly outshines whatever expectations one might bring to it, even if those expectations are that the book is going to be really fucking good, which it absolutely is. For those of you at the tail end of giving a shit about this useless, banal, horseshit medium, for those of you happy to lose all the arguments just as long as it means you can leave forever and never hear about these people cheerleading their toy ‘n sadness collections for the thousandth time, take some gosh damned heed: a couple of smart assholes have gone and spun a solid yarn. Give that baby another week to get used to its surroundings. Your bathtub isn’t going anywhere.

Fury: My War Gone By #1
By Garth Ennis, Goran Parlov, Lee Loughridge
Published by Marvel Comics

This is the American Tabloid to Ed Brubaker’s L.A. Quartet (Fatale), with the Ennis twist being that James Ellroy never had a guy like Nick Fury stalking the blood-stuck mud. Oh sure, Tabloid has oversized badasses who don’t mind stripmining the skulls and ears of Communists with well-oiled chainsaws; if there’s one place Ennis could have lifted Barracuda from it’s the Tiger Kab offices, but the trick with Nick Fury–the trick that only Ennis seems to still have a handle on, as the rest of Marvel seems to be in a race towards infantile regression–is that Nick Fury is what Captain America would be if that super soldier serum made people smarter: a dead-set patriot, ready to carve out their own heart for the cause, but smart enough to know the cause is still under construction. Fury isn’t stupid, cynical, or selfish: he’s passionate. It’s all right here, in an issue where the real action is in matter-of-fact statements of purpose and a wearied snarl. As of right now, everybody else is in the business of fighting for second place.

The End of the Fucking World #7
By Chuck Forsman
Self-published, 2012

The most recent installment in Forsman’s formidable experiment in his contemporary-youth-goes-Badlands series sees his ever more dangerous couple meeting up with that old road movie chestnut, the aging perv with grabby hands, and while the sequence plays out with less bloodshed than expected, the bigger surprise is Forsman’s hell-for-leather commitment to his male lead’s almost autistic sociopathy. Where one expects violence, one instead finds sluggish curiosity, a methodical plodder so removed from his own culpability that it’s becoming more difficult to lay blame on him for his own acts. He’s in a world of his own, but it’s one his fucked up brain chemistry has created; there doesn’t appear to be a lot of choice being made. It’s been a while since comics depicted crazy like it really is: completely unpredictable.

Green Lantern #9
By Geoff Johns, Doug Mahnke, Christian Alamy, Keith Champagne, Mark Irwin, Tom Nguyen, Alex Sinclair
Published by DC Comics

Okay, it’s report card time. It turns out that the Indigo Tribe–which is the group of Lanterns who “wield the light of compassion” the way the Yellow Lanterns do fear and the Reds do rage–is constructed out of brainwashed criminals, described by one Yoda rip-off as “the worst killers and sadists in the universe” during one of those four-page blocks of pure, uncut exposition that could serve as a master class in what DC’s finest talents seem to think is the best way to write a story. You have to hand it to Geoff Johns, honestly. Like–if you were making fun of Johns as a writer, you’d probably talk about how he’s the guy who came up with an entire army of aliens and people (and an abused house cat) motivated by “rage” who happen not only to rely on magic wishing rings, but also on magic red rage vomit to get revenge and do violent stuff, you’d go off on how every character he throws out there has some kind of horrible violent loss in their past, how he fetishizes things like “aviator jackets” and Chuck Yeager biographies, and if you were going to guess at what he’s going to do in the future, you’d probably say, “Ah, he’ll probably reveal that some Green Lantern had a secret prison where he secretly brainwashed the worst people in the universe (one of whom will be depicted by Doug Mahnke as a giant bat wearing one of those gimp bondage masks) into becoming an actual “army of compassion.” And you have to give it to Johns, because even though that’s the exact kind of story you would make up in a fit of exaggeration to hurt somebody’s feelings, the guy just goes ahead and writes like that anyway. He’s already the guy who has spent the last ten years writing super-serious stories about aging Smurfs who live on another planet and have a crazy billion rules about why emotions are the Worst Thing Ever, he’s already the guy who decided that the obvious name for the living embodiment of Love should be the word “Predator,” and here he is, doubling down for the 8,000th time. You like little Smurf characters? Well, how about an immortal dwarf who dresses like an aboriginal wizard and lives inside a secret purple prison? You like it when people’s family members die? No problem, we’ll get Doug Mahnke to draw a splash page of Sinestro holding the bloody corpse of the love of his life on top of a gigantic pile of bodies, one of which is clearly a small child, another of which is some dude who died mid-scream. PS, because we’re running long and we should repeat this for clarity: one of the nameless bad guys in this comic is a giant bat wearing a gimp mask.

The Punisher #11
By Greg Rucka, Mirko Colak, Dan Brown, Jim Charalampidis
Published by Marvel Comics

It seems like there was a time when fill-in issues came from fill-in teams, so let’s all throw some props to Greg Rucka for delegating the scut work to the (self-described) lesbian in the mirror. This issue is a one-shot tale filled to the brim with the most immediate clichés available; it’s also about zombies in New York, which would push the thing into parody if Greg Rucka had ever told a joke, even a bad one. The structure is one of those “cop getting interrogated about last night’s craziness” things, and it hits all the beats that story always has. The only real twist–zombies can’t count as a twist anymore, not since everybody’s mom started watching The Walking Dead–stems from the quirk factor that ensues when you realize that Mirko Colak didn’t have time to find any photo reference for “when human beings are surprised,” which means that the the only way you can decipher emotional reactions is to see how wide open the mouths are. (Halfway means thinking!) The comic ends with one of a Ruckan staple–undergraduate political skepticism, drink it in–but not before he rips off the best gag in that War Zone movie, strips it of its timing, and uses it to fill up two full pages of comic. Speaking of pages, the Punisher speaks on only two out of the seven he actually appears on, so at least there’s a bright side: you can finish reading this issue very quickly.

The Punisher Armory #1
By Eliot R. Brown, Nel Yomtov
Published by Marvel Comics, 1990

Back in the days when the Punisher was the most popular character in the Marvel universe–also known as “the days when the world made a lick of fucking sense”–Marvel was raking in so much cash that they forget they had the power to say no to every random Punisher-related idea that came across their desk. And while this was a business model that resulted in a whole mess of terrible Punisher tales, it also resulted in this: a 32-page comic consisting of Eliot R. Brown’s self-described “still life-with-notes” pages. The format’s easy to follow: some type of object, most often a gun but not necessarily always a gun, and a diary entry explaining the object. (Notice the hand underneath the refrigerator? That’s the only way this format allows Brown to depict action.) As the cover promises, you’ll get “his thoughts!” and “his feelings!” as well, and while it took a while for the “feelings” part to pay off, they eventually did, in the weirdest way possible. This first issue doesn’t deliver as strongly–probably because this issue is a compilation of reprints–but it’s a good set-up for what became one of the more absurd artifacts of ’90s Marvel.

US-1 #1
By Al Milgrom, Herb Trimpe, Christie Scheele
Published by Marvel Comics, 1983

Everything one needs to know about this comic can be found in the full page explanation for its existence found at the end–trucking was popular in the early ’80s because of novelty songs and morons, Jim Shooter had a raging hard-on for both of those things–but really perceptive readers will probably figure it out on the first page, when they see Shooter credited as “Big Smokey,” while everybody else involved goes ahead with the boring old regular job titles, like “drawing” and “writing.” At the risk of alienating any of the forty-something males in the audience, any appeal that one finds in this comic–which is about a long-haul trucker with a half-metal skull that gets him a CB signal, a CB signal that, combined with the weaponized truck that Marvel was helping the Tyco company hawk, he uses to hunt his brother’s assumed killer–will purely be of the nostalgic variety. US-1 was a thing that existed. Thanks to bags, boards and boxes, it exists still.

While it may be about love, CAA is also like porn, in that it is largely online and in photographic form. Web CAA grew out of pre-internet CAA. YouTube cat videos stem from America’s Funniest Home Videos videos. Online CAA still photos are web versions of cat posters. LOLCats are hacks of the text-image pairings found in dentist office (“Hang in there!”) cat posters. Of course, people have been drawing and photographing cats as long as there have been drawings. And photos. And cats.

Of drawn CAA artists, the most well-known is the Art Nouveau printmaker Steinlen. The guy drew a lot of cats in a lot of different ways. His pussies stand stoically erect, as if carved out of wood, petrified. Louis Wain’s crazy cats don’t putter around either, they pulse in a “cuteness overload” overload.

Cartoonist Jeffrey Brown’s cats aren’t excessively cute and they’re not frozen at all. His focus is on the changing flexibility of cats, and in this way he’s closer in spirit to the 1850s CAA of Utagawa Kuniyoshi who, taking after Hokusai’s observational manga, affectionately documented the activities of felines.

Cat Getting Out of a Bag, Cats are Weird, a postcard set and a journal book are all collections of cat strips Brown calls “observations.” Observational comics are similar to observational drawing, figure and landscape drawing. They probe the everyday, the seen. Cartoonists weave observational comics inside of larger narrative ones, Chris Ware being an obvious example, or the countless mangaka taking pause to draw a drop of dew. You can find a million examples in comics of rendering and extolling the mundane.

Similarly, stand-up “observational humor” highlights a mundane subject (“What’s with airplane peanuts?”) and cleverly, insightfully twists it until the audience laughs: “It’s funny because it’s true!”

Jeffrey Brown’s cat books are the equivalent of a comedian just eating airplane peanuts in front of us — and it’s genuinely funny. The laugh doesn’t come from presenting a mundane activity as a joke. The observation itself, the eating of the peanut, is somehow elevated to a real gag, no twist necessary.

Brown’s talent at composing scenes with an inexplicable comic timing has often been at the service of autobiographical relationship stories (Clumsy) or action genre parodies (The Incredible Change-Bots). These cat books occupy a new territory, unique to him. Newspaper strip humor, from Nancy to Marmaduke, is clever. At their best, these cat comics aren’t clever. They’re akin to a comic strip of Marmaduke just lying down asleep. The strips reserved for the holidays. Here are three books full of them, only with Brown’s skill the strips work as jokes while retaining their poetic mundanity.

Cat Getting Out of a Bag introduces the exercise: observational comics coupled with drawings of cats from photos. These are hard comics to make, especially because the cats aren’t given specific personalities. They just do what cats do. And how much do cats do? They sit. They purr. They lick themselves. They purr again. Humor strips always involve recycling the same relationship or scenario into a thousand variations, but they usually star characters that have character. Even Brown’s photo reference drawings revel in their non-specific generic-ness. These photos could’ve been found in any yard sale picture bin. Their haunting charge is “observational” too: We’re looking at Brown look at a photo of his cat.

These photo-ref drawings serve as essential intermissions. Even a cat nut needs a breather. The gusto required to spend a couple hours reading about cats is tough to muster, and the thought “enough of this” deflates the enjoyment of any work, no matter how good it is. The strips are usually one page but they aren’t consistently titled or divided, so sometimes what we thought was the end of one story is only half-way through a two page strip, interrupting our reading pace and pleasure.

However, with The Cutest Sneeze in the World: 30 Cat Postcards , Brown, or his publisher, Chronicle, found an ideal form for this work.

Cutest Sneeze contains the best Brown cat comics in the best format for them. They’re physically isolated onto separate cards, eliminating the exhausted “enough of this” moment and the hiccups of reading confusion. In Cats Are Weird, Brown lapsed into a couple clever gags — “Where a Cat’s Center of Gravity Lies” diagrams? The “smarter” the jokes are the dumber the whole exercise feels. Those are weeded-out in favor of the best observational comics from the books, plus some new additions. Most revelatory is the conversion from the nine-panel grid of the book to the six-panel grid of the postcard size. This necessitated an editing of previously published strips.

Comics are notoriously frustrating to edit. Let’s look at two versions of the same strip side-by-side…

The back-and-forth ping-pong action of a six-panel comic has an inherent comic timing. The nine-panel grid has a fat center to drag through. The same gags are, startlingly, funnier in their sleeker six-panel form. The “No biting the pen!” moment of the nine-panel version makes the ending more about the cat’s inability to understand language. The two-column vertical format emphasizes the final panel’s close-up more than the clutter of the nine-panel form. Even when converted to a horizontal six-panel format, the comics read easier than their nine-panel square versions. Could it be that rectangles are just funnier than squares? An unfunny, unfun person is called “a square.” Or maybe revisiting and reformatting gave Brown the freedom to look at his old work with new eyes.

No characters. No story. The joy we get from these comics is born from Brown’s ability to transmit his love of cats and extol the banal in well-executed gags. That Brown has created powerful, humorous celebrations of the mundane in the form of the queasily-commercial, CAA “cat book” medium is delightfully surprising and odd and funny, because it’s true.

Someone once said that Maurice Sendak, children’s book author and illustrator, drew “little old people worrying away their childhoods.” It’s true: Sendak’s work is remarkable for its lack of sentimentality and its depiction of childhood as it really is, a time of coming to grips with the sometimes unpleasant and frightening world around you — a reality that children’s literature often tries to ignore. What his work also contains is a genuine sensitivity to the complexity and intelligence of children.

Sendak was born in 1928 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Jewish-Polish immigrants. He received little formal art training. One of his first professional illustration jobs was filling in the backgrounds for the Mutt and Jeff comic strip after classes in high school. Sendak’s best-known work is Where The Wild Things Are. With that book he perfected his own unique picture book format, characterized by the complete integration of a rhythmic poetic text with engaging and dynamic illustration, a relationship reminiscent of choreography.

In December of 1987, The Cartoon Art Museum of San Francisco held a symposium on children’s book illustration. The main attraction of the event was a question-and-answer session with Maurice Sendak, an abridged transcription of which follows. At that time Sendak was illustrating a book, based on a Wilhelm Grimm fairy tale newly discovered in 1983, which would come to be titled Dear Mili.

MAURICE SENDAK: In this article, which I saw the other day, which is really very funny, I am referred to as “Morose Sendak” [audience laughter]. Actually, the use of that as my first name has been frequent for people who think the books are over-serious, or that I treat children too seriously, or I’m not comical enough. That has been my name for a good part of my life, including childhood, when my sister used that on me, too.

I can talk about what I’m working on right now. I haven’t illustrated a picture book since 1980. My last picture book was something called Outside Over There, and then I began designing for the stage, sets and costumes for operas and ballets, which is my new profession at this point, with occasional dipping back into books. Only occasionally, because I feel as though  I’ve done most of the books I want to do at this point in my life.

But then this Grimm came up. The Grimm is a fairy tale that’s never been published before, and it was found in a letter, seven years ago, that Wilhelm Grimm wrote to a little girl. Her mother had died and he was trying to console her and, like all adults who are trying to console children, he made a mess of it. He was using language and she was only feeling at this point; she couldn’t figure out his language. So right in the middle, he quit trying to explain this complicated business called death and said, “Just let me tell you a story.”

He told an original fairy tale, which has never seen the light of day because the family kept the letter through all those generations. The letter was sold, got to America, a dealer bought it, got it to a publisher, and I’m now illustrating it. The Germans are fuming. They were very anxious and upset in Europe because this will be the first Grimm tale that has not been published in Germany, or with the original stories back in the early 19th century. I work with the publisher, and so I will thus be the first illustrator to illustrate this story, and America will be the country that will publish it [audience applause].

I agree with you. We keep the story hidden in a vault because would a German passing through New York happen to see it, he could translate it instantly and it’ll get published in Munich before we know it. So there are only three copies. Mine is at my bedside, the other is in a vault in New York, and somebody else has it out in California. Anyway, it’s been three years since I’ve been working on it. I’ve done all the studies, did all the sketches, had problems with it because it’s a religious story, I’ve never illustrated a religious story. Frankly, I have difficulty with that kind of subject. Having spent a year researching it, I vacationed at a monastery in New York State, not because I’m religious, obviously, but because they breed German Shepherds and I’m a German Shepherd freak, so the idea of dogs and monks was terrific. They actually helped me with the story. The father up there is a very — now — excellent friend of mine. For the past year, starting last January, I started painting. I’ve just finished the book, a full year’s work. I have to go home after this trip and do the jacket and deliver the book by Christmas and it’ll be out next Christmas. So this will have been a long three-year job on this book. I’m very emotionally invested in this little girl and in her mother. Like all the people you work with, imaginatively speaking, in a book, I’m going to miss her very, very much.

The story about the Grimm tale I was telling you about is in many strange ways a continuation, at least in my own head, of Outside Over There, because Outside Over There had a mother, two daughters — the elder daughter trying desperately to get rid of the younger daughter, which is typical of households. My sister was nine years older than I, so she was my mother, basically, and both adored me and brutalized me at the same time. When I came to do the Grimm, I couldn’t get rid of the same image of the mother from Outside Over There, so she now comes into the Grimm fairy tale. It’s like Ida, the oldest girl from Outside Over There, has moved to a big town and the baby is now about five or six years old, and so the story takes up with the mother and the baby.

The reason I do this is because I didn’t write the Grimm story, and in illustrating someone else’s book, unless I can find some way of investing myself emotionally into the material, even pretending it’s my story, then I have a difficult time drawing pictures for it. But I have to be inside the book, tremendously. I have to really admire the text very much, the form of the writing, the subject, the emotional content, all of it. If I can get inside to that extent then I’m going to do something that I will enjoy doing. Otherwise I’m going to be just illustrating a book, which is of no interest to me at all whatever at this point in my life.

[Responding to a question about his commenting on how bad his work is.]

SENDAK: My pleasure comes when I officially begin the book. The excitation of starting. Getting the images in my head. That is absolutely the best part, in laying out the book, in designing it, in the characters appearing under your pencil. It’s absolutely true that whenever I finish it doesn’t look anything like what that first vivid impression was. I see all my faults. I see how badly I draw feet. I see how badly I do this. And those are faults which are inherent in my style, which maybe other people — I hope ­— do not see or dwell on as I do, but I really don’t like my pictures when I’m finished with them. I give them away to a foundation. I don’t have anything of mine hanging in the house [except for] a few favorite pictures from books. There’s one of my dog Jennie from Higglety Pigglety Pop. But that’s because it’s her, not because I drew it.

From Higglety Pigglety Pop!

I don’t get pleasure from finished drawings. I get pleasure from finishing the book and the release from having finished it, and knowing that it’s the best I can do. I redraw everything that must be redrawn. I’m not lazy. But even in the end, the totality of it is disappointing to me.

QUESTION: So you see this picture in the mind’s eye and you draw it out, and it never comes out like that?

SENDAK: It doesn’t look like the picture I saw, no.

QUESTION: I have a similar question. When you do illustrated work that deals more with characters than animals or people, do you also see the backgrounds on the paintings?

SENDAK: That’s a curious question, I think, because both things happen. I sometimes see characters, I sometimes see only backgrounds. I don’t often see whole settings with characters and backgrounds. At other times, I don’t see anything at all. I just have a feeling, a very excited, happy feeling, but I have to explore that feeling on paper, and then my hand begins to do it.

If you saw that whole documentary [a film on Sendak from the PBS series American Masters], the best homework I can advise is sketching. It has certainly worked well with me as I sketch to music. Put the record player on, and you take a blank sheet of paper. You start at the top, and you have to finish that sheet of paper by the time that piece of music ends. Since it’s one sheet of paper, it’s best that you don’t work with the symphonies; it’s best that you work with a sonata or a quartet or a popular song, whatever music excites you. But the exercise is, start at the top, get to the bottom when the music is done, and it must be coherent. It must have a plot. But you must not think about the plot. It must simply flow out of your hands, almost like unconscious writing. I find music is such an incredible stimulus to the unconscious. Usually I’ll pick the composer, maybe Mozart or maybe Haydn, whoever. I’ll draw a picture, a little fantasy sketch of them, and then draw about something that happened in their lives. But I must come to the end.

Of course, you end up with dozens of horrendous drawings. But, in fact, you also occasionally end up with some very good drawings that are fresh-cooked right out of the head, and that tell you the direction that you’re going, or that tell you what you’re thinking about. It’s like forcing your dreams out on a drawing paper. That is the only exercise. It’s like playing the piano every day so that when you get to the concert you really play the piano. I think, when you’re illustrating a book, you have to be drawing all the time, and using the muscles in your imagination all the time, so when you get to it you are ready to work.

QUESTION: Have you ever thought about just printing your sketches?

SENDAK: Yes; the sketches always have a freshness, and they’re always vivid. They simply aren’t good enough. Maybe in an art book where you’re showing all the stages of your work, then it would be fun. People who saw the sketches I did for the Grimm said, “Publish it just that way.” Spontaneous. Then people who saw the work pencil drawings I did based on the sketches said, “Do it that way, publish the book this way.” What you have to do is, one, don’t show anybody anything, which was the mistake I made, and two, wait until you know that you have finished with what you’ve done.

I’ve never, ever, ever done sketches that I felt were adequate. They’re all lively, and there are qualities in the drawing which are unrepeatable, we all know that, but there’s something else that’s missing. There’s composition that’s missing, there’s emotional content that’s missing, and there’s something that’s appropriate to the text that’s missing. So in my case, I can’t do it. I keep them; I enjoy them. But I haven’t published them.

[An audience member asks about how Sendak broke into the publishing business]

SENDAK: OK. The question was about my apprenticeship to my editor, how did it begin, how did it work. Her name’s Ursula Nordstrom and she ran Harper and Brothers then. She was enamored of young people and of training young people. I came off the street in New York.

This was the early ’50s, when there was no such thing, really, as big-deal children’s books in America – I was very lucky to have gotten on the ground floor. It was a little pokey department, which they gave to the women in the office. The macho pigs decided, “We don’t want to be embarrassed by running kiddie-book departments, that’s a peculiar thing to do.” They gave it to these incredible women. And had the women been smarter, they wouldn’t have made such a great success of their departments because, eventually, the most ingenious, adventurous, exciting stuff was coming out of the juvenile departments in America, like her department at Harper’s. And we began gradually to make money, which was the beginning of the end, because then we came to the notice of the goons who ran the publishing houses and then these wonderful women were dumped, unceremoniously. Then you had these other people, who maybe were good bankers but not good children’s book editors, coming in. I speak not of the people we know, Barbara. I speak in general.

But in fact, it was an incredibly ingenious time between 1950 and 1965, where we were all trained. Me and Tomi Ungerer and Ezra Jack Keats, and all the people — kids who came off the street. I had no taste whatsoever. I didn’t know anything about bookmaking. I did not have any art training. I was really just an ignoramus. Ursula simply spoon-fed me the time she spent working with me on books. The first book I wrote, Kenny’s Window, in ’57, she was up there every weekend guiding me, and I was at her house working out the text.

The books she gave me to illustrate were all chosen by her, based on what she thought was proper for my development as a young illustrator. I didn’t know how to pick them. I would have done anything because my only interest was to get enough money to move out of my house in Brooklyn and have my own apartment, so I would have illustrated the walls of the subway or the urinals; it would have made no difference. So, without her guidance …

I can look back on my backlist now, and there is not a single dud. I may have done badly illustrated books, but the books I illustrated were all terrific books. I now know that. I didn’t then. I would just do as I was told. And that kind of guidance, which was not narcissistic, which was not egocentric on her part, which was really to bring me out as an artist, to find the things that develop my particular talent, was what she was doing. What maybe half a dozen women of that period were doing at various publishing houses in America.

It was an extraordinary apprenticeship. You got the full blast of these people’s attention and gradually you grew up.

You learned right from the beginning. I read manuscripts at Harper’s. She forced me to read manuscripts, to critique them. I ran errands. I hung around. It’s something I would like to think is true today, but I’m not sure is. I don’t think it is true, actually, because I have taught and I know how difficult it is to get into the business now. But back then it just wasn’t a business. It was an incredible privilege to be drawing pictures and hanging around.

QUESTION: A technical question. I noticed on the film that you were placing an overlay; it looked like an ink-drawing overlay over the painting. Is that the way you always work?

SENDAK: No. Actually, that book was done in four-color process. Meaning, you do the color separate from the line. It is a less expensive way of doing it. And also, to a certainty, your line will be clearer that way, because of the printing problems in doing a book. Most of my books are full color, and they’re printed as full-color works. But I wanted, in Night Kitchen, to really look like a comic strip. I wanted it to look like Little Nemo. I wanted it to be Winsor McCay. I wanted to do a facsimile of a comic book, and in separating you have the perfect clarity of the line, and clarity of the color, and then they’re superimposed on each other, and you’ve got a comic book vividness. That’s why it was done that way.

[An audience member asks how Sendak controls his blending of fantasy and reality]

SENDAK: It’s difficult to tell you what the trick is. What is the turn-around from a fantasy situation into a reality situation in a child’s life? Like Max in The Wild Things. One minute he’s talking to his mother and the next the trees are growing out of the walls, and then he’s talking to wild things. To me, that is a normal day [audience laughter]. I really don’t think that is a trick.

I think we assume that only children have this incredible flexibility — they talk to newspapers; they talk to tablecloths; they talk to bowls of water; and we say, “How charming, how cute.” We do it, too, but we don’t do it aloud. Because we have grown up and we have gray in our beards and we’re supposed to be adults and we’re all just nervous wrecks, basically.

Children have the privilege because we have endowed them with the privilege of having this fantasy life. So they move in and out of fantasy all the time. But, I think, people always say how wonderful that you can do books for children; you have your childhood intact. They give me this really ridiculous sentimental aspect, because I think we all do; I think it’s a survival tactic; if we didn’t live in fantasy most of the day, we’d all be off your famous [Golden Gate] bridge over here, for the most part.

So I think this trick you’re talking about is no more than the observation of real life.

QUESTION: I was referring, though, to how you can have that baby talk but make it believable. Some of the editors would say, “Well, this is a little contrived to think that a fish can rescue a jade bracelet.”

SENDAK: Well, this conviction has to come from you. If your fish is talking, then it’s got to be a perfectly reasonable thing that your fish is talking. If your fish is talking and it doesn’t come really from you, then your editor is correct. That’s a contrivance. Children will know instantly. Kids know instantly when you’re patronizing them, when you’re giving them ersatz fantasy or it’s coming genuinely from the middle of your gut; they know. They are not impressed with the fact that you’ve won the Caldecott Award or that you like Mozart or any of those things; they could not care less. The book goes flying across the room. You notice from their letters; “Dear Mr. Sendak: I hate your book. I hope you die soon. Cordially…”

[Audience laughter.]

So this famous trick you’re talking about just didn’t work, as far as this kid was concerned. They are the most brazen audience, because they will not tolerate being bored. They won’t tolerate listening to your blither. You have got to get to it. They know the real thing from the false thing. This gets lost or fuzzy as they get older, we all know that.

But the same principle upon which they function day by day by day is the same principle upon which we function. It doesn’t change. We just get more astute at hiding it, at pretending that we’re grown-ups. They have the privilege of being natural until we stop them.

QUESTION: Do you ever envision your books pictorially, before the text is developed?

SENDAK: No. I really do think in terms of language. Even though my life has been predominantly as an illustrator and I’ve written a very small percentage of the books that I’ve illustrated, I do think in words. I prefer words. If I weren’t an illustrator, then, why aren’t I a painter? You put me in front of a canvas I’m dead as a doornail. I need language as a springboard, or I need music as a springboard. My work doesn’t generate without language. So when I think of story, I think absolutely in terms of text. And pictures come long after that.

QUESTION: What do you think about developing a story in that manner, where the stories are developed pictorially?

SENDAK: Stories shouldn’t be developed pictorially, initially. They should start out textually. Your stories should be immensely constructed by the time you’re illustrating it. You should only be worrying about your text and making something marvelous. Writing it and rewriting it and writing. Let the pictures come later. They’ll take care of themselves.

QUESTION: Are you saying that if you removed the pictures from the story that it would work just as well?

SENDAK: No. Well, that could happen. But I think what happens is if you’ve got enough confidence in yourself and you’ve resolved the text, that the pictures then do a second story, not be a mere echo. “Jane walked into the room and was eaten by the plant.” You don’t need to draw that, although maybe you’d like to draw that. But, in fact, you should draw something else. There should be a counterpoint between your pictures and your text. The best-illustrated books are the books where the text does one thing and the pictures say something just a little off-center of the language, so they’re both doing something. Otherwise you have an echo chamber. The most boring books are where the pictures are restating the text.

Who needs that? The text said it much better. So you cannot separate the pictures from the text, you shouldn’t be able to, not in a well-constructed book. They should fit in like machinery.

QUESTION: How you do research for a book?

SENDAK: Well, I love doing homework for a book, I like the research part of it. The most obvious case is the Grimm, because I’m working on it. I wanted to set the Grimm in the correct time, which means 1800. It happens also to be my favorite time. It’s Mozart’s time: it’s the end of the 18th century, beginning of the 19th century. I like the way people looked then. I think the costumes were fabulous at the turn of the century. And that’s where the Grimm comes from, that’s the air that it lived in. So I’ll do lots of homework, reading about the brothers. I read every book published in English about the brothers. And they’re all very bad; let me assure you. If anybody here publishes books, do a translation of a serious book about the brothers Grimm: we desperately need it. It’s all about these cute brothers who write stories, and it’s fatuous.

From King Grisly-Beard: A Tale From The Brothers Grimm

But I did that, then I looked at costume books of the period, films of the period. Not of the period, but films about the period. There was a movie which I saw, which was wonderful, by a French director named Eric Rohmer, and it was The Marquess of O by Heinrich von Kleist, who’s one of my favorite playwrights. The setting of that movie and the look of the woman in that film was very much the smell and the sense of the Grimm I was looking for. So, you do about as much of that as you wish, and then you start sketching and you start drawing. What you hope is that the homework, kind of like a big blender, goes into the inspiration and comes out into the book.

Continued

From Pierre

Maurice Sendak, creator of Where the Wild Things Are, is dead at 83. He knew that would be the first line of his obituary, he told me once, in a tone that conveyed more resignation than pride. He was an artist, first: That his work spoke to children was important to him, but he disliked being limited to the realm of childhood alone. That’s why, earlier this year, he told Stephen Colbert: “I don’t write for children. … I write, and somebody says ‘That’s for children.’” Sendak’s work speaks to us all, and his work extends beyond children’s picture books. He’s designed sets for opera and dance productions, illustrated Herman Melville’s Pierre, created album covers, posters and dust jackets for adult books. His inspirations span both genres and age categories: Melville, Mozart, Winsor McCay, William Blake, Walt Disney, Maxfield Parrish, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.

Yet he’s most recognized for his genius in creating books for the young, winning all the top prizes in the field and beyond it: and rightly so. The illustrator of over 100 books, Maurice Sendak was the greatest artist-for-children of the 20^th century — a century that brought us the astonishing, transformative work of Dr. Seuss, Virginia Lee Burton, Beatrix Potter, Chris Van Allsburg and Peter Sís. Sendak was a giant among giants. He still is.

The book that leads all obituary notices — Where the Wild Things Are (1963) — remains a revolutionary work. As protagonist Max moves toward and then more deeply into the land of the wild things, the pictures command more and more space. When the “wild rumpus” begins, Sendak — for the first time in children’s picture books — provides three two-page spreads without words. Max has left the world of language, and can communicate only through his wordless, wild cavorting. Beyond its formal innovations, the book is unusual in its respect for the natural ferocity of children. Max hangs his teddy bear by the neck, terrorizes the dog, and shouts at his mother. Yet, when he returns home from the land of the wild things, he faces no punishment. He finds “his supper waiting for him and it was still hot.”[i]

From Where the Wild Things Are

The power of Sendak’s work develops from the author’s acute feeling for the dynamic emotional landscape of childhood. When he and Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel) shared a stage at the San Diego Museum of Art in 1982, moderator (and children’s lit scholar) Glenn Edward Sadler asked them both to “comment on how much your own early childhood has influenced your work.” Geisel said he skipped his childhood, but used his adolescence; Sendak said he skipped his adolescence, but “profited mightily from my early childhood.” Geisel harnesses the skeptical adolescent’s gift for finding and satirizing the adult world’s many hypocrisies, but Sendak draws upon the basic fears and desires of very young children. As he observed in his Caldecott acceptance speech for Where the Wild Things Are, “from their earliest years, children live on familiar terms with disrupting emotions … [and] fear and anxiety are an intrinsic part of their everyday lives.” Sendak’s books are about facing those fears and anxieties, documenting the sharp, turbulent, powerful feelings of early childhood.[ii]

In the Night Kitchen: Growing Up in Brooklyn

Born in 1928, the third child of Polish immigrants, Sendak grew up in Brooklyn … though he often wondered if he would grow up. Young Sendak was frequently sick, always aware that — in those days before vaccines — his illnesses might be fatal. Adolescence delivered a different, even darker lesson about our fleeting existence. While Sendak celebrated his bar mitzvah, his father was trying to bring his European relatives to America. None made it to the U.S. The Nazis killed them all.[iii]

American popular culture sustained young Sendak. He loved Mickey Mouse, comic books and the movies — Disney features, Busby Berkeley musicals, Laurel and Hardy and King Kong. A homage to the popular culture of his youth, Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen (1970) is one of his most autobiographical works, both personally and aesthetically. Dedicated to his parents, the book places a protagonist named for Mickey Mouse in a bed borrowed from Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland, which a teenage Sendak first encountered in histories of comics. Like Nemo, Sendak’s Mickey moves through a child’s dream world. Unlike McCay’s hero, Sendak’s is in charge of his dreaming. When naked Mickey lands in batter, a trio of bakers (each of whom resembles Oliver Hardy) mixes him into the cake, which they then put in the oven. If a boy being placed in an oven evokes the Nazi crematoria that killed his relatives (as one German critic has suggested), Sendak’s bright colors and plucky protagonist diminish any sense of fear.[iv]

From In the Night Kitchen

That’s because Sendak’s Mickey is part early Mickey Mouse and part Sendak himself. He has often spoken of his identification with the famous animated rodent, noting that they share more than a first initial and a birth year. When Sendak and his siblings were children, Mickey Mouse was “our buddy” because he did not resemble the golden-haired cinema children (such as Shirley Temple), and neither did they. He so loved Mickey that Sendak’s earliest extant color drawing is of Mickey Mouse, done when the artist was 6 years old.[v]

As a high school student, he took art classes, created a comic strip for his school newspaper and (after school) worked at All-American Comics, filling in background details for Mutt and Jeff. He got his first job as a professional illustrator, creating drawings for the physics textbook Atomics for the Millions (1947). Sendak also made many visits to the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He wanted to work as a commercial artist. Now was the time to learn as much about art as he could.[vi]

Upon graduation, Sendak worked as a window-display artist, building models for store windows all over New York City. That led him to a full-time window-display job at F.A.O Schwarz. Though it is now merely a toy store, it then also had an outstanding children’s-book section, run by book-buyer Frances Chrystie. She met Sendak, learned of his interest in illustrating children’s books, and helped him make the acquaintance of three people who would become vital to his future career.[vii]

A Book is to Collaborate: Sendak’s Apprenticeship

In 1950, Chrystie introduced Sendak to Ursula Nordstrom, Director of Harper’s Books for Boys and Girls from 1940 to 1973. During her long career, she nurtured and published some of the greatest talents in children’s literature: Margaret Wise Brown, E.B. White, Louise Fitzhugh, Shel Silverstein, Arnold Lobel, Crockett Johnson and Ruth Krauss. As Selma G. Lanes reports, Chrystie arranged for Nordstrom to stop by the store’s studio when Sendak happened to have his work tacked up to the walls. She “looked intently at the work,” but said very little. The next day, she called him and invited him to illustrate Marcel Aymé’s The Wonderful Farm (1951). He was thrilled. The job “made me an official person in children’s books,” Sendak said.[viii]

After he had illustrated a couple of books for her, Nordstrom asked to see his sketchbook. His illustrations of Brooklyn children playing in the street inspired Nordstrom to introduce Sendak to the second of the trio who would shape his career. Ruth Krauss had just turned in a manuscript composed entirely of children’s words, defining the world in their own language and on their own terms. She had visited the local nursery school, collecting definitions from the 4-year-olds and 5-year-olds there: “a face is something on your head,” “a hole is to dig.” Nordstrom loved it, but potential illustrators did not. Nicolas Mordvinoff, who would win the 1952 Caldecott Medal for Finders Keepers, said that no book or illustrations could be made for “so fragmentary and elusive a text.” Sendak’s illustrations would be perfect, Nordstrom thought. When she showed him the manuscript, he was enthusiastic. Krauss took a look at Sendak’s sketchbook, and immediately said, “That’s it.” A partnership was born.[ix]

Working on the book that would be titled A Hole Is to Dig (1952), he began spending his weekends at the Rowayton, Conn. home of Krauss and her husband, Crockett Johnson — third in the trio of important professional influences. Born David Johnson Leisk (and known to his friends as “Dave”), Johnson was then famous for his classic strip Barnaby, though he had also illustrated some children’s books — including Krauss’s popular The Carrot Seed (1945). As Sendak remembered in a 1994 Horn Book essay, Krauss and Johnson “became my weekend parents and took on the job of shaping me into an artist. … Ruth and I would arrange and rearrange and paste and unpaste and Ruth would sing and Ruth would holler and I’d quail and sulk and Dave would referee. His name should be on all our books for the technical savvy and cool consideration he brought to them.”

Johnson not only offered design suggestions, but intellectual companionship. He and Sendak discussed books, and Johnson drew up lists of recommended reading. There was no test: Johnson simply wanted to give Sendak a chance to expand his horizons.[x]

©Ruth Krauss & Maurice Sendak

In a very material way, A Hole Is to Dig established Sendak as a children’s illustrator. Ordinarily, an artist would be paid a flat fee, and the author would receive royalties. However, when drawing up the contracts, Krauss insisted that she and Sendak split the royalties 50-50. So, when A Hole Is to Dig became a popular success, Sendak quit his job at F.A.O. Schwarz, becoming a full-time freelance illustrator. During the 1950s, he would illustrate as many as six books a year — and eight by Ruth Krauss. He won his first Caldecott Honor for their next collaboration, A Very Special House (1953).[xi]

In a Nutshell: Sendak’s First Picture Books

After a period of apprenticeship illustrating others’ works, at age 27 Sendak wrote and illustrated his first book, Kenny’s Window (1956). The story reflects his childhood habit of observing the world through the window (a necessity, since he was often sick) and introduces a theme he would explore more memorably in later works like Where the Wild Things Are and Outside Over There — the permeable boundary between real and fantastic.[xii]

During the 1950s and 1960s, whether creating his own work or collaborating with others, Sendak’s books reflect the ease with which he moves between fantasy and reality, but also his ongoing need to experiment. When HarperCollins responded to the Why Johnny Can’t Read crisis with its “I Can Read” series, Sendak illustrated the first, Else Homelund Minarik’s Little Bear (1957). The Sign on Rosie’s Door (1958) drew inspiration from a real Rosie who coerced her friends to play roles in her staged performances. He followed that with the Nutshell Library (1962), four tiny books that celebrate “children being themselves,” as Selma Lanes has observed. The four books — Pierre: A Cautionary Tale in Five Chapters and a Prologue, Alligators All Around: An Alphabet, One Was Johnny: A Counting Book, and Chicken Soup with Rice — were Sendak’s first big hit, selling 100,000 copies (of the set) in their first year.[xiii]

Sensing the makings of a popular series, Nordstrom pressed him to do more Nutshell books. The resulting argument would lead to Sendak’s first masterpiece. He resisted her suggestion: he had illustrated over 50 books in the past decade, and wanted to try something new. When she proposed that another author create sequels instead, Sendak was upset; the Nutshell Library was his idea. Nordstrom backed off, and Sendak returned to a book dummy he had made back in 1955, during his apprenticeship with Johnson and Krauss — Where the Wild Horses Are. All through early 1963, he kept revising and rewriting the text, finally retitling the book Where the Wild Things Are.

(Continued)

Elsewhere:

Aaron Renier posted a moving tribute to Sendak on his site.

In Marvel news, Tom Spurgeon writes about donating to the Hero Initiative in light of the Avengers movie. And Rob Steibel digs up a 1968 Stan Lee interview from Castle of Frankenstein #12. A relative rarity from the days before the hype vibe completely calcified.

Daniel Clowes is having a busy couple months. Here’s a fine Artforum interview with him, focusing on his current retrospective, by TCJ-contributor Naomi Fry. And now he has a YouTube channel, too!

Speaking of motion, apparently Jodorowsky is crowd-funding his next movie. And Wired asks and answers “how the streaming revolution is changing the Japanese animation industry“.

I grew up with his books, literally from day one. I was Pierre (I didn’t care). Sendak gave me my first literary role model at age zero. And he soon became one himself. My dad was casually acquainted with Sendak and there was a household legend that they had once discussed publishing a children’s magazine together. It probably never went any further than grownups-with-alcohol banter, but it was a heady story to grow up on.

The most important thing about him and his work can be summed up in a headline the Guardian ran with in an interview last October: “Maurice Sendak: I refuse to lie to children.” This might seem sort of obvious but of course it is really anything but. In 2012 when children’s literature is, as often as not, as calculated, pre-formatted, and nutritious as the latest Happy Meal, the issue of what is true— and brave—and right— to actually put into the books themselves can easily get lost between the word count and price point.

Very few others ever did as pitch-perfect, emotionally-connected picture books as Sendak. Whether he actually made them for kids at all, or for himself as he sometimes claimed is moot. He knew exactly what was important, page by page, at all times—better than the editors and publishers and marketing departments and parents and librarians and critics and awarders and all of the other pseudo-superfluous grownups who stand between a children’s book author and his reader. That he was able to do it so well and for so long now seems nothing short of miraculous.

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Mo Willems:

Even if Maurice Sendak (or Morose Sendak as James Marshall reportedly called him) had never created Where the Wild Things Are, he would be in the pantheon of great illustrators for his direct, dynamic draftsmanship (particularly his ink work in the 1950s). His originals are tremendous, all the more so as he usually drew and painted at half the size of the published work.

Where the Wild Things Are is rightly considered the pinnacle of children’s picture books, for its structure, draftsmanship, and content. Certainly, I used the book as a template for my first effort, Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! Where Sendak increased and decreased the size of the drawings to indicate the slide of emotion from reality to fantasy and back to reality, I used colored backgrounds to underline the character’s emotional state. If you’re going to steal an idea, steal from the best, right?

It is a book that, when deconstructed, teaches you that good design is good storytelling, that it works best on the subconscious (when you notice it, the potency disappears), that posing and strong silhouettes create motion and emotion, and (most importantly) that childhood sucks.

I am very glad he lived and made the books he did.

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Seth:

Maurice Sendak was one of those artists, like Edward Gorey, who sat at the edges of the cartoon world. Not quite cartoonists, but close enough to have influenced at least one generation of comics artists– probably more. He was certainly an artist whose work I adored. I truly love those early books he did with Ruth Krauss. And is there any more impossibly exquisite work (and object) than the Nutshell Library? Like those little medieval carvings of a world in a walnut–so perfect you cannot believe anyone actually made them.

I must admit, I didn’t really grow up with his books. I have a sense that I did read Wild Things once– a vague memory of being frightened, at an early age, by those amazing drawings.  Certainly I recall reading In the Night Kitchen, but whatever impression it made on me was slim. It did stay in my mind. I never forgot it. I wish I had read more of them.

For me, it was in my early twenties that his books came into my life. Around the same time as Gorey and Addams and Steig and Blechman and Steinberg. Everyone knows that the very best children’s books can be as deeply appreciated as an adult as when a child. Often more. That’s true of Sendak’s work. Terrific stuff. Deep. Playful. Maybe even a bit sad.

Sendak seemed like a character as well. From a distance he appeared pushy, egocentric, increasingly disinterested in the modern world … a navel-gazer … crabby. Maybe even self-centered or arrogant. All things that made me like him. His life was an object lesson on how to be a publishing artist, that’s for sure.

I never actually met the man, of course. I saw him once on stage (more than a decade or so ago) at one of those “in conversation” events in Toronto. Afterward I pressed a copy of one of my books into his hand and mumbled a few words of praise. I recall hoping that he might actually read it, not toss it in the hotel waste-basket before heading to the airport. Later, as that book looked worse and worse to me, I hoped he had tossed it. Several years after that, R. O. Blechman made some offhand comment to me about my name having passed casually between the him and Sendak. Nothing extraordinary. Just a remark.

Upon hearing that I felt that odd feeling that you never lose–no matter how old you get–a feeling of wonder. A profound sense of the impossibility that such distant mythical creatures — demigods from your youth (a Sendak or a Blechman ) could have somehow spoken YOUR name when you weren’t around! How did it ever happen?

I encourage everyone to read Caldecott and Co., Sendak’s book of essays and introductions. That’s a good read. That book made as big an impression on me (way back when) as did his beautiful picture books.

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Peter Blegvad:

He and my parents, Erik and Lenore, were on friendly terms in the early 1960s in Connecticut. Fellow members of the community of children’s book illustrators, writers, editors. They saw him in the UK too. I think he was in hospital in Cambridge (was he there to dig the Blakes in the Fitzwilliam?) after his heart attack in the ’70s? I think they visited him then.

Drawing Leviathan, there was a period when I used the cat in one of Sendak’s “Little Bear” books as my model in several strips.

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Charles Hatfield:

I teach Where the Wild Things Are every time I teach my flagship course in children’s literature. I teach it in other courses too. What this means is that I get to renew my acquaintance with the book in an intense way several times a year. I reread it a lot.

There’s nothing original about choosing Wild Things for a children’s literature course. It’s an old choice. Maybe it’s a stale choice. Sometimes I chide myself for getting stale, and tell myself that I’m going to swap Wild Things out in favor of some other, less familiar book.

I never do.

The truth is that Wild Things draws me like a moth to candle. The reason isn’t just that I find it delightfully, endlessly provocative—a book simultaneously so definite and yet so ambiguous, so eager and light-footed and yet so dark and fearsome. The reason isn’t just that Wild Things is an endlessly provoking Rorschach of readers’ attitudes, assumptions, and tolerances. Those are some of the reasons. But another reason, and one that always outpaces my desire for novelty and change, is that Wild Things is the teachable picture book par excellence—a book that contains so many potential lessons in it. By lessons, I mean useful provocations. More than that, Wild Things contains within it a whole picture storybook tradition.

The miracle of Sendak stemmed partly from his understanding of that tradition, which was historical, critical, even curatorial—but not at all scholastic in the starched-collar sense. Sendak knew the tradition in which he was working: not simply as a market genre, nor as a careerist niche, but as a shimmering, dynamic, ever-adjusting tradition in which he was proud and happy to work. When he won the Caldecott Medal for Wild Things the better part of a half-century ago, he gave an acceptance speech that not only unveiled some of the memories that inspired the book but also sang the praises of the artist for whom the Medal was named: Randolph Caldecott, the Victorian genius whose visual-verbal repartee and rhythmic gusto Sendak eagerly sought to make his own. Sendak’s appreciations of Caldecott—reprinted in his splendid book of essays, Caldecott & Co. (1988)—reveal an artist-critic ensconced in a tradition that, even as he celebrated it, he was busy changing. Sendak clearly loved picture books and illustration, heart and soul. His critical appraisals were acutely observed and keyed to the subtleties of form, but also animated by a pure, bounding delight. He reveled in drawing, the rhythmic exchange of word and image, and sheer creative troublemaking.

If formalism gives Wild Things its structure—a tug o’war between word and picture, superego and id, mom and child, domestic reality and far-flung fantasy—then that quality is offset by Sendak’s fearless depth-sounding of the inadmissible, inarticulable feelings that nearly carry Max, his child-protagonist, away. Sendak’s formalism serves to give shape—not only at the level of the page, but even at the level of entire book design—to feelings that, until Sendak, picture books had hardly registered, feelings of rage, loneliness, thwarted autonomy, and the desperate need for love. I’m not talking about “love” earned through some disciplinary calculus that seeks to impress its grinding lessons on the child—apologize, say you’re sorry, don’t act out—but love given openly in spite of our essential fucked-up-ness.

From my teacherly perspective, which I admit leans toward ruthless pragmatism, Wild Things has many potential “lesson plans” in it because it is so many things at once: designingly simple and formally elegant; self-aware about its genre, by which I mean historically grounded yet innovative; ambiguous enough to lure readers into so many different judgment calls; and, perhaps above all, affirming and challenging at the same time, teasing out how we feel about brattiness, selfishness, discipline, a parent’s love, the urge to dominate, and the urge to give in—in fine, about childhood as we’ve come to know it. I can ask students to read this book to one another and thus observe its rhythmic visual/verbal exchanges; to write or recite its text from memory, thus to catch its poetry; to compare it aesthetically to a late Victorian toy book by Caldecott; to think about why the book’s unseen mother is its second-most important character; to disclose how they feel about the book’s resolution (definite? open-ended?) of the mother-child conflict; to compare and contrast it to a range of post-Sendak picture books dealing with similar conflicts and feelings, from Molly Bang’s When Sophie Get Angry—Really, Really Angry… to David Shannon’s No, David!; to interpret the book as sentimental or fierce; in sum, to reread the book again and again for weeks, admiring its grace or confronting its terrors. It is a great, inexhaustible treasure: the quintessential late-twentieth century American picture book.

Sendak did beautiful, affecting work before Wild Things; a survey of his career to 1963 alone would be impressive. (My wife introduced me to the unaffected schoolyard delight of A Hole Is to Dig, Sendak’s first great collaboration with Ruth Krauss, published in 1952.) But Wild Things was the book that unlocked Sendak, freeing him career-wise. This was not only because of its marketplace success—Sendak once quipped that Max was the best kind of child, the kind who allowed his parent to do whatever he wanted—but also because it overturned the last vestiges of obliging timidity in his work, uncorking the dark and unabashedly personal stuff that now defines him. Sendak would later pursue this dark stuff into openly self-indulgent crypto-autobiographical territory, from the McCay-inspired dream comic In the Night Kitchen (1970), with its balancing of homey delights and childhood nightmares, to the frankly chilly, almost frozen Outside Over There (1981), an uncanny horror story about a changeling. Wild Things helped bring many great and startlingly personal books out of Sendak, from Higglety Pigglety Pop! (1967), a fable based on the life of a beloved dog, to We Are All in the Dumps with Jack and Guy (1993), a satiric riff on mega-capitalism based on two traditional nursery rhymes, to the Holocaust-haunted Brundibár (2003), his collaboration with Tony Kushner based on Hans Krása’s children’s opera, which was performed at Terezín (Krása was murdered at Auschwitz, dying in a gas chamber). Kushner and Sendak engineered a revival of the opera as well. Who else has had a career like that? Wild Things was the passport that led to all these boundary-shattering works, as well as Sendak’s design work for operas and ballets, starting on the cusp of the 1980s with a stage adaptation of Wild Things itself.

Sendak, then, was a genuine Renaissance man, whose interests could not be neatly corralled into one tiny box (genre, style, medium). But for me the heart of his achievement will always be his picture book children, those squat, feisty urchins, full of vinegar and fire: feisty, anti-authoritarian, and, yes, wild. He paid tribute to their imaginations by unleashing his own fierce imagination, untrammeled, boundless, and free. Wild Things is the turning point in that story.

Sendak is that rare artist whose pursuit of self-indulgence liberated and humanized an entire field, extending its horizons and enriching its emotional palette. Against pinched, hidebound ideas about what children’s book could do, he depicted childhood in all its confounding mystery, unfogged by sentiment and invested with fear, fury, and joy. His understanding of the picture book form was so complete, his reverence for its history so genuine, that he became America’s greatest practitioner-critic of children’s books. His understanding of the human heart was greater still. He was, in short, an incandescently bright star—and Where the Wild Things Are, I believe, is the thrumming heart of his achievement.

I just can’t seem to get away from that damned book!

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Lauren R. Weinstein:

Few people know how to tap into a child’s deepest emotional life and shape his or her subconscious forever. Maurice Sendak did. My favorite book of his is Outside Over There, and the reasons why keep changing as I get older. In the Night Kitchen and Where the Wild Things Are seem to explore primal urges and dreams, and are resolved by the characters waking up, or going back to their mommies. I love these books, but in Outside Over There, there’s more at stake.

A baby sister is kidnapped by goblins. The baby is replaced by a changeling made of ice (the scariest thing I could imagine when I was a kid). The mother is absent—waiting for her husband who’s away at sea. Our hero, Ida, probably four or five, has to save her sister using her will, her mother’s cloak, and her wonder horn. The goblins happen to be disguised as babies. Ida entrances them by playing the wonder horn, making them dance so fast that they dissolve into water. Few people could draw this transformation with such naturalism. In the end, Ida is charged with the responsibility of raising her little sister, while her mom stares off to sea, waiting for Ida’s papa to come home. When I was a child, I looked up to Ida. I marveled that a girl could be so brave and save her sister. I longed for one of those big flowing night gowns, and I wanted a sister.

The drawings in this book changed my life. I scrutinized the sunflowers growing up and up and the facial expressions of the portrait in Ida’s room changing slightly. The German Shepherd. The musician and the sailors hidden in the compositions. Sendak’s inspiration seems to have been German and Netherlandish engravers. These drawings don’t take any short cuts. They are very rendered, but carry an emotional weight.

Do I identify more with this book because the main characters are girls? Possibly. The story seems to be more about girls, and what is expected of them. If the protagonist was a boy, would he be expected to raise his younger sibling? Ida has big feet and flowing hair; she’s going to be tall and gorgeous. She’s more in control of herself than the boys in Where the Wild Things Are and In the Night Kitchen. She has grace.

Now we read this book to my daughter. She’s 2 1/2 and I don’t know how much of it she gets, but she wants to hear it over and over. She thinks the goblins are aliens. Maybe she can just tell how enthusiastic about the story I am. Sendak knows he can take children to these dark places, but he builds in the security of the adult reader guiding them along. This book takes childhood seriously. It talks about love and responsibility and heroism, in a way that is never spelled out. I read somewhere that he revised the book over one hundred times, and it shows. It reads like Yeats, like perfect poetry. I don’t mind reading it over and over again to my daughter, always marveling at new details in the drawings.

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Sergio Ruzzier, children’s book author and Sendak Fellow:

I miss Maurice’s voice and I miss his hugs. I miss walking with him and sitting on a stone wall to rest and chat. The last time I saw him was the day before the night he died. He was sleeping peacefully and it feels good to remember him like that.

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Michael DeForge:

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Megan Kelso:

While I agree that  Maurice Sendak’s work deserves its place in the picture book canon, I feel lucky that I got to discover his books on my own. The imaginary world that feels real—equal parts terror and delight—- belongs to childhood. Only a very few adults retain a grasp on it the way Sendak did. I think having your first grade teacher (or your mom) introduce you to Sendak’s vision of that world somehow diminishes its power. In kindergarten, soon after I learned to read, I remember  going to the library on my own during lunch recess; a respite from the stressful routine of Boys Chase the Girls/Girls Chase the Boys. I remember finding Where the Wild Things Are on a low table stacked with picture books. Max seemed a little older than I was. I did not identify with him, but the book shed some light on the mysterious, somewhat frightening behavior of boys. My favorite part of that book is when the smell of supper lures Max back to his room, so cozy and prosaic after his big adventure. If I were an elementary school teacher, I too would probably not be able to resist reading the gorgeous, perfect prose of Where the Wild Things Are aloud, but I also think that book, and most of Sendak’s work is meant to be read, and pored over,  in solitude. And on a final note, how did Sendak manage to make his simple drawings of food seem so delicious? I think all my favorite Maurice Sendak moments are food related. I love that overflowing pot of noodles when the Alligators are making macaroni ….and in Chicken Soup with Rice, my favorite drawing is when the March wind knocks down the door, blows the soup off the table and proceeds to greedily lap it up and roar for more. I wanted to climb right into those illustrations, live in the funny old houses with Max, Pierre, Johnny, and all the little dogs. When I reached the point with my own drawing where it occurred to me to copy what I admired, Sendak’s were it. May his work live forever, quietly, on library shelves, waiting for children to discover it.

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Dylan Horrocks:

When I heard Sendak had died, even though I knew from interviews he’d given that it was coming, I was hit by the news like a physical shock. It was like when Charles Schulz died. It’s not just because Sendak made such great books (and they really were incredibly good – from the tiny Chicken Soup With Rice to the extraordinary Outside Over There). It’s because – in his work and in interviews – he was utterly painfully candid and honest, full of rage and passion and intensity, compassion and love. He was angry and he fought with life, and life took him to some very dark places. But for anyone who’s ever been a frightened, angry, crazy child (i.e. everyone), Sendak was on our side; he was fighting on our behalf. He was just so goddamn present in the world. And now he’s not.

There are things he said in interviews that will always stay with me: “I refuse to lie to children,” he said. Then there’s the story he told about a young boy called Jim who loved the drawing Sendak sent him so much that he ate it (“That to me was one of the highest compliments I’ve ever received. He didn’t care that it was an original Maurice Sendak drawing or anything. He saw it, he loved it, he ate it.”).

Of course, it goes without saying that so many things he wrote and drew will stay with me too. Sendak’s books changed everything. Everything.

Maurice Sendak is one of THE great writers and artists of the twentieth century, in any field. And if anyone disagrees, I’ll fight ‘em! In a parallel universe, he’d have won the Nobel Prize. But then, the Nobel Prize is nothing next to that small boy who ate an original Sendak drawing for sheer joy: “We’ll eat you up, we love you so!”

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Cathy Malkasian:

Maurice Sendak seemed destined for an agonizingly full life. He was a special kind of bug, with antennae tuned to suffering and humor. In every careful line, every thin subtraction of light he used to shape an image, there’s a bit of sorrow at the beauty of living and loving too well. His complete honesty—in line, print and speech—can leave you feeling both empty and full. He seemed to understand that oscillation well, and somehow thrived in its fine frequency. His work can look playful and buoyant, but it is heavily weighted, too, and deeper than some parents might be willing to accept. But he wasn’t writing for parents, or anyone who had learned how to be sensible. He was appealing to that very real oscillation—of dark and light, empty and full, terror and bliss—from which children don’t necessarily want to flee.

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Victor Kerlew:

Time ran out on me.

I was at a garden party. Brass band and everything. “I leeeft my looove in Aaaavaloooon.”

“That’s Bacchus,” he said, “god of wine.”

“And revelry,” I added, from my vaults of comic book knowledge.

“Hey, that’s pretty good! I didn’t know any of that shit until I moved here.”

“You know how old the artist was?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Three. Three years old. Her daddy helped her a little, gave her some direction. But yeah, she just took off her clothes, rolled around on that.”

“It’s nice,” I said.

“Fuck yeah it is.”

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PLEASE NOTE: What follows is not a series of capsule reviews but an annotated selection of items listed by Diamond Comic Distributors for release to comic book retailers in North America on the particular Wednesday, or, in the event of a holiday or occurrence necessitating the close of UPS in a manner that would impact deliveries, Thursday, identified in the column title above. Not every listed item will necessarily arrive at every comic book retailer, in that some items may be delayed and ordered quantities will vary. I have in all likelihood not read any of the comics listed below, in that they are not yet released as of the writing of this column, nor will I necessarily read or purchase every item identified; THIS WEEK IN COMICS! reflects only what I find to be potentially interesting.

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SPOTLIGHT PICKS!

NonNonBa: A show debut at MoCCA the other week, where I held all 432 pages in my hands, although this 1977 release from Shigeru Mizuki — maybe a more characteristic work than last year’s Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths, given the artist’s renown in Japan as a master of yōkai manga — has already been making the rounds elsewhere in the west, given its capture of the Fauve d’Or at Angoulême 2007. Still, I believe there is some (fantastical) autobiographical content in here, as an old woman acts as a guide to the world of Japanese spirits. Preview; $26.95.

Megalex: Ah, this one brings me all the way back to publisher Humanoids’ 2002-04 attempt to revive Métal Hurlant as a comic book-format anthology for the North American audience – an edition somewhat different, I understand, from a mostly contemporaneous French-language incarnation. Most prominent among the alterations was an attempt to juice up the English release by serializing the first two volumes of this 1999-2008 series from writer Alejandro Jodorowsky — a bankable name working through one of his weakest stories, an autopilot array of nature-based revolution against a drugged technocratic society — and artist Frédéric “Fred” Beltran, who commanded a certain amount of aesthetic pull with the publisher at the time, having already collaborated successfully with Jodorowsky and Zoran Janjetov on The Technopriests, and even inspired an ill-considered re-coloring of The Incal. Yet the extreme of his chilly, digitally-smooth approach was Megalex, rendered entirely via millennial 3D models which, as you might expect, absolutely scream the era of their creation, which is perhaps what moved Beltran to switch to a more traditional illustration approach for the third and final volume, available for the first time in English in this 168-page hardcover package, which also includes its predecessors. Samples; $29.95.

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PLUS!

Mastering Comics: Drawing Words and Writing Pictures Continued: In which authors Jessica Abel & Matt Madden follow up their 2008 ‘how to’ text via publisher First Second with a 336-page sequel intended to deepen the lessons offered prior; $34.99.

Silver Surfer: Parable: Fans of the gradual diminution of artists in the superhero comics process will definitely want a peek at this new 168-page hardcover from Marvel, a reprinting of writer Stan Lee’s 1988-89 collaboration with one Mr. Jean Giraud. Alert browsers will note that the project has actually been paired with a second Lee-scripted tale, 1990’s Silver Surfer: The Enslavers (art by Keith Pollard), transforming a rare Moebius-in-English package into a showcase for the character, or, barring that, the writer. Or, I dunno, maybe it was more cost-effective to bulk up the page count? Anyway, we’ll see if any remembrance for the late artist was put together before press time, though I won’t be expecting the Quentin Tarantino introduction the series so plainly demands; $24.99.

Space Ducks: An Infinite Comic Book of Musical Greatness: Being a 96-page original graphic novel from musician, artist and documentary subject Daniel Johnston, which can be joined with an audio album and an iOS app for additional content. The publisher is Boom! Samples; $19.99.

Archie’s Sunday Finest: Your Archie for the week, this time a 160-page IDW ‘best of’ release of ‘40s and ‘50s Sunday comics by franchise originator Bob Montana; $49.99.

Baby’s in Black: Astrid Kirchherr, Stuart Sutcliffe and the Beatles in Hamburg: Another First Second offering, presenting the story of eventual ex-Beatle Sutcliffe and his continental experiences in a “lush, romantic” (per the publisher) and somewhat seinen manga-inflected (to me eye) style from German artist Arne Bellstorf, who saw the initial release of this 208-page work in Berlin, 2010. Official site; $24.99.

Frankenstein Alive, Alive! #1 (of 13): Clearly the main draw to this new IDW project is seeing artist Bernie Wrightson embark on (a) the largest single comics story of his career and (b) a sequel of sorts to his 1983 illustrated edition of the Mary Shelley novel, albeit here a full comic with writing by frequent collaborator Steve Niles. I’m a bit more interested to see how the process utilized in the publisher’s gigantic Artist’s Edition books — i.e., reproducing the original art in full color, retaining all of the textures and imperfections of the page, which admittedly was not devised by IDW itself, having been used by McSweeney’s in its edition of Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary – translates to new work in the comic book format. Samples; $3.99.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Color Classics #1: Another popular trend – colorization! Bone did it, Scott Pilgrim’s doing it, and now the original Kevin Eastman/Peter Laird debut gets (another) treatment, courtesy of one Tom Smith and Scorpion Studios. Preview; $3.99.

Trio #1: And for a throwback of a different, newer sort, IDW brings an all-new big fightin’ superhero comic from writer/artist John Byrne. Preview; $3.99.

Mystery in Space #1: Another one of those fat anthology comic books Vertigo sometimes puts out, this time an 80-page package promising work by Paul Pope, Mike Allred, Kyle Baker and others; $7.99.

FLCL Omnibus: Oh wow, this is something. The worst manga in the world are generally anime or gaming tie-in series, but the once-great animation studio Gainax sponsored several exceptions, among them an expansive (and never-finished) Neon Genesis Evangelion adaptation by the popular show’s character designer, Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, and this utterly berserk Hajime Ueda rendition of the studio’s 2000-01 critique of the “magical girlfriend” genre, as inside-fandom as a premise can get while nonetheless — under the sure hand of never-better director Kazuya Tsurumaki — dishing out comedy and surrealism and big dirty genre licks in the manner of a top-notch Grant Morrison comic. Ueda’s comic, however, flings the entire affair deep into furious, near-inchoate mark-making of a sort rarely seen in mainline Japanese comics, which is its own type of added rebellion for the sponsor studio. Previously released in 2003 by Tokyopop, and now from Dark Horse as a 392-page all-in-one brick. Samples; $19.99.

The Bible: Finally — and sadly not your DC relaunch of the week — we have a new hardcover reprint of a 1975 treasury format release by the publisher (Limited Collector’s Edition C36), sporting 68 pages of Nestor Redondo drawing Old Testament classics under the direction of Joe Kubert, in a project spearheaded by Sheldon Mayer that never proceeded past issue #1. Note that this edition is 10.3” x 13.6”, which is approximately the original publication dimensions; $29.99.

Cover of the IDW hardbound edition.

Elaine Lee and Michael Kaluta’s Starstruck had almost become the stuff of legend; now it is in print. The first page of Starstruck was published more than 30 years ago, followed by a complicated serial publishing history. The first 200 pages are now collected in one immaculate book, with an almost equal amount of excellent additional material.

From the fan’s perspective, the progress of Starstruck seemed to have stalled some time ago, forever “to be continued,” never to be definitively collected. Now it is collected, and it turns out, Lee and Kaluta have been moving forward with full development of the next two-thirds of the story. Starstruck, as we’ve known it since 1980, really is finally complete, and the rest of the story will finally be told.

Now seemed to be the ideal time to have a long conversation with Lee and Kaluta, both about the genesis and development of the book and about the intricacies of the story itself, which spans decades and is told with the ambition and complexity of Watchmen or a Faulkner novel.

My intent going into this interview was to break with the tradition of reintroducing Starstruck to the uninitiated, and instead simply talk to the creators about their work. There’s never been an extended authors’ preface to Starstruck.

But we’re not leaving those unfamiliar with the story out in the rain. Lee and Kaluta are gradually posting the IDW pages on their website, so you can start reading Starstruck right here.  (The website also includes a glossary for the Starstruck universe, which has been developed far beyond the scope of the comic book pages.)

I’ll preface this first installment of the interview with only a few pieces of backstory: Starstruck started as a play, written largely by and starring Lee, who was an established television actress and emerging writer. Kaluta, one of the most interesting and elusive comic book artists of the Seventies, entered the picture at that point, having become disillusioned by the comics industry but enthralled by the idea of designing Starstruck’s costumes and sets. Before long, Starstruck crossed the event horizon into comic books, Lee becoming a regular contributor to the form, and Kaluta entering into the longest, strangest narrative of his comic-book career.

TCJ: How does it feel to have finally signed off on, and published definitively, the first 200 pages of the Starstruck?

Elaine: Wonderful! I’m very happy with it. And Lee Moyer’s beautiful color adds so much to it.  Of course, as soon as it was out, I saw a few small mistakes we allowed to get past us. It always happens, I suppose. But that really is being very picky. And there will be more! As the Galactic Girl Guides might say, “Trust me.”

Michael: Having the first third of the Starstruck Story in color and published in a massive hardback gives me a “between worlds” feeling. One part of me says “can it BE?” and the rest of me is peacock proud. It’s a heck of a lot of work to have all in one place (but knowing there’s an equal amount of work already drawn, just waiting for the intervening pages to be drawn: well, again a metaphor: like watching the Amazing Sunset from one’s desert island then glancing over one’s shoulder and seeing a full-sized Saturn rising out of the Ocean behind. Yeeeeek!

New page for the continuing Starstruck saga.

TCJ: I’m not aware of any other example of graphic storytelling that was developed in quite the way the work in this volume was. The story in its present form is 200 pages long, but the first and last pages of it are the same pages that bracketed this story arc when it was half that length. After the series’ first American run with Epic (which reprinted the earliest chapters as an early graphic novel, then added six new issues), you decided to build into what you’d already published, rather than extending the story from the point where you’d left off.

Michael: The thought behind doing Starstruck as a Comic Book, back in 1980-81, was that it’d come out in a sort of bi-monthly schedule, or Monthly if in a Magazine, and the story would layer easily with the readers. As it happened, that didn’t happen, and when the story first came out in Heavy Metal, the editors often gave the story arbitrary page lengths, halting the flow in what was already meant to be a challenging storytelling approach. My philosophy at the time was: let them catch up (stolen from Robin Williams)… I knew that there were folks who craved a comic book story that could keep them engaged while entertaining them, and Elaine Lee rose to that with gusto!

Elaine: The decision to expand the story from within was a natural one. When we first decided to do a Starstruck graphic novel, we had to decide how we wanted to do it. We knew we couldn’t do the play. It was just too “talky.” Plays are all about the dialogue. And the play detailed the confrontation between the crews of two ships that meet in space. The story was too small and not visual enough for a graphic novel, much less a comic series. But the characters in the play had each been given a monologue in which they talked about an important incident from the past. We decided to make the graphic novel a series of vignettes, based on these monologues. But, in some cases, years passed between, say, Kalif’s story and Galatia 9’s. So, there were big time jumps in the chronology. When we got the chance to do the Epic books, we started from where we’d left off and continued the story from there. We were supposed to do twelve books, but were told we were being cancelled after the first few were done. So we ended up shortening the story we had planned, so there would at least be some sort of an ending. When Dark Horse picked us up, it made sense to fill in the gaps – to let people know what certain characters had been up to, during those time jumps, and to put planned story elements back in that had been cut when we were cancelled.

Michael: When it came to expanding the stories, adding in plot lines, it turned out that my approach to my “background” characters made fitting the new material into the pacing a lot easier. Like seeing the second Back To The Future film, the expanded Starstruck was the exact same action but with a lot better omniscient viewpoint given to the reader.

TCJ: For the present edition, you’ve again revised Starstuck’s existing pages – both the storytelling and the artwork (including the expansion of each of the first 80 pages). Can you talk about what led to this revision process and how you approached it?

Elaine: We’ve gone back and forth between serialized, graphic novel and comics versions of the work, so that putting it all in one big book was a challenge. The pages were of many different dimensions and, when we put them all together, double page spreads might end up not being on facing pages. So, we had to add to the length of some pages, in some cases giving more room to existing panels, in others adding panels. We added at least one new page of art and, in a couple of places, rearranged art, adding new text. We added a couple of these rearranged pages to the IDW comic series that we decided to leave out of the Deluxe Edition. We had put them in to make the design work out, but didn’t need them in the collection. All the pages will be there on the website, however, both the pages we added to the series and those we added to the collection. There’s room for everything there!

Michael: The largest part of my work on getting the Starstruck Pages ready for publication in the IDW volume was extending about 80 of the pages by 2 and ¾ inches. Given Elaine’s tight storytelling, the pacing of each monologue and dialogue, I couldn’t just put a thin panel in between others to lengthen the pages… I had to make selected panels taller, matching the rendering I did 30 years ago… for the first 20 pages it was a technical struggle: then I hit on a technique: time consuming, but near flawless: scan the art (had been done already, of course) select which panels/panels were to be lengthened: crop the top and bottom lines off the panels in Photoshop, print same (same size as the originals) then draw on the printed paper. Scan that page at the same DPI as the Art, go into the now lengthened page template and replace the previous panel with the taller one. Draw new panel borders and on to the next!

TCJ: I’m curious to hear about what it has been like to live with and to engage creatively with the same work – and your younger selves – across three decades.

Elaine: It’s been a little strange working with Starstruck over so many years. There have been characters I’ve identified with more strongly during certain periods of my life, so that those characters were given prominence within the story. When I was coming up with characters and plot for the original play, I wrote Galatia 9 for myself to play. I was about 5’ tall and weighed maybe 95 pounds at the time, but I wanted to be the Amazon Captain, so I wrote myself one. I was a big Star Trek fan as a kid, but I had hated that last episode in which Kirk switched bodies with a woman who wanted to be a star ship captain – which meant, of course, that she was insane. Kirk’s last line was, “Her life could have been as rich as any woman’s. If only… if only…” (meaning, “if only she hadn’t had any ambition beyond being a Kirk-smooching, mini-skirted yeoman”). Beyond that, as an actress, I thought it would be fun to play a character that embodied exaggerated versions of all the traits that bothered me in myself. I was flat-chested, so I gave Galatia 9 a missing breast, building the other breast into one side of the costume. I had had surgery for scoliosis, which left me with scars down my back and a slight limp, which I exaggerated on stage, by putting an ankle weight inside one boot. My costume was asymmetrical and I put a big scar over one eye and down my face. Galatia is sometimes blindly idealistic, sometimes paranoid, and she enjoys her booze; traits that I share, but more so in my youth.

Elaine Lee in the Starstruck play, 1980

By the time Michael and I started working on the Marvel graphic novel, I got into Ronnie Lee’s head. In the stories, as they were printed in Ilustracion+Comix International and Heavy Metal, there was no narration from Ronnie Lee. We added that for the Marvel graphic novel. A lot of the frustration I felt, growing up as a girl in a small southern town during the ’50s and ’60s, went into that character. That feeling of being meant for something better than circumstances allowed.

Then, when we started doing the Epic comics, I found that I was getting tired of all the female characters and wanted to add a strong male character to the cast. Enter Harry Palmer. He had been a side character in Galatia and Brucilla’s story, but Michael and I decided to give him his own storyline. It was lovely to spend a couple of issues walking around in Harry. He may be my very favorite character. He’s certainly the most loyal, loving and stable character in the Starstruck pantheon.

We began doing the Expanding Universe books for Dark Horse when I was the mother of a very young child. That was when we started beefing up the character of Mary Medea (AKA Glorianna of Phoebus) and I’m sure my own motherhood played into the scenes of Mary and her mother, as well as Mary with her much younger sibling, Molly (Galatia). Mary was a behind-the-scenes manipulator of much of the action, which is sort of what you become as a mother. You are no longer the main character, but you play a large role in shaping the main character. (By the way, that baby I was tending during the Dark Horse days ended up playing Rootersnoos Ferret Jimmy the Snout in the recent Starstruck audio adaptation.)

By the time we got to the IDW series and collection, I wasn’t making too many changes to the actual pages, but I wrote forwards for the series in the voice of Dwannyun of Griivarr. Dwannyun was a main character in the play, who hadn’t had much chance to breathe in the comics. We had set up a history for him that described him as a complete failure until the time of the play. So, I took him into the future, made him a historian, and had him write a history of the events in the comics, from that future perspective. So, as the character, I was writing a history of this world we had created over several decades. In doing so, I could hint at secrets that Michael and I knew, but that had never made it into the pages.

Michael Kaluta, 1975

Michael: I’d “given up” on comics a few months before meeting Elaine and her sister Susan and falling into their Gravity Well… that what they were up to when met was a play, and what they wanted was a poster (then costumes, because there would be costumed characters on the poster, then Sets) it wasn’t comic books at all! I learned what a Hot Glue Gun was. I learned that Stage Clothing/Costuming wasn’t like drawing, real life or stuff for Films: it could look slapped together up close (and generally WAS slapped together) and look like a million bucks from the audience. Never having designed costumes for folks to wear, it was twice-lucky that Elaine knew Costuming and had all the necessary arcane equipment needed to make spacy-looking stuff. (Leather Punch, Rivet Setting Tools, the Hot Glue Guns and her expertise).  When set design and building came into the mix, skills I’d honed as a kid (dumpster diving it’s now called) came to the fore… and NYC is a Treasure Trove of Interesting Stuff waiting to be appropriated and redefined. I’ll not go on about how finding “things” that could “look terrific from the audience” took over my waking life: Refrigerators: the inside of their doors, turned upside down and painted silver with a bunch of tacks, Legg’s Eggs and Disposable Razors hot glued in series: Voila! An entire wall of Space Stuff! I think Elaine mentioned the Hot Wheels track.. there was a kid’s bowling toy that made a terrific console and card table legs, removed from the table and set upside down along the bottom edge of the console wall became levers Brucilla and Galatia could use to pilot The Harpy.

Elaine: Writing new Starstruck material now doesn’t feel the same as it did in the beginning. In the early days, Michael and I lived Starstruck. We worked together, writing and drawing in the same room. As time went on, each of us worked on our own more. By the time of the Dark Horse series, I was a Mom and we were working separately. Now, I’m a completely different person from the girl who had the idea for the play. But the Starstruck universe is so familiar that I can put myself back in that head pretty easily. I can write it, without being as attached to it. As the pages go up on the website, I am writing new glossary entries that link to the pages. So, it goes on.

TCJ: Let’s spend some time with the first page of Starstruck, which introduces a number of narrative, structural, visual, and thematic traits of the series. Among other things, this page inaugurates Starstruck’s approach to making the reader work harder than usual to understand a comic book. For instance, there are no conventional boxes full of explanatory copy on this page or on any other page of the story.

The first page as it appeared in the 1984 Marvel graphic novel...

...and as it appears in the new edition.

Michael: The first page of Starstruck has always felt exactly right… it was one that adding in another panel to get the page length correct for printing almost didn’t work…  still, I knew that some folks would keep that first scene in their minds as they read on and, eventually, pieces would fall together. Getting to expand the story many years later, it was like affirming to those who “felt” they knew what was happening before the expanded version that they’d been right all along.

Elaine: We weren’t really thinking of omitting or changing any comic book conventions. We were just thinking of doing a story we really liked. Hmmm… maybe we were thinking of doing a story that was fun to create. And we were as much influenced by stories from other media, like film or novels, as we were by comics. In his novel, Dune, Frank Herbert had begun his chapters with excerpts from the writings of Princess Irulan. I’m sure that was an influence, though we used the writings of many different characters to begin our Starstruck chapters. I was a big fan of movie director Robert Altman, who let his story be gradually revealed by moving you through scenes where you would pick up bits of information from the many characters in his large cast. And literary novelists, known for the dark humor of their work, like Thomas Pynchon. Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut were certainly an influence. American comics were probably more of an influence on the play, than on the Starstruck comics. The play had a more straightforward story. And 50s and 60s low-budget sci-fi films and television were an influence on both.

The style of Starstruck was probably shaped by the content, as well. There were certain ideas we were interested in getting across. For instance, people lie. They are mistaken or misinformed. They may understand only part of the picture or they may not be able to see past their own agendas. We wanted a story that reflected that reality. So, you may see an episode in which one thing is happening in the narration (which might be a history, written in a later time) and another, completely different thing is being talked about in the dialogue, but when you look at the art, you see that something altogether different is happening, because neither the future historian, nor the characters living the event understand what’s really going on. Content decides style.

I remember Larry Hama telling me about some of the letters to the editor he’d gotten during his time at Marvel. One reader wrote something like, “In Conan #2, Conan says he’ll never run from a battle. Then, in issue #957, Conan runs from a battle. What gives?” That really made me laugh. So, what Michael and I are saying is: Just because Conan tells you something is true, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s actually true. (And we might even hit Conan in the face with a giant hotdog; just to make sure he and everyone else gets the point.)

TCJ: Right out of the gate, the series announces its interest in the female body as a potentially conventional object of male desire, but in what turns out to be an unconventional plot of female empowerment. You decided to start your script with a woman hatching an elaborate political/economic power play involving mass production of sexbots. Why?

Elaine: The sexbot came first, the plot later. When coming up with characters for the play, I thought it would be fun to have a reprogrammed pleasure droid aboard the space ship, the Harpy. She would have the mind of Spock, the body of Marilyn. At the time, a lot of people in the media were writing about divisions in the women’s movement. Should women be trying to be like men, compete with men, do men’s jobs? Or should the women’s movement instead be trying to change the world, in order to make the world reflect more traditionally feminine values? The character of Brucilla the Muscle was a role reversal, a female version of every hotheaded, gung-ho, young, male space cadet in ’60s sci-fi movies, or war-in-space science fiction novels. And the pleasure droid, Erotica Ann 333, was the traditionally feminine woman to the max. Erotica Ann is brilliant and almost always right, but Brucilla can’t see past her appearance and manner. Bru can’t stand Annie. Of course, the Annie 333 you see on the first page of the comic, along with her “sibling” droids and their maker, Mary Medea, is not the Annie of the play. She hasn’t begun to think independently and she hasn’t been reprogrammed to serve as a crewmember of the Harpy.

In the play, Annie has a monologue, through which she tells the story of being owned by a young Kalif Bajar. She explains that, when he realized the droids were not able to love him, he ordered that they all be melted down in a vat of acid. As she watched her sisters march, one by one, into the acid, Annie had her first independent thought. She thought, “If I stay in this line, I’ll be melted down in acid.” Annie walked away and survived, later to meet up with Galatia 9, who has her reprogrammed to serve aboard the Harpy.

As far as Mary Medea’s schemes go, I think the idea of the seductive female spy has been around for quite a while. The desirable woman who isn’t what she seems. The Annies serve as Mary’s proxies, programmed to get close to their target, then preventing the target from achieving what he might have. Because they look exactly like Mary, they also serve as cover for her. When she wants to go into a situation, she can dress like an Annie and go wherever they are. In this case, that “object of male desire” is a honey trap. He may perceive her as an object, but he is actually enthralled, her slave. Kalif’s sister throws a wrench into the works, however. By the time she’s through messing with her brother’s mind, he’s attached to the headless (thoughtless, speechless) Annie. Like many of us, men and women alike, he would rather invent a personality for his love, than deal with an actual being, even one as pliant as a pleasure droid.

Michael: Kalif gets “his” Annie back after her rebuilt head “changed” her, by echoing his father’s blowing the head off one of the droids. A telling point: the beheading is done to a completely different Anne, #72, as opposed to the original headless Anne #1.  Headless, she is His Annie.

Elaine: The Annie Kalif loves is the one he imagines. As sick as this might be, it keeps him from being “guided” by Mary, through her droids. In the end, it is Ronnie who is enthralled by Mary Medea. She spends her life trying to understand and/or thwart Mary.

TCJ: Michael, in its final form, this first page is a really unorthodox, adventurous comic book page (let alone as a splash page for an entire series). It contains six panels, five of which stretch across the whole page. However, you’ve used the situation being illustrated (many identical female forms/faces) to create the illusion of more than a dozen panels on the page. And you’ve used light and dark areas to create an almost perfectly symmetrical composition.

Michael: I can’t remember my thought processes on the day I laid out the first page of Starstruck… I remember wanting to: 1) Introduce the Character. 2) visually show she was master/mistress, completely in control of the mysterious process being portrayed. 3) show there were a LOT of copies of her. 4) contrast Glorianna’s human movements against the implied mechanicalness of the androids, and 5) allude to Glorianna having a personal interest in one of the androids. Adding in the extra panel for the newest version was somewhat simpler than drawing it: Photoshop is a boon… but, although the Annies are identical, the fluid in the tanks was lowering, the bubbles rising, so there was more than just one cut, copy and paste to get the complete page. Since there were now quite a number of pages following the first page, it seemed important to add a background in the final two panels to give them a sense of belonging to the rest of the strip.

The layout of the page seemed the only way to do it: I felt it was given me in the subject matter. I owe the tracking camera approach to Goseki Kojima, the artist of Lone Wolf and Cub (and he owes that technique to Kurosawa, I’m sure!) That the first page was to be a symbolic opening, immediately followed by the Bajar Throne Room Sequence, allowed me to be more structured with it: by making it appear iconic, it contrasted nicely to the everyday madness going on in the following story.

TCJ: You had drifted away from comics before Starstruck, and you have never been particularly committed to extended comic book narratives. Can you speak to how you re-engaged long-form sequential art with Starstruck, and how your compositional approach to non-sequential art (comic book splash pages and covers, book covers and illustrations, posters, etc.) influenced your page compositions?

Michael: My drifting away from comics was more like me trying to swim away from a whirlpool… at the time I met Elaine and Susan I felt my work had become very stale. And I was also not a very good Worker. The major effect Starstruck had on me was to give me a reason to draw comics: the unique approach to the story intrigued, getting to layer the visuals in service of creating a sense of place for the characters was fulfilling, and the immediate feedback from Elaine on my choices made staying with the art easier than anything I’d done since Carson of Venus (of course, Carson was mostly a 5 page monthly strip… nothing compared with the huge amount of pages to eventuate from starting and committing to Starstruck)

I’m not certain my Cover Work for other comics, nor my illustration work, gave anything major to Starstruck beyond that my ability to draw had improved through the doing. The pacing of Starstruck, the sweep, the set-ups needed to give room for developing sub-plots and surprises gave me challenge after challenge: rising to those challenges made me use everything I’d ever seen, thought, read or heard of. Ideas sparked more Ideas, problems were worked out on the spot. Having to please only myself, and the writer sitting on the couch behind me, made the art grow into the epic it has become. Had I been handed a finished, 300 page script of Starstruck at the time of starting, alone at my drawing board, I shudder to think of what I’d have done.

TCJ: Lee Moyer’s new coloring is a dramatic departure from previous treatments of Starstruck. It is also highly illustrative in its own right. Did you actively collaborate with Moyer on this dimension of the new edition? How did he become the colorist in the first place?

Elaine: Lee Moyer has been involved with Starstruck, since way before he did the color for this edition. When he was a kid, still living at home, he saw Starstruck in Heavy Metal magazine and wrote Michael a letter saying, “If there’s anything I can ever do…” Later, Michael would meet the young Mr. Moyer, when they worked together on a video for by the Alan Parsons Project song, “Don’t Answer Me.” When the Marvel/Epic comics were coming out, Lee sent us examples of android Stark Verse that he and his friends had been writing for each other. Then, when we were doing the Expanding Universe books for Dark Horse, Lee wrote the “what happened in the last issue” pieces for us, signing them as Rootersnoos Ferret, Lee Moyer. During the years that Starstruck was stuck in a holding pattern, Lee sent us three beautifully painted pages. These were pages that had never been colored, from the black and white Dark Horse books. His note said, “If you ever intend to do a digitally painted version…?” By the time we got to the IDW series, it only made sense to ask Lee to do the color. Besides being an incredible artist in his own right, he knows Starstruck inside and out. He probably knows it better than Michael and I do!

Michael: As much as I’d like to take Big Credit for Lee Moyer’s painting of the Starstruck Pages, I can in truth only claim my contribution was in giving color notes to the Spanish Artists who did the airbrush color for the pages that appeared in Heavy Metal Magazine back in ’82 and eventually in the Marvel Graphic Novel from Epic. Basically my contribution was character costume colors. All the rest is Lee! Though I gave out with a few, “Could That Be Green?” and “Maybe That Should Glow?” comments, my involvement was as a fan: I got to go WOOOOOOOO!  And as any creative person can attest: if something allows one to go WOOOOOOO! over one’s own art, it is a blessing!

Oh: I DID tell Lee “Remember, there are over 200 pages of this highly detailed art: Don’t Kill Yourself with the First Pages and then have to match them for the entire 200+” …  of course, he ignored me, to our benefit. As Elaine points out: Lee knew the story backward and forward: I knew he’d know what to accentuate and what to let alone… even better than me, sometimes. It was a rare day when Lee would need to know what it was he was looking at in my panels, though I’ve a suspicion there were more times he crossed his fingers and dived in (to terrific results) than he’ll ever let on. AND: Lee is FAST!!!! Once or twice I sent him line art for the covers, intending to send color notes in the following email, only to have a note arrive from Lee with the finished color cover attached. I’m still agog!

Elaine: I worked very closely with Lee on the “extras” pages for the IDW comics and Deluxe Edition. Michael did new art for many of these pages, but Lee also did some of the art, a few of the mission patches, the Space Brigade poster, and the brochure for the Garuda – the ship that eventually becomes the Harpy. He repurposed and expanded existing art, for the Personalities of AnarchEra cards, as well as posters for the Ramscoop Lounge and the Aguacade. Lee did the design for the inside cover pages. In some cases I would send Lee text and he would design the page, in others we would chat, he would do the page, leaving room for text. Lee and I we worked together on the Book Design for the Deluxe Edition. Besides being incredibly talented, Lee is the consummate professional and very entertaining, and I would work with him again in a heartbeat.

TCJ: Jean Moebius passed away on March 10, 2012. What was his influence on Starstruck?

Elaine: Quite simply, there would have been no Starstruck, if there had been no Moebius. As a kid, I had been a voracious reader of comics, but had given them up as I entered my teen years. Then, in my early twenties, I discovered Heavy Metal and the European comics artists. Moebius was my favorite. At the time, I was living in Manhattan and working as an actress, but was also taking a playwriting class at The New School… a really bad playwriting class! I was given an assignment to write a scene about two people fighting over an object. The two women in my scene were the prototypes for Galatia 9 and her sister Verloona and they were fighting over a box, contents undisclosed. My ex-husband read the scene and said, “This is just like something from Heavy Metal!” I dropped the class, but kept working on the idea.

The Moebius influence.

Now, I’ll tell a story at Mr. Kaluta’s expense. While working on Starstruck, Michael went through a bad patch of artist’s block. Every time I dropped in on him, he was either sleeping or reading and I was starting to get cranky about it. I asked him what the heck was going on. Michael’s answer? “I’ve started to worry too much about whether or not Moebius will like it.”

So, from my point of view, Moebius was both the inspiration for, and almost the end of Starstruck!

Michael: I met Moebius as Jean Giraud when Jean-Pierre Dionnet came over to the USA with a gang of Top Flight French Comic Strip Artists (including Jean-Claude Forest: Barbarella, and the astounding Philippe Druillet). JP Dionnet became our Translator, being able to speak both languages, and brother did he hop from one to another. The first meeting was in the coffee room at the DC Comics/Independent News offices: a smallish room, now full of Frenchmen and Americans, all Comic Book Artists, all wanting to communicate to each other… On our side (if there were sides) there was Neal Adams, Alan Weiss, Berni Wrightson, etc. I can still see Howard Chaykin over my shoulder waving his hand toward Dionnet to come and help his conversation, while I had a hand on Dionnet’s chest, holding him in check until he could speak for me. We all traded drawings.

The Art of Moebius is the benchmark for Brilliant Comic Book Drawing, as well as being a high water mark in the design and characterization areas. I knew when I began Starstruck whatever I’d absorbed reading and studying his work would come out in anything I did that was “sci-fi”, but I did make it a rule not to look at his art while drawing: Moebius had so many elegant solutions to artistic and story-telling hurdles that his work would overwhelm anyone not careful to channel his being while staying clear of copying his results.

One of my quirks: when I draw a subject, my art tends to reflect that subject: hence one not studied in my work would think one of my Tolkien Calendar Illustrations done by someone entirely different than the artist responsible for Starstruck. Because Elaine’s Starstruck story covered (on purpose, note) so many different people, places, things and situations, my work, though uniform in the overall presentation, adjusted to different scenes by, say, softening when we are on New Wyoming (the Arizona Highways World), or hardening when Harry Palmer walks the Voidfront. Of course, the signature of an Elaine Lee Story is: you never get just what’s expected, so, in the Hardware-Driven Brucilla Story, Moebius-like machinery gets to meld with Spin and Marty high jinx, and the art followed suit. When discussing the various stories during the working process, it was often a reference shared from a 50’s TV show, commercial, joke from Boys Life or “something I heard once” that’d imbue an otherwise mundane artifact or scenario with the feeling “Hey, I’ve SEEN that… but where???”

Luckily, the fun we had doing it translated into fun for everyone!

We will have much more to say about him in the following days, but in the meantime, Margalit Fox’s obituary of Sendak in the New York Times is very good, as is the Fresh Air interview with Sendak from last December (which made my wife cry even back at the time). Blown Covers re-published a comic collaboration between Art Spiegelman and Sendak that is very much worth reading. The Guardian has a slideshow of his life in pictures. And Jeet Heer reminded me of an excellent critical look at Sendak that he found a few years ago from Hilton Kramer, of all people. There is much, much more, and we will have further coverage of Sendak’s life and influence up on the site very soon.

On the site today, we present the first installment of John Hilgart’s very thorough multi-part interview with Starstruck creators Elaine Lee and Michael Kaluta, about the very strange and unique history of that project. (You may, or at least should, know Hilgart from 4CP.)

Joe McCulloch escaped Louisiana to bring us his column on This Week in Comics!, a little late but no less essential.

And Sean T. Collins reviews Arne Bellstorf’s Beatles book, Baby’s in Black.

But that’s about as much drama as you’re gonna get. Baby’s in Black tells the story of this pivotal stage in the Beatles’ career without storytelling. Bellstorf works tirelessly to sap the mystique out of the Beatles bildungsroman generally, and the oft-told tale of fifth-Beatle Sutcliffe, John’s close friend, ankling the band for an arty life with Astrid specifically. The events are enumerated quietly and chronologically through action and dialogue (lots of simple sentences ending in periods in which characters explain things to one another), until they stop. There are no blow-ups with the rest of the band about the departure, no Byronic tortured-artist moments. Astrid’s mother is supportive to the point of treating Stu like a son after they’ve shacked up. Klaus supports his lovely ex’s decision to date Stu and accepts his missed opportunity to replace him on bass in the Beatles (he’d get his chance later with the Plastic Ono Band) with good grace as well. Aside from the basic components of the look, the art eschews grand romantic gestures as well (aside from one sequence of Stu painting in Astrid’s attic that in retrospect communicates as much about his worsening medical condition as anything else). Overall it’s a good look, though there’s a trade-off involved: The insistent refinement and good taste of it all makes it feel slight where a less decorous, more shoot-for-the-moon take could have hit harder.

Perhaps that’s why the few stylistic flourishes Bellstorf allows himself linger so. When Astrid and Stu have sex, Bellstorf cuts away to a comparatively bright-white forest dreamscape, in which the couple wander (fully clothed) through a mass of entangled trunks and limbs. It’s one of the strangest visual metaphors for sex I’ve ever seen, and its uniqueness made it work all the better somehow, like “Yeah, okay, never thought of it that way before, but sure.” It’s also charmingly demure, which is another strength of the book on a number of levels. Whatever the Beatles became, collectively or individually, here they were just a bunch of friendly kids who enjoyed playing rock and roll music semi-professionally. They enjoyed hanging out together, they were pleased (almost honored) to get gigs playing at bars or recording as an in-studio back-up band for a colleague on the scene, and in particular they were as happy to meet and make friends with interesting, kind, like-minded people their age, like Astrid and Klaus, as everyone else tends to be. Bellstorf shows how it was only context – the seedy bars in bad neighborhoods and stuffed with rough customers that were the only places they could get gigs; an Englishness and a love of American rock music that made them seem enticingly alien; a series of language-barrier-enhanced run-ins with concert-hall managers and immigration-enforcement officials that led to arrests for arson and work-visa violations; much later on, their trajectory toward world domination – that made this quintet of perfectly nice young men seem like the rebel vanguard of an incipient youth revolution. Even their infamous boozing and speeding of the time is pushed off-panel, mentioned in passing by Paul one morning as he bashfully admits they got a bit wild the night before. Since everything that’s gone before has been so stately and reasonable, it’s all the more shocking when Bellstorf reaches the climax of the story, such as it is, and addresses it in lethally abrupt and straightforward fashion. The final panel of the book is its most dramatic, and its best. (That’s a good look, too, and a rare one—cf. Acme Novelty Library #20 or B.P.R.D.: Killing Ground.)

Only as I write this do I think that maybe this is the point, and the message of Baby’s in Black. It’s good to be reasonable, but shocking, sudden, life-changing things happen anyway, for both good and bad. Sometimes they’re both at the same time. Sometimes they’re one thing for you, and something else entirely for the guy on the bass guitar just a few feet away.

Noomin, born in Brooklyn in 1947, may be best known as an early contributor to Wimmen’s Comix and as the founder, with Aline Kominsky-Crumb, of Twisted Sisters Comics, in 1976. In the same period, her work appeared in a who’s who of underground publications: Weirdo, Arcade, Short Order, Young Lust, Titters, and more. But her career has also been devoted to celebrating the work of her fellow cartoonists; she has edited three anthologies, two of them—Twisted Sisters: A Collection of Bad Girl Art and Twisted Sisters: Drawing the Line—in the past decade.

Noomin’s talents extend off the page as well. In 1981, she put DiDi to work onstage, in a production with Les Nickelettes theater group called “I’d Rather Be Doing Something Else: The DiDi Glitz Story.” The costumes—fishnet stockings, gold lamé pants, and leopard-print rompers—were courtesy of Noomin, and the backdrops were created by friends, including her future husband, Bill Griffith. The year before, Noomin herself donned the blonde bubble wig to film an episode for the “Zippy for President” series produced by San Francisco’s KQED. At the close of the episode, DiDi and Zippy wake up in bed together, in what may be the most surreal cross-comics hookup.

I met Noomin for lunch last month on Manhattan’s west side, while she was in town for an event in conjunction with Yeshiva University Museum’s “Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women,” an exhibition that includes Noomin’s work. Midway through our conversation, a semi truck ambled down Ninth Avenue and eased to a stop at a red light, just in front of the restaurant’s windows. On its flatbed reclined a thirty-foot gold-painted statue of David, his gaze heavenward. DiDi most certainly would have approved.

Did you study art in school?

I went to an art school for high school—the High School of Music and Art in New York—and at Pratt, I took photography and sculpture courses. I wound up working in the Pratt library, in the art section. So I’m pretty familiar with art history.

Did it work its way into your early cartooning?

No, I think my cartooning had to work its way through the art, because when I went to school, they were trying to turn everybody into Abstract Expressionists, Jackson Pollock juniors. They once showed us a film where somebody was throwing paint onto a canvas on the floor and then rolling balls into it, and this was High Art! The worst thing you could be was illustrative or narrative, which of course defines comics. They told you how to look at art—you’re looking for the movement and all this stuff. In order to be a cartoonist I had to try to forget all that. I had a student pass to the Museum of Modern Art, and I’d cut class and try to look at art the way we were taught to.

When did you start drawing?

I think I’ve been drawing my whole life. When I was a kid I used to trap friends, cousins, my sister into drawing contests, because I knew I’d win.

Were you interested in cartooning when you were at art school?

No. I loved comics. I grew up reading comics. I loved Little Lulu, Uncle Scrooge, and whatever comics books I could get my hands on, but I never contemplated being a cartoonist. It never occurred to me.

Why not?

[Laughs.] I have no idea!

But that changed when you met Aline.

When I went out to San Francisco in 1972, I carried a little black notebook, where I wrote a lot of poems and made doodles and drawings. So I was heading to cartooning without realizing it. I showed it to Aline at a party and she said, “We’re starting Wimmen’s Comix. You should come down.” The first issue of Wimmen’s Comix was being finalized, so I wasn’t in the first issue—I was in the second issue—but I was in on it from the beginning, and it was very exciting. Suddenly I realized the whole world was material. I could do comics about anything!

How difficult was it to do your first strip?

Actually, it wasn’t difficult at all. I didn’t include it in the book because it’s kind of a continuation of an illustrated poem, and that’s in Women’s Comix, no. 2. Then, in Wimmen’s Comix, no. 3, I started to get more satirical, critical. That story was called “The Agony and the Ecstasy of a Shayna Madel.” That issue of Wimmen’s Comix was the part of the impetus for Twisted Sisters—Aline and I were getting very fed up with the politics of the women’s comix “collective.” That’s in quotes.

Sharon Rudahl, a Jewish woman, was the editor, but basically the editors did all the shit work, and Trina [Robbins] pulled the strings behind them. That was my perception. Anyway, Trina was Jewish, Sharon was Jewish, and I handed in “The Agony and the Ecstasy of a Shayna Madel.” Aline did a “Goldie” story, and Sharon told her that they had too many Jewish girl stories in there and they rejected it.

Is that when you and Aline broke with Wimmen’s Comix?

I think it took a little longer, but there was a lot of in-fighting and a lot of really unpleasant stuff that was going on in Wimmen’s Comix aimed at Aline and me.

Why you two in particular?

I think it’s because we had famous boyfriends. This was a feminist collective and some people—mainly Trina—had a lot of trouble getting into comics they wanted to get into, like Zap or Young Lust, and they felt they were being kept out by the boys’ club. That hostility got transferred to us, since Robert did Zap and Bill did Young Lust. The funny thing was that almost all of the women had cartoonist boyfriends. Every single one that I can think of, including Trina—and that wasn’t an issue. Then Trina got a friend of hers to write an editorial in the Berkeley Barb basically calling Aline and me “camp followers”—whores. The writer was the girlfriend of the cartoonist Guy Colwell. I once was so pissed off about the “camp follower” thing that I made a list of all the male cartoonists who were connected to women cartoonists.

Did you think there was a boys’ club?

I don’t think I really thought about it in those terms, because I was lucky—everything fell into place for me. I didn’t have that experience. I think it’s a valid experience that Trina had—I’m not saying it wasn’t—but I didn’t have it. I don’t think Aline had it.

So we just created our own comic. We went to Last Gasp and asked Ron Turner if he would do Twisted Sisters. It was just Aline and me. She did the front cover, I did the back cover, and we each did a story as long as we wanted and that was it.

Were there good things about being in the collective?

The good thing was getting work in print. The bad thing was that people didn’t notice it.

How was it distributed?

In head shops and wherever underground comics were distributed. I think it’s better known now, even though it’s out of print, than it was then. I’ve always thought that, aside from the small distribution, one of the problems was quality. When I did Twisted Sisters: A Collection of Bad Girl Art for Penguin, I got all these people saying, “Where did all these great cartoonists come from? Where were all these strong women cartoonists?” A lot of them came from Wimmen’s Comix and Weirdo. Weirdo got more attention, but the good stuff in Wimmen’s Comix was drowning in the bad stuff, in my opinion.

What do you mean by the bad stuff?

There were very strong cartoonists who published work in Wimmen’s Comix, but—I’m not very diplomatic—there were also comics in there I didn’t like and that weren’t up to the same standards as the really strong stuff that I chose for Twisted Sisters. And I think that was proved to be true because when it was separated, it really stood out, and people started paying attention to Krystine Kryttre, Mary Fleener, Penny Moran Van Horn, and Julie Doucet. Julie did a great story in Wimmen’s Comix that we reprinted in Twisted Sisters, about drowning the city in menstrual blood. Wimmen’s just didn’t get enough attention. I think Weirdo got attention in the comics world because it had Crumb covers, and that helped.

What was the relationship between women cartoonists and men cartoonists at the time?

I had no problems. I really didn’t. When I went out to San Francisco, it was kind of a “wild and crazy” time, and someone would throw a party when they published a book. I remember when Insect Fear came out, there was a huge party with kegs of beer and everybody was dancing—it was fun. When I first got there, I met Bill and Art Spiegelman and cartoonist Michelle Brand. Michelle was nice and really helpful. She was married to another cartoonist, Roger Brand. I wouldn’t say that Roger was helpful because Roger was just in his own world, but Michelle was, and Art was very helpful, very supportive, and so was Bill.

In a way, it was like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney saying, “Let’s put on a show, kids.” If you wanted to, you’d say, “Let’s put on a comic, kids!” and you asked all the people you liked to be in it. Bill and Art had started Arcade and I was inspired. I wanted to edit a comic book, so in 1978 I edited a comic book called Lemme Outta Here!: Growing Up Inside the American Dream. It has a cover by Michael McMillan and a back cover by MK Brown, it has long stories by me and Aline, and Bill did a story called “Is There Life After Levittown?” And Crumb did a story about Treasure Island. Robert was obsessed with Treasure Island when he was a kid. I just asked cartoonists I liked if they’d be in a comic book and they said yes.

But there was a very strong need for feminism across the board in this country. When I was looking for work after high school, there were jobs called girl Fridays, and there were separate want ads for men and women. Hillary Clinton could not have run for president. Even though Geraldine Ferraro did later run for vice president, it was still a shock. I think a lot of younger women don’t have to think about it today, so that earlier stuff can come across as strident, but that wasn’t my interest in doing comics. My interest was in personal stories.

But I didn’t have that experience of not being able to get into comics. It seemed to me if you wanted to and you did enough work, you could ask a publisher and they would put a comic out. There was a time when it was easy to get things published, and Wimmen’s Comix was during that time. It’s also been a very long-lasting title, and I’m grateful for all the work I got into it. I was surprised at how much was there. And in Weirdo. Weirdo first was edited by Crumb and then by Peter Bagge, and then by Aline.

Had you read the underground stuff before you started doing your own work?

I read every comic I could get. And when I lived in New York and a new Zap came out, it was a huge deal—Far out, let’s read the new Zap! Let’s get stoned!

What made you move to San Francisco?

I had separated from my first husband, and I decided that the Upper West Side wasn’t far enough from Brooklyn.

Also, I came back from the summer of meeting Aline to my one room, fifth-floor walk-up on the Upper West Side, and to a shrink who told me that I should not go to San Francisco and draw comics, I should stay where I was and put bars in my windows and deal with all my issues about men. And I said, “I’m going to California!”

Your issues about men?

I didn’t like that guy. I had a shrink I really liked, a woman, and she—I always intended to do a story about this—she ran a group-therapy session. This particular group had rules, like you don’t know last names and you don’t fraternize outside the group. But then she left—she said her husband got a job in Washington D.C.—and we all took it badly when she recommended this guy to take over the group and do personal therapy. And when he did, chaos reigned. I had an affair with a guy in the group, and then another woman in the group had an affair with a guy in the group, and we started having meetings at our houses without the shrink and serving drinks and the whole thing turned into anarchy. [Laughs.]

So you went to San Francisco and met up with Aline again.

Yeah, I had relatives who lived out there, so I lived with them for six months before I found a place on Clipper Street. My roommate was Lela Janushkowsky, who was Kathy Goodell’s best friend from high school. Kathy was Robert Crumb’s girlfriend for a very long time. She was an artist and sculptor and she was not happy about Aline’s relationship with Crumb.. So I was Aline’s close friend and I was living with Kathy Goodell’s best friend. It was interesting.

That must have been complicated.

It was fun, though. Lela was a good-time girl. I’d never lived with a good-time girl, so I went along in her wake sometimes.

How did DiDi come about?

She started as a costume for a Halloween party at Gilbert Shelton and Lora Fountain’s house and quickly took over. There’s photo of me in DiDi drag in “Canarsie Creeps” in 1973. It’s an eight-pager—we used to call them eight-pagers. A lot of people were putting them out. Justin Green did one, Bill did one, Art Spiegelman did them. Everybody, just for fun, was putting out these eight-pagers that sold for seven cents and were two 8 ½ by 11 sheets of paper that were folded four ways and configured so you had eight pages.

In 1974, I did a full-fledged DiDi story for Wimmen’s Comix. It was four pages and was called “She Chose Crime”, and when I was putting this book together I realized that DiDi came out almost fully developed. She hasn’t changed, she hasn’t grown or anything like that. If I look at that first story, the drawing has changed and I’d like to think that certain things have gotten better, but in that story, DiDi’s persona is it. I don’t think I’d realized that.

How did she make it from costume to cartoon?

I put myself in the costume in “Canarsie Creeps”, and then, as I was drawing comics, I was influenced by a photograph of what looked like complete desolation in suburbia by a photographer named Bill Owens. Titters, which was an anthology put out by Deanne Stillman and Anne Beatts in the early seventies, I published a two-row strip about DiDi describing her décor. It’s called “I’d Rather Be Doing Something Else”. So that was my first DiDi strip, but very soon after that came “She Chose Crime”.

I could never understand how Aline could be so autobiographical. Aline’s method was, “I’m going to say everything bad about myself that anybody could say before they say it and put it in my comics.” It’s basically like, “Fuck you. Yes I’m with Robert Crumb, yes, my drawing doesn’t look like his.” I was incredibly impressed by that. And she was very influenced by Justin Green.

They were the first two to start doing autobiographical work. She was the first woman.

She gives Justin credit for that. Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary had a powerful effect on her. For Aline, that was just a natural approach, and for me, DiDi became the natural way to do things. I could do satire and use real-life situations and have DiDi experience them in her way, so that I’m one step removed. It took a long time for that to change, although there were intervals along the way where I did do personal stories, like “Coming of Age in Canarsie” or “The C-Word”, about abortion—C, at that time, meant choice.

That was for a pro-choice book that Trina Robbins edited, it was a very hard story to do, because I had had an abortion soon after the affair with the guy from my group, who had a long blond ponytail and wore black leather pants. But I didn’t know who the father was. It was a confusing time. It was after I had left my husband.

How hard was it to get an abortion then?

It was the first year it was legal, so it was not hard at all. I went to the Margaret Sanger Clinic, and everything was very above board and easy. Scarily easy.

Were there protesters?

There weren’t. Legal abortion didn’t have a high profile yet. When I was in San Francisco I was involved with a theater group called Les Nickelettes, and they did a play called “I’d Rather Do Something Else: The DiDi Glitz Story”. As a group, we decided to do a benefit for Planned Parenthood—this was in the eighties, and there was a lot of demonstrating and fire bombing. When we were planning the benefit, we went to the Planned Parenthood offices in San Francisco where they had intense security and it was a little scary to be there. In San Francisco, of all places, I didn’t think it would be like that, but it was.

There’s a lot of sex in the DiDi comics.

There is. I was surprised at how much when I started to put Glitz-2-Go together,

But thinking about the time you did them, the mid-seventies, it’s not the kind of sex you’d expect to see from that period. It’s not feel-good, wild experimentation sex. DiDi can’t get an orgasm, and she can’t find a good lover. And in trying to solve her problem, she consults a woman’s group, where they talk about loving yourself.

It’s very San Francisco. In one of my favorite panels, a naked woman wearing rubber gloves jumps up out of a communal hot club shouting, “It’s my wrists, my gross, fat, disgusting wrists, gloves don’t help anymore…!” [Laughs].

But in the end she’s just completely true to herself. And the contact paper…

What could be truer for DiDi than riding contact paper to an orgasm?

I love that ending. Is that your favorite DiDi story?

It might be. I mean, I don’t really have a favorite but that’s a good, pure DiDi story. And it was fun. I got to send away for catalogs of vibrators.

The good kind of research.

Yeah.

How much does her lifestyle resemble that of Canarsie, where you grew up?

It wasn’t personally similar. I moved to Canarsie when I was twelve, going on thirteen, and I had to learn how to be a teenager in about two weeks because the mores were so different in Brooklyn. In Long Island, I was climbing trees, I was a kid. And in Brooklyn I was going to make-out parties, so it was pretty shocking. And my experience growing up in Canarsie was very different—but I wasn’t satirizing my family, I was satirizing the neighbors. We had a neighbor who had white shag carpeting, and you had to take your shoes off before you came into the house. I had seen the houses of my friends in junior high school, and then I went to Music & Art, and I became a real snob. Canarsie was so bourgeois. So, Canarsie did feed a lot of it.

My experience on Long Island was unusual for suburbia because my parents were communists. They moved to Long Island to go undercover, although they didn’t change their names, so I can’t figure that one out. They moved to an integrated neighborhood—what they and the Communist Party thought was an integrated neighborhood in Hempstead but actually was a neighborhood experiencing white flight, so more and more black people were moving in. It was a much poorer neighborhood, but I did end up having some black friends who protected me from other black kids who threatened to beat me up.

So I didn’t experience the kind of incredibly luxurious but fraught childhood Aline had. She lived in the five towns and had the cashmere sweaters and the Capezio shoes. I never had that.

When did you find out your parents were communists?

I got a clue when the FBI started questioning our neighbors in Canarsie, but we didn’t talk about it until I was in my thirties. I did know during the Vietnam War, when I went to march on the Pentagon, that my mother was in Women Strike for Peace. So I knew they were left wing and liberal, and I was proud of them, but the commie stuff was all secret.

They were working for the Communist Party of the United States?

Yes.

(continued)

But on the site today we have Nicole Rudick’s interview with the great Diane Noomin, whose collection of thirty years of her stories, Glitz-2-Go, is out now and a great read.

Elsewhere all around:

TCJ-contributor Chris Mautner on why he isn’t seeing The Avengers.

Timothy Callahan has a MoCCA Festival round-up with a list of promising new books.

There are some very psychedelic and deeply strange Edgar Allen Poe illustrations by the pulp artist Harry Clarke over at 50 Watts.

Design and illustration historian Steve Heller is interviewed at Design Matters.

And finally, just what you’ve always wanted: Early Dave Berg!

Then, we present a preview of Dan Zettwoch’s new Birdseye Bristoe, which feels to me like a potential breakout book. I have always really enjoyed Zettwoch’s work, and the way he tirelessly experiments with formats, panel breakdowns, and storytelling techniques of all kinds. What’s also nice is that his stories work. (Some cartoonists who create “experimental” comics don’t seem to notice or care when their experiments fail, and just publish the results no matter what. This might be the correct response if comics was a science instead of an art.)

We also have Rob Clough’s review of the latest Jason collection, Athos in America.

—Speaking of Jason, the National Post has a short profile of the Norwegian cartoonist.

—The Doug Wright Awards were announced, with Kate Beaton, Ethan Rilly, and Michael Comeau taking the top prizes. (For those who like comparing and complaining about comics awards, it is worth noting that Best Book winner Hark! A Vagrant was not nominated for an Eisner this year.)

—Speaking of Canadians, Tom Spurgeon has a long interview with Jam creator Bernie Mireault.

—Octopus Pie creator Meredith Gran talks to Gary Tyrrell.

—Newspaper History department:

1. Frank King explains where he got his characters for Gasoline Alley.

2. Peter Huestis has posted a whole bunch of difficult-to-find old Jimmy Hatlo cartoons.

—Adrian Tomine immediately jumps to the head of the list of cartoonists who have created covers for Thomas Pynchon novels.

—Chris Mautner has a photo diary of the MoCCA festival.

—James Romberger has a new online strip.

—Jason Thompson provides an excellent in-depth overview of Shigeru Mizuki, the artist responsible for Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths. You should know about him.

—Daniel Best continues to do the Lord’s work, gathering and posting legal documents related to the Superman case. The latest is a letter from attorney David Michaels, who had been previously been suspected of stealing various documents from Marc Toberoff and leaking them to DC. He gives his side of the story in the letter at the link.

—For a certain kind of person, the next two links—blog posts written by Steve Ditko biographer Blake Bell about his relationships with Ditko, Dave Sim, and Jesus Christ—will be the most interesting things they read all day.

—And finally, via Mike Lynch, a documentary about the infamous Jack Chick, posted in its entirety:

Dan Zettwoch’s work occupied a unique space in comics — they’re ingenious contraptions that show precisely how things (mechanical, social, geographic) work, and spin out narratives from those demonstrations. His first graphic novel, Birdseye Bristoe, is about the construction and destruction of an enormous cellphone tower on land owned by an old man known only as Uncle in the titular town. It is also about, of course, invention, the midwest, family, and corporations. According to Zettwoch, “the premise came from a mini-comic idea that had been stuck in the back of my head for a long time. I’d think about it as I drove the lonely stretch of I-64 between Louisville and St. Louis, which I’ve done hundreds of times. The construction stuff, fold-out, maps, homemade shrines, decrepit roadside Americana stuff, I tried to engineer a story around stuff I wanted to draw.”

And the drawings in this book are gorgeous — they are Zettwoch’s finest work to date, marking a turn towards a more organic style. The artist reports that “the pages are all ballpoint pen, colored pencil and white-out pen on tan typing paper. That’s how I’d been working my sketchbook, liking the results and also the speed at which I could crank out finished pages. (If I was going to have to go through the pencil>ink>computer color process there’s no way I would ever finished.) I also liked the idea of the color being more involved with the act of drawing – be able to color over ink, white-out over top of that, etc.”

So click through and enjoy the scenery.

Any comic by Jason is going to have some familiar components. The humor will be deadpan, the body language of his characters deliberately stiff and cold, and their visual appeal heightened because of their status as anthropomorphic animals. That tension between image and action has always been at the heart of the emotional content of Jason’s comics. It has also made it easy for genre tropes to coexist with the mundane elements of his comics. Above all, what his comics have in common is Jason’s fascination with structure and performance. By “structure,” I mean that he’s interested in the ways in which genre stories are expected to develop and resolve—and in how to subvert those expectations. He does this either by introducing unexpected twists or else introducing some absurd but deadpan element that changes everything. By “performance,” I mean that he’s fascinated by the ways in which genre characters and roles can be exaggerated in a way that’s not unlike an actor chewing the scenery in a film. Jason is interested in classic cinema, and his animal characters are his own little repertory company for the stories in which he’s director and writer. Despite the frequent lack of affect on the part of his characters, it’s Jason’s characterizations that ultimately provide the most memorable moments in his comics, not his plots.

Both the opening and closing stories of the book revisit characters from Jason’s past work. “The Smiling Horse” is a good example of Jason’s fascination with structure and expectations, as we revisit the criminals from the story “&” from Low Moon. This is a pulp fiction narrative with two desperate criminals and the woman they’ve kidnapped, and the sense of doom they feel when they learn that someone named the Smiling Horse is after them. Jason subverts expectations here by never revealing the specifics of any scene: how someone dies, how someone escapes, or even who the Smiling Horse is. At the same time, the reader gets the sense that these kidnappers are in way over their heads, and the sad-sack antics they got into in “&” become deadly very quickly.

After opening with this grim attention-getter of a story, Jason shifts gears with “A Cat From Heaven”, which is described as a “Bukowski pastiche” in the promotional materials. In it, Jason portrays himself as a hard-drinking, hard-loving, hard-living artist who has a love-hate relationship with his live-in girlfriend. After yet another explosive fight, Jason kicks her out, gets drunk, goes to a comics reading (late, of course), goes to a party, picks up a girl in the least romantic way possible, and then can’t perform when the time comes (imaginary newspaper headline in his head: “Famous Cartoonist Can’t Get It Up”). Finally, Jason is beaten up, then gets back together with his girlfriend, before winding up back at the drawing board, with plenty of fodder to write about. This is one of Jason’s more broadly funny strips, one that focuses on the fantasy element of being something that he’s not while satirizing the ideal of a Bukowski-like lifestyle. It’s the details that make it work, like Jason pulling a switchblade on a fan who mutters something while walking away from him. This is an example of a story where performance is everything.

Jason’s love of classic cinema and genre-bending reaches its most inspired heights with “The Brain That Wouldn’t Virginia Woolf”, a pastiche of The Brain That Wouldn’t Die and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Jason tells this story in reverse chronological order, and the reader gets the brunt of both the sci-fi weirdness of a head being kept alive in a lab as well as the brutally toxic but co-dependent relationship of the husband and wife. Things get more tragic as we see them struggle with the ethical ramifications of him finding her a new body, the failures he encounters, their initial courtship, and the accident that puts them in this situation. The cleverness of the set-up and the way Jason manipulates emotion make up for the ways in which the characterization is more rote and reliant on its source material, as the strip’s protagonists chew the scenery like Liz Taylor and Richard Burton.

“Tom Waits On The Moon” is Jason’s take on Robert Altman-style narratives with multiple unconnected characters. Each page features a single character without dialogue, just thought balloons. Each character expresses his or her own sense of grief, regret,or pure self-loathing (here disguised as misogyny). One of the characters is a scientist working on a teleportation device, and all four characters are slowly brought together for an explosive and tragic conclusion. Once again, Jason balances structure and characterization, as the reader must gather clues from their interior monologues as to their motivations and actions while the actual momentum of the story moves very slowly, speeding up only at the very end. Along the way, the plainness of the characters’ thoughts adds an emotionally raw and revealing element to the book that’s not in the other stories, giving nuance to the importance of performance in his work.

“So Long, Mary Ann” is another Jason gangster story, a genre that seems to hold a particular interest for him. Half of the story about a convict who breaks out of prison with the help of his girlfriend focuses on that couple and the odd woman they pick up as a hostage along the way. The other half of the story concerns the boss he’s trying to get money from, who is comically violent over the least of offenses (he eventually kills his right-hand man for blowing his nose). After he leaves his girlfriend and runs away with the hostage, the convict realizes just how deadly ridiculousness can become. This story again balances Jason’s interest in story structure with straightforward character motivations, but this time adds an absurd comedic element to the mix that nonetheless does little to ultimately lighten the drama.

Finally, the titular story brings back the star of The Last Musketeer, a great character that Jason seems to have been born to write. Jason re-introduces a single absurd element–that Athos the Musketeer is both immortal and now bored–and spins its story mostly off-panel. The story is really about Athos leaving America after having foiled a crime (allowing the structure of high adventure to have its moment in the story) and having failed to get his career in Hollywood off the ground. It’s a decidedly downbeat and even anticlimactic note for this book to end on. Of course, since this story is a prequel to The Last Musketeer, it serves the purpose of adding a bit more depth and soul into the character of Athos, making that other book all the more poignant as a result. Despite his style, Jason is quite effective in modulating emotion from story to story, going from gags to violence to tragedy, sometimes all in the same story. Jason is in total control of all aspects of his storytelling, and, even after a decade straight of ambitious publishing, it seems as if he’s just getting warmed up.

Here I am – Pittsburgh PA – the thrill of exiting the tunnel from route 79 going into Pittsburgh and the the immediate view that pops into space – unlike any other approach or reveal of a city. Exit the tunnel and you are on a bridge with a spectacular view of the three rivers. The two that make one. Perfect cool still light evening humid buzz of the city. I turn on the parkway headed upriver and the road goes along eye level with the water. A coal barge half a city block wide and three blocks long pushes towards me – I can see the pilot – is he looking right at me? We are even, squared off facing each other for an instant across the water and concrete before the road slopes up and away. Everything is new again to these old eyes. Pittsburgh. I miss you even when you’re here.

Always arriving. Always leaving. That’s what it feels like anyway. Funny how coming home reminds you who’s here, who isn’t, who’s died, who’s moved away. Every time I came back into town, the old man would greet me the same – “There he is: the wandering ghost. Where the hell you been?” 

“I’ve been in New Mexico and I’m on my way to New York.”

Going to New York for animation work. Going to set up my summer studio which I share with Aaron Cometbus. Every year since 2000, me and Aaron have sublet an art studio in lower Manhattan. It is a big empty white room with a window. Two tables and a radio. That’s it. No living there, no hoarding or filling the place with useless junk. Art uber alles. Even when I lived in Pittsburgh, I would come up and spend part of the summer in NYC. It is the most constant thing in my life. I’ve had that studio longer than any other space I have inhabited. And Aaron is the perfect person to share a space with because he works so hard and produces so much that I push myself just to keep up.

I will be offering a new correspondence course in June. Check out the info below. Please pass this info on to anyone you know who may be interested in my workshops or course. Thanks!

Also, this summer, I am going to have a comic book back issue blowout sale. Since NYC is the worst city to be a comic book back issue enthusiast – I am bringing the comics directly to you poor souls hungry for hard to find comics. That’s right folks, every Saturday in June, I will be holding a mini comic book convention in my studio. Replete with workshops, special guests, giveaways and, ahem, panel discussions. Come on down and find all the alt, indy and mainstream comic book back issues that you never see in NYC. I am an expert at this shit, folks. No one knows where to find obscure comics like I do. I should have my own reality tv show where you see how I find and then flip comics. Even if you don’t buy anything – come on down and check it out. You will see comics that you have never seen before. I have traveled the country to bring you the best in obscure back issues. Every Saturday in June. Stay tuned for details.

———–

Frank Santoro Correspondence Course for Comic Book Makers
Summer 2012

New Course Announcement

June 4th start date

8 week course

“Full course” – layouts, color, figure drawing – you will make a 16 page comic over the 8 weeks.

500 bux. Payment plans available. No money down! Totally serious.

To apply, email me and I will explain the submission guidelines.

Deadline to apply is May 30th

Only ten spots available
capneasyATgmailDOTcom

Check out one of my student’s work – he just finished his comic and posted it to his blog.
———–

Storytime

When I was at Kevin’s looking at mini-comics for hours on end – I found an old mini that advertised a publication titled Comics Comics #1 Check it out:

Front cover of the mini:

Back cover of the mini – check out the ad for Comics Comics #1:

I don’t ever remember seeing this and definitely had never heard someone say “Comics Comics” before Laris Kreslins suggested it to Dan, Tim and I as the title of our “magazine about comics” we had concocted back in ’05. Anyways, if Tim Corrigan (well known as editor and publisher of Small Press Comics Explosion which was a sort of cross between Factsheet Five and the Comics Buyers Guide) is out there wants to “claim” this comic – I’d like to hear from you. When did you make this thing? Comics Comics as advertised here was acollection of classic strips from The Comics Buyers Guide – if anyone out there has one of these Comics Comics please email me. Thanks!

———

Be nice to those whom you love. You’ll miss them someday. Over and out.

As Tom Spurgeon notes, TCAF is an ideal occasion to enjoy not just a superb comics festival but also a great city. So here’s a tip for Toronto visitors who want to see a little bit more of the city’s culture, while also enjoying a  comics-related jaunt: take some time out to go to the Tony Calzetta exhibit at the De Luca gallery (217 Avenue Road – about a ten minute walk from the main TCAF building).

Calzetta cartoons on the canvas, which puts him in a now venerable tradition of comics-inspired painters. Unlike Roy Lichtenstein, Calzetta doesn’t do cool, detached appropriations of illustration images from romance comics or war comics. Rather, Calzetta is closer in spirit to Philip Guston, doodling with his paint brush to evoke the warm, scribbly free-spirited iconic forms of early 20^th comic strips. But where Guston’s stubbly, cluttered paintings called to mind the slightly-claustrophobic world of Mutt and Jeff, Calzetta’s open  spaces and bold colors evoke the antic play of George Herrimans’s Krazy Kat.

Having spent a happy afternoon with Calzetta’s paintings, Herriman was never far from mind. Partially it was a matter of capering shifty shapes that are never content to settle down but are always transforming themelves before your eyes – the stumps that could be elephant feet or steep desert mountain, the upside down umbrella which could also be a ship or a mushroom, the trees that weirdly have branches growing at right angles making them at times look like chimneys with blowing smoke. Herriman’s also present in the way Calzetta stages his paintings – often putting a not-quite-rectangular border within the painting itself, calling to mind Herriman’s play with panels and placing of his characters in a proscenium theatre within the strip (and indeed in earlier painting Calzetta placed his images within a proscenium theatre). And of course, there are the colors – often circus bright in the foreground but set against a darker background.

Beyond all these surface similarities, there is also the feel of Calzetta’s work. Like Herriman, he’s an artist who makes me cheerful even when the work deals mournful themes of loss and separation. The joy that these artists provoke is not a naive pleasure and doesn’t come from the denial of pain. Rather, they have the special gift of returning art in its primordial roots of childhood play even as they grapple with adult concerns.

To say that Calzetta is a Herriman-esque artist is very high praise, but I think anyone who sees his work will realize that he deserves it.

(Calzetta’s paintings will be available for viewing on Friday May 4th and Saturday May 5th).

Anyhow, you may have noticed TCJ was offline for a bunch of hours yesterday. Sorry — the Internet broke for a little while. Then it was fixed.

So: on the site today:

We have a recording of an April 12th discussion about comics at The Art Institute of Chicago featuring Neal Adams, Ivan Brunetti, Geof Darrow, and J.J. Sedelmaier , moderated by Richard Holland. That is one very diverse line-up. Please note that the audio is a bit soft, so we recommend head phones and concentration for this one.

And like every Friday, Tucker Stone brings sunshine to your morning with his prose report on all things comics. This time we get a little extra helping of Moebius and depravity, too.

Elsewhere in our great web nation:

-I always have time for Wilhelm Busch.

-I also always have time for these illos by Takeo Takei.

-Ray Johnson is also someone I have time for. Special guest appearance by Karl Wirsum doesn’t hurt.

And that’s really all I have time for.

NOW FOR THE BUSINESS

Gladland #1
By Oliver Schulze
Published by Good Vs Evil/Hirntrust Grind

A little bit of Tim Vigil and a whole lot of something else, this black-and-white comic features some of the most challenging examples of Can You Handle It? drawing this side of sanity, the most intense being a nude bodybuilder who has a standalone vagina resting on his pompadour, an erect penis (with intact sac) sprouting out of his tongue & drooling mouth like some kind of a mid-chin dick-unicorn, and a couple of deformed naked ladies apparently growing out of his arm. One of those ladies is wearing a ball gag, and the other one is masturbating. It’s not totally clear if pages like these—and there are a few pages “like these,” one even comes with a yellow sticker covering … something (I haven’t removed it to check, because I’m an emotional cripple)—are part of the plot, or if the pages that seem to have a plot (which is about a guy whose face became crystalline and was then hospitalized when it became necessary to hammer an air hole through the crystal) are a break from the drawings or just, you know, fucked up drawings, but forcing Gladland into a narrative box would possibly strip it of some of its charm, which, despite its foray into the grotesque, it definitely has.

Moebius 8: Blueberry
By Jean Michael Charlier & Jean “Moebius” Giraud
Published by Graphitti a while ago

Also referred to as “Lieutenant Blueberry” and featuring the stories “The Iron Horse”, “Steelfingers”, “The Trail of the Sioux”, and “General Golden Mane”, this collection is an excellent installment of the sorts of pleasure Blueberry stories have to offer. It can be a bit difficult for some to stomach for lengthy periods of time, as these tales have a tendency to smash its lead character three steps back for every two he’s permitted to take, and after a while, all that deus ex bad luck can get irritating. The art is the obvious American draw, and as such, there’s little disappointment to be had on that front. Horses, cowboys, and trains, all three drawn in such a way that points more to museum visits and less to pictures–everything has a density to the way it saddles the panel, and it can take effort to linger. Moebius lathered on a lot of care, but it’s hard to ignore the character’s desperation, to abandon that hope that success might be just coming up on the next page. Considering the decades of time clocked, Giraud clearly felt the same.

Diah H #1
By China Miéville, Mateus Santolouco
Published by DC Comics

Although it definitely wins some sort of consolation prize for not sounding/reading exactly like every single other mainstream cape book on the stands, Dial H may be the unfortunate herald of a terrifying future: crappy imitations of Grant Morrison comics. Sponsored by slumming, Dial H is written by some guy who writes those kinds of fantasy novels that look more respectable than Dragonlance books but aren’t respectable enough not to be shelved alongside them, and it’s drawn by another one of those DC artists who never saw a picture he couldn’t add way too many extraneous lines to. It’s about a fat guy with a friend, a rotary phone booth that turns people into random super-heroes, and it’s probably qualitatively better than most DC comics currently available while still not being half as aesthetically successful as the last two YouTube videos somebody emailed you links to. This will be the favorite thing of exactly no one, but it will probably be a few people’s number seven.

Short Cuts: Volume 1
By Usamaru Furuya
Published by Viz, 1998

A little book consisting of one to two page humor pieces centered around ko-gal, which the author defines as “a Japanese high-school girl with attitude.” It’s very funny, and some of the comics in here–most notably, “Cut 7”–manipulate the basic visual language of manga upon the reader to unexpected, rewarding ends. (Cut 7 and Cut 10 are worth whatever effort it takes to track this collection down, the former because of its ingenious visual manipulation, the latter because of its as-ingenious verbal trick; both are too special to spoil.)

Intruder #1
By Tom Van Deusen, Ben Horak, Billis Helg, Jason Miles, Tim Miller, Marc Palm, Nikki Burch, Tony Ong, Aidan Fitzegarld, Alexa Koenings, Max Clotfelter, Marc Palm
Published by Intruder

A free newspaper with one-page contributions from a variety of cartoonists, some of whom wear their influences more obviously than others. There’s some clear differences between everybody’s current level of skill, and some pages that seem like they’d be more comfortable existing as stand-alone prints to be sold to the I Prefer Stand-Alone Prints audience, but in the grand pantheon of shit that you can be occupied by, free comics newspapers that don’t descend into genre parody or cutesy “all-ages” animal shit for 43-year-old men still angry that they grew pubic hair … these comics aren’t the enemy, you know? Some smirky kid looking at Paper Rad way too often is always going to be preferable to another self-righteous webcomic about how hard it is out there for single 30-somethings who miss the Go-Bots and Totally Hates The Racisms.

Love and Rockets #2
By Jaime Hernandez, Gilbert Hernandez, Mario Hernandez
Published by Fantagraphics

A fucking knock-out, really. This wasn’t even stuff that yours truly ranked that highly– “Mechanics”, “Radio Zero”, “Music for Monsters”, and “Somewhere in California”–but reading it in this contained format, without the universally celebrated “good stuff” that the longer digest collections yank you foward with, it’s weirdly excellent. Maggie’s impossibly beautiful, striking classical pose after classical pose, while Rand Race and Penny Century keep falling into every different kind of romance-engorged tableau that ever went to paper. There’s so much to love in here, and Gary Groth’s overly excited, Gaddis-quoting essay really sets a wonderful tone. This thing stinks of comics, it’s wet and messy. The Punisher of feelings, and thighs.

Daredevil #12
By Mark Waid, Chris Samnee, Javier Rodriguez
Published by Marvel Comics

The External Hard Drive Crossover (featuring Spider-Man, Bearded Punisher, and Greg Rucka Fantasy Lady Version 3.0) concluded in last week’s Daredevil with Daredevil still wearing the external hard drive around his neck, but Waid and Co. seem to have decided they’re going to maximize whatever mileage they’re getting out of that particular storyline, meaning that this issue only mentions it in passing. More carrying a glorified address book around excitement to come! In this issue, they instead choose to tell the story of Daredevil’s first date with some lady who Bullseye will probably kill the new district attorney, and it turns out Matthew Murdock knows how to show a lady a good time, and by showing her “a good time,” I mean he tells her some fucking story about that fat piece of shit he hangs out with all the time, because there’s nothing a lady likes more on a first date then listening to the dude drone on and on about the moment in college when he realized he was becoming best friends with some guy she doesn’t particularly like that much. Waid and Samnee try their best to uncover a secret awesomeness to a bunch of clichés, but this issue–like the three-issue crossover that preceded it–is another dud . Marvel had a clear winner on its hand with this title not that long ago, but over-shipping, overwrought crossovers, and an abysmal series of fill-in artists have turned Daredevil into the exact kind of mindless filler it spent its first seven issues acting in stark criticism of. Then again, it’s fucking Daredevil, and if there’s one thing this title has historically been great at (besides murdering girlfriends), it’s brief moments of good in between years and years of the opposite.

Batwing #9
By Judd Winick, Marcos To, Ryan Winn
Published by DC Comics

Although DC is in the middle of cancelling a bunch of their “New 52″ titles, this one is not only dodging the axe but getting itself included in the “Night of the Owls” crossover sprawling out of the successful Scott Snyder-led Batman title. Batwing is a weird, weird comic, almost unreadable in its initial installments, all of which were card-carrying members of the hilariously offensive variety of super-hero comics–a short-tempered black man sponsored by a rich white Westerner fights a villainous African warlord who cuts off the heads of children with a Darfur-inspired machete and openly refers to himself as “Massacre”–but this issue just sees the character dumped off in Gotham City, where he fights off some random storm trooper type by blowing the dude’s arms off.

Detective Comics #597
By Alan Grant, Eduardo Barreto or Eduardo Baretto, Depending on Which Part of the Comic You’re Looking At, John Wagner, Steve Mitchell, Adrienne Roy
Published by DC Comics, 1989

This is the second part of a two-parter, and yet it would have read as a far smarter comic if this was the only issue that existed. It opens with a splash page featuring Gotham’s richest (well, except for Bruce) preparing to watch the latest in a series of Advanced Bumfights: The Batman Installment. We then see the fight and its aftermath, which is one of those weird passages that’s gone extinct in today’s hunger for faux-realist super-hero stories, a passage where Batman goes to the hospital and is treated by doctors who allow him to keep his mask on. Then Batman drives around in broad daylight, thus setting an all time record for the most-obvious suspect tailing of all time. It’s a one-trick pony, this comic, and there isn’t a note you won’t see coming. There’s some pretty drawings, but that’s it. This is the sort of comic that a childless man reads only to realize that no, he’s never going to read this to a little boy, and if his own father was still alive, he would call and tell him that they should have played a little two-hand touch instead. Life is a meaningless spiral into oblivion, there is nothing beyond the mortal realm, and average super-hero comics are far worse than those that are merely bad.

Apart from that, there are almost too many links to link.

—Secret Acres has their now-traditional semi-disheartened wrap-up of this year’s MoCCA festival.

—Paul Gravett takes a look at the recent Madrid career retrospective of Spanish cartooning legend Max (and interesting read in conjunction with our Berenguer obituary from yesterday).

—In Alison Bechdel news, John Horgan has another interview with her, and Dwight Garner reviews her new book for the New York Times.

—BK Munn had a really good May Day-related post featuring Dr. Wertham and Ernie Bushmiller the other day.

—In Salon, Steven Brower writes about the generation of comic-book artists who switched to advertising.

—Print has another gallery of Françoise Mouly’s collection of rejected New Yorker covers.

—And finally, Vice visits Johnny Ryan in his home:

EIGHT: KIRBY AS VISUAL ARTIST

DOUG HARVEY:

OK, I’m going to just spew out a few things as they come to mind. First, here’s my initial response to Jeet’s first email probe, before I got Hatfield’s book:

I consider Kirby a visual artist, and a modern artist, by the same token and on the same playing field as any visual artist or modern artist, from Picasso or Duchamp to Jessica Stockholder or Banksy. And I rank Kirby very highly. I don’t see any need to make apologies or rationalizations for narrative or commercial parameters – Shakespeare and Hiroshige were commercial artists. It’s important to avoid self-ghettoizing the comics medium. Do we need to strain out the narrative intent inherent to virtually any pictorial artwork in order to assess its visual impact? Would we propose that for Picasso’s Guernica or Duchamp’s Large Glass? Personally I consider even the most abstract and conceptual artworks to be engaging the viewer in a narrative of some kind – often a more convoluted, context-dependent and reference-heavy one than that dictated by more patently illustrational figure paintings. For me, Kirby’s work holds its own on the strength of its visual impact, which necessarily includes his mastery of pictographic symbolism and graphic narrative composition. There’s no stronger argument than the work itself, and I’m astounded that anyone would need to read any book other than The Golden Helmet to recognize the genius of Carl Barks! Critics.

SARAH BOXER:

I’ve been watching the Kirby lovefest from the sidelines — not with envy, but with a kind of fascination. Why I can’t I dive in? Why does my son want to? (I see a superhero comics fan in the making and I am horrified but interested too.) There must be a reason. Hatfield’s chapter “How Kirby Changed the Superhero” speaks to the point. And it also seems to explain my physical revulsion for almost all of the Kirby superheroes except, perhaps, the Silver Surfer, a giant phallus on a surfboard.

I like my superheroes smooth. Many of Kirby’s superheroes (and some of his anti-heroes) are encrusted, scaly, ripply. This encrustation strikes me as related to Christian iconography, which I also know nothing about. (See the attached photo of a work by Arthur Lopez at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, titled El Savador del Mundo.) Every layer is meaningful, not merely ornamental. And the layers seem designed to keep people like me out, people who don’t understand what the encrustation is all about. It is literally repulsive.

In his superhero chapter, Hatfield defines the difference between Kirby’s Marvel characters and the pre-Kirby DC superheroes like Batman (who would be my favorite superhero, if I were forced to pick one, which I am almost daily, by my son). The DC superheroes are smooth, streamlined, modernists in tightfitting pajama costumes. They are not so much clothed as depicted “though a haze of color,” Hatfield writes. The costumes, Hatfield continues, quoting Michael Chabon, are meant to show off “the naked human form, unfettered, perfect, and free.” P. 112

If the clothing has any job other than labeling the superhero, it is an ironic job.  Hatfield calls the clothing of DC’s superheroes “inherently ironic,” paraphrasing Terry Castle’s Masquerade & Civilization: “the superhero’s disguise … enabled its hero to invert his usual identity.” P. 113 I like that. Ironic clothing.

The Marvel heroes are not ironic. They are dead earnest, in constant deadly battle with Pure Evil. Cap battles the Nazis, not funny anti-heroes like The Joker. Hatfield writes, “the Marvel style was vigorous, even brutal… Marvel favored energy over smoothness.” P. 119 (By the way, this energy, is something I do admire about Kirby’s drawing. I also like that Kirby krackle — the depiction of energy itself. And I like some of Kirby’s heirs like Gary Panter, who aren’t quite so earnest.)

The most interesting point (at least to me) in Hatfield’s book is that the Marvel superheroes are not only physically layered but semantically layered. They have layers of personal history & mythology, which they carry with them over time. They are encrusted with their own history.

As Hatfield writes, “the Marvel characters remembered — and so did their readers.” And this historical encrustation, which the Marvel-type superhero carries with him, makes for a certain kind of fan.The Marvel readers are “addicted, soap-opera like, to continuing storylines and unresolved problems.” Captain America is a superhero soap opera. This is why I can’t jump into the discussion. This is why I don’t want to. Those super-encrusted layers of narrative clothing are super-nauseating and super-repulsive.

By contrast, the DC characters (as Umberto Eco has noted) are “blessed” with forgetfulness. They exist in what Neil Gaiman has called “a state of grace.” Each new story is a fresh starting point, naked and free. The characters have personality but they are, narratively, blank slates. As with a comic strip like  Peanuts, anyone can dive in. Even me.

Linus is my idea of a great super-hero.

JONATHAN LETHEM:

Sarah, Doug: Two brilliants posts that slam against each other like a Superman-Thing slugfest.

I think I intuitively agree with Doug Harvey’s context-demolishing blanket avowal of Kirby’s pure value as an artist even more than I agree with anything I might have said myself earlier in this round-table. He’s seeing the future: the job of posterity, pretentious term that it is, is precisely to dissolve the circumstantial brackets surrounding the site and occasion of the work’s production and the mortal, humble, and often humiliating or awkward facts of the artist’s person, and to begin to create a new context of its inevitable imperishable greatness, a contextual feeling suitable to the feeling it arouses in the viewer. Of course nobody but a fool ever wrote for money, everyone rushed their work to the marketplace and left it scarred with evidence of all sorts of local grudges, compromises, rivalries, and marketplace dynamics, including the marketplace of fashions or fads, (i.e. ancient astronauts) or meaninglessly eccentric personal references (i.e. Don Rickles), and while one job of scholarship is to nail down an accurate account of the context of the work’s arising, an apparently totally conflictual purpose (or, at least, result) of the scholars rushing in to begin their work is that they are collaborating at building the platform for posterity to do its celebratory enshrinement. Hence some of the strange tensions inherent in a book like Hatfield’s. His job, whether he knows it or not (I think he knows it) is to simultaneously speak for the Fiore side of things (Kirby is “like” Steve Ditko, Stan Lee, Gil Kane, etc. in that he consciously worked in tandem with and in reaction to a specific cultural operation, one subject to the restrictions and opportunities and self-definitions typical of that locality) and the Harvey side (Kirby is “like” William Blake and Picasso and Shakespeare in that you need to just forget all of the local context and say “look at what this fucking human did and how its inherent power and strangeness demands attention and needs no excuse or apology whatsoever” — Behold!, in other words.)

As for Sarah, I’m going to go all baroque on you now and analogize your resistance to the Marvel thematics as being the result of a collision of dynamic models of the human psyche, one I’m supposing grates on your classical Freudianism –for the beautiful catastrophic difficulty with Marvel is that the heroes are subject simultaneously at all times to the pressures of living in an intimate Freudian universe, dominated by “the family romance” (Lee’s side of things) and a Jungian one, where individual self-developmental fates are overwhelmed by the apprehension of vast archetypes of power moving through all human history (Kirby’s side). “Overdetermined” might be the word. This muddle produces the encrustations which dismay you. Kirby, it seems to me, manifests the tension in his drawings themselves during his “classical period” (i.e. the core of the Fantastic Four run), by bringing romance-comic tenderness to the stances and facial expressions while burdening these same figures with the persistent onrush of his psychedelic techno-gnosticism.

(The reason Steve Ditko had to leave Marvel was that he subscribed to neither the Freudian nor the Jungian views — his resistance to seeing the Green Goblin as some kind of familiar and shocking — Lacanian? — “other” for Spiderman being the defining crisis.) Ditko believes he is Ayn Randian. In my view he is Gurdjieffian.

The DC heroes are not so much even Freudian as they are a super-distilled and popularized Freudianism, akin to Dianetics. Each has one “origin-trauma” to solve, like an Engram: Batman’s parent’s mugged in that alleyway, Superman’s planet exploding. Superman is what Dianetics would call a “Clear” — his trauma is all manifested and managed in such a coherent and externalized way that he can literally tour you through it — i.e., the Fortress of Solitude, where through the clear bottle glass he can present to you the restored City of Kandar, reduced to manageable size, and then tour you through the sculptures depicting everyone of importance in his life,  resolved into solidity. Superman has no difficulty loving Clark Kent, but he is waiting for Lois Lane to join him in becoming a Clear, which she will accomplish by seeing his two halves as one person.

Batman’s trauma is still murky and concealed in a cave. He is not yet a Clear, but he’s trying. He needs to give more of his money to L. Ron Hubbard.

R. FIORE:

Well, you know, Jack was Jewish.  So is Stan Lee.  Their characters would probably have more to do with the Golem than anything specifically Christian.  Art Spiegelman once suggested that might with justice also be called “The People of the Comic Book.”

R.  FIORE:

P.S.  And, now that I think of it, so were Siegel, and Shuster, and Bob Kane, and Julie Schwartz, and Sheldon Mayer . . .

Happy Passover, everyone.

SARAH BOXER:

Wow, Jonathan… speaking of brilliant! Geez. I never thought of all this in terms of Freud v. Jung. (And you’ve definitely got my number here.) Not to go all graphical on you, but I just looked at some online images from the recently published “Red Book,” (I’ve attached one here) and, yes, it turns out that Jung’s graphic fantasies are indeed Kirby-esque!

JONATHAN LETHEM:

All my scholarship rests on scrupulous study of David Cronenberg’s recent movie, of course. That’s how we roll, here in academia.

GLEN DAVID GOLD:

Jonathan Lethem wrote: “(The reason Steve Ditko had to leave Marvel was that he subscribed to neither the Freudian nor the Jungian views — his resistance to seeing the Green Goblin as some kind of familiar and shocking — Lacanian? — ‘other’ for Spiderman being the defining crisis.) Ditko believes he is Ayn Randian. In my view he is Gurdjieffian.”

Geeks will come at you with plastic forks — Ditko apparently didn’t leave Marvel because of the Goblin.  He left because Stan and Martin Goodman promised him money they didn’t pay.   Stan said later it was because of an argument over unmasking Green Goblin, and that’s been the refrain ever since.  I’m not sure if Ditko ever said his part in print, but numerous people who talked to him face to face have repeated the story: there was supposed to be money and it didn’t happen. I’ve heard Ditko tried to get Kirby to come with.

DOUG HARVEY:

Ha!

Now this:

[Holger Liebs quote:]  Mike Kelly’s synaesthetic Gesamtkunstwerk updates earlier holistic Utopias of harmony and universal communication – from the early-20th-century experiments of Russian composer Alexander Scriabin to the multimedia design environments of the 1960s – by introducing another key 20th-century myth of reconciliation and salvation: Superman. The title of the show, ‘Kandors’, references the eponymous city on Superman’s home planet of Krypton that was saved in miniature form under a bell jar by the superhero and transferred to his ‘Fortress of Solitude’ after an evil alien had shrunk Kandor and its inhabitants to the size of a toy. This transportable city-in-a-bottle is emblematic of Superman’s traumatic childhood and symbolic of the double loss he suffered of both his parents and his homeland.

Since Superman trivia have been subsumed into everyday American life – the motif of the Fortress of Solitude, for example, has been quoted in numerous American television series from The Simpsons to Saturday Night Live – Kandor denotes a kind of Utopia, a purely imaginary place, a possible but never actually realized version of a city (Kelley’s installation Kandor-Con of 2000, a kind of laboratory for a future metropolis, was also shown in Berlin, in an abandoned factory on Ackerstrasse). For Kandor is the phantom of a place in two senses: within the logic of the Superman story it is the miniaturized symbol of a traumatic loss; furthermore, since countless renderings of it exist in numerous comic strips, with each version being slightly different, its original appearance can no longer be accurately recalled.

Kelley subjects Kandor to adaptation and reinterpretation within the context of ‘repressed memory syndrome’, the popular mythology according to which the memory of traumatic events could well be completely blocked from the conscious (an idea originated by Freud in his early writings but later abandoned in preference for the repression of impulses theory).

[from Holger Liebs, frieze magazine, Issue 112 January-February 2008]

R. FIORE:

I don’t mean to portray Kirby as some kind of idiot savant.  He was a culturally aware individual in his working class autodidact way, and with such unsystematic learning there’s no saying what he was or wasn’t aware of.  In addition, he grew up during the infancy of mass culture and commercial fantastic literature, so classics that touch on the fantastic would be part of his knowledge.

DOUG HARVEY:

Mike’s and Jim Shaw’s work are both very informed by Kirby’s.

JEET HEER:

It does seem appropriate to be talking about Kirby’s Jewishness on Passover.

With all apologizes to Michael Chabon, Robert Fiore, and others I think the Golem theme can be overstated. The fact is Kirby, Lee. Siegel, Shuster and others lived as Jewish Americans at a time when public displays of Christianity were even more blatant and unapologetic than they are now. Which meant that Kirby, Lee, etc. would have been aware of many aspects of Christian culture and mythology just by going to the movies (Going My Way, King of Kings, etc.) There is a lot of evidence that Kirby in particular as a visual artist internalized many of the the standard visual tropes of Christianity. Take a look at the cover of Thor #127 (“The Hammer and the Holocaust”) and compare it to Michelangelo’s Pieta. Kirby’s Odin is clearly a counterpart to the Virgin while Thor is a Christ-figure. Kirby used Christian images and narratives with the same reckless aplomb that he used in appropriating Norse mythology in Thor or the pseudo-archeology of Erich von Daniken. For the artist, everything is fair game. More than anything else, Kirby’s gleeful larceny aligns him with the tradition of modern art.

JEET HEER:

The recent surge of brilliant comments from Sarah, Robert, Jonathan, and Doug have left me fairly agog, so I’m not sure where even to begin. A few scattered thoughts:

1. I think there is a gender divide on Kirby that we need to be explicit about. Sarah is right to see Kirby through the prism of her son’s love of superheros. Spending time with some a young niece and a cousin recently — a girl aged 4 and a boy aged 5 — I was struck by how her imagination was totally princess-centric while he was superhero mad. It occurred to me that the dominate Gods or animating spirits of modern childhood, for better or worse, are Jack Kirby (for boys) and Walt Disney (for girls). There sheer pervasiveness of Kirby’s cultural impact might be a barrier for appreciating him the way Doug wants, as an remarkable mark-making artist. But any coming to terms with Kirby has to acknowledge not just the historical context that Kirby worked in but also the way his images have circulated through the culture.

2. Kirby’s characters — especially after the mid-1950s — tend to be variously scaly, encrusted, earthy, leatherly, scarred, shape-shifting, unstable, chipped, masked, marbled or rocky. I think the psychological inquiry as why this is so is fruitful but I would also add there is a visual component to all this — it made Kirby’s pages livelier than more polished and smooth artists — I’m thinking here of Curt Swain or the other dominate figures at DC. There is something mysteriously alive on Kirby’s page, something that is by no means true of most superhero art.

3. I don’t know what to say about Jonathan’s Jung/Freud/Rand/Hubbard analysis except to acknowledge its brilliance and to add that like other popular artists — Hitchcock comes to mind — Kirby was familiar with at least the more popularized versions of therapeutic culture. As I pointed out before, Kirby did have Mister Miracle fight a creature called The Id. (See Mister Miracle #8). In general Kirby was a cultural sponge who managed to rework virtually everything he saw around him into his visual idiolect. I’ll also add that it makes perfect sense to see an affinity, as Jonathan does, between the DC classical heroes and the mythos of Dianetics — both after all came from the same pulp roots.

4. The Fortress of Solitude … now where have I heard that before?

DOUG HARVEY:

I feel I should make an aside about my own history with Kirby’s work, because it’s a little peculiar, and I want to avoid generalizing from my own peculiar experiences. I became aware of him at the time of the Fourth World comics – I’d read stuff before that, but wasn’t old enough to be interested in authorship.

I also immediately began cutting up and collaging his comics (fragments of his machinery, explosions, musculature, and sound effects, plus dialogue) into new works, which eventually evolved into a series of collage comic works that continue to this day (in fact I’ll be showing some at Jancar Gallery in Chinatown in LA opening May 19th – any of you in town I’d be happy to meet in the flesh) – so I’m very sympathetic to Hatfield’s emphasis on semiotic analysis, albeit from a formalist practice-based perspective rather than an academic critical one. [For more on Doug Harvey's art see here.]

I became deeply interested in Kirby’s work, and began reading back issues (thanks to a couple of older collector friends) and collecting new stuff as it was released. I was, and remain, a big fan of the reprinted 50’s alien monster stories in Where Monsters Dwell which struck me as very modern in their stripped-down hypnotic repetitiveness. I stuck with him through Kamandi, The Demon, and OMAC, but I rapidly started losing interest with The Eternals and 2001.

This also marked the end of my interest in mainstream comics, more or less, and in the superhero genre – though I’d like to point out that I had finished with the boyhood will to power fantasy phase (or whatever) by the time I was 8 or so. I don’t identify with the embarrassment and defensiveness many comic fans exhibit regarding the genre. But I did feel at the time (and though I haven’t delved much into subsequent iterations, stand by this assessment) that it reached an organic peak with the Fourth World and rapidly devolved into a self-conscious mannerism from which it has never recovered.

So when we talk about Kirby, for me we’re not just talking about an extraordinary artist who shaped and was shaped by commercial comic books for most of their history, but one who presided over (and arguably orchestrated) their death as a valid medium of artistic expression. This is why Kirby remains King and Frank Miller will never be more than an Executive Producer.

JEET HEER:

A few off-the-cuff thoughts:

1. Kirby’s influence on other visual artists is a story worthy of its own book and one that Hatfield only hints at. Within the comics field, this influence has been largely baneful, with epigonic imitators borrowing the surface elements of Kirby to create a synthetic house style (a house style which still undergrids most of the art published by Marvel and DC). Still, there have been creative appropriations and reworkings of Kirby — notably by Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez as well as Gary Panter.

2. I like the thought of the Fourth World work as the “organic peak” of the superhero genre. If, following Hatfield, we see Kirby as having an essentially apocalyptic imagination, then the Fourth World was the moment of revelation. What followed tended to post-apocalyptic in the literal sense (i.e. stories about what happens after the world has ended: Kamandi, Omac).

3. I’d be curious to know if you’ve ever revisited the 2001 material, which was widely panned when it came out but now has defenders who see it as the most extreme example of Kirby’s formalist experimentation (I think Christopher Brayshaw made that argument in The Comics Journal once).

GLEN DAVID GOLD:

“epigonic”

I’d never heard this word before, and I’m not ashamed to admit it.  I am SO going to use it in conversations with people who are better than I am.

DOUG HARVEY:

1. Gary Panter is the MAN!

2. Yes! I’ll have to think about that – revelatory ontological
apocalypse transmuting into literal materialist apocalypse. First
there is a mountain, then there is no mountain, then there’s a pile of
shit!

3. I haven’t. I should. Have they been reprinted? Mom threw them out.

JEET HEER:

About Kirby’s 2001 work, alas it hasn’t been reprinted (it’s virtually the only Kirby work from the 1960s and 1970s that has not been re-issued in the last decade). This is largely, as I understand it, for copyright reasons. The ownership of those comics — Sony, Arthur C. Clarke’s estate — is murky.

NINE: KIRBY AS BLAKE, BLAKE AS KIRBY

R. FIORE:

The interesting question here is not how Jack Kirby is like William Blake but how William Blake is like Jack Kirby.  He is both a poet and a painter.  More to the point, he is a printer, which in the 18th Century is to say a publisher.  While it isn’t mass art, he does develop a method of producing illuminated manuscripts in multiples.  Given his revolutionary principles the intent is to create art for an anonymous public rather than to seek patronage among the nobility.  The signal difference here is that he makes no attempt to make his art comprehensible to a general public; they would have to come to him on his terms, and they didn’t.  Robert Christgau coined the term semipopular art, meaning that which has every characteristic of popular art except popularity.  William Blake might be said to be the father of semipopular art.

Imagine a William Blake born in Lambeth in 1917.  During the war he’s producing graphics for the Ministry of Information.  He’s known in bohemian circles as a talented fellow but a bit of a roughneck and not quite the right sort — his father was in trade, after all.  After the war he picks up a couple of bob here and there drawing and writing for the comic weeklies.  Eventually he lands at The Eagle and then in the 1950s it’s Hampson, Bellamy, and Blake, and Blake is the one who writes his own scripts.  He gets talked to about the unorthodox religious ideas that get into his scripts.  Frequently.  You know he’s going to be one of the first people on Earth to take LSD.  And then as ’60s start to swing, which old stager do you suppose is poised with the means and motive to blow open the doors of perception . . .

JONATHAN LETHEM:

I love this.

DOUG HARVEY:

Sweet.

GLEN DAVID GOLD:

This really is beautiful.

I just saw a piece by Freeman Dyson in the New York Review of Books (hey, don’t worry, I just get it for the cartoons) that references Blake in discussing the difference between physics insiders, those with connections to the academic world, and outsiders — educated and intelligent people who have theories that are wonderful and not based on science.  Not schizophrenics (though the Museum of Jurassic Technology has a wonderful book on schizophrenics’ letters to astronomers), but people whose work relies more on a poetic soul than what’s experimentally viable.  The instant response is “crackpots” but Dyson doesn’t see it that way.  He keeps coming back to contemporaries’ opinions on Blake, and I read the comments below back to back with what he said, which was nice on this Matzo Bunny of a day.

DOUG HARVEY:

Was he reviewing this?

GLEN DAVID GOLD:

Yes he was.

I hope these come through. I only realized this comparison 5 minutes ago and I’m sorta gasping.

TEN: KIRBY AND MODERNISM

DOUG HARVEY:

I guess I won’t have time to get down all the thoughts I’ve had reading Hatfield’s book and the previous emails, but if I’m not already too late, I’ll put in my final two cents. As some one who is not immersed in comics culture, I really appreciate the balance of historical information, critical opinion, and academic contextualization Hatfield manages. I imagine it will go a long way to foster acceptance of the comic book medium in American academic circles, which is probably a good thing. I like that his more theoretical flights are in the realm of semiotics, as it’s the only sub-category of post-’70s critical theory that holds much interest for me, and certainly the most applicable to comics. I think it might have been better to elaborate on Charles Peirce (Chapter 1) even further along the narrative momentum of Kirby’s biography, and I think the Umberto Eco section (pp 126 – 128) could be expanded significantly, particularly to The Fourth World, and Kirby’s inability or unwillingness to wrap things up neatly.

One of the central and most challenging insights of Modernism is the recognition that — however much our minds and hearts desire it — life doesn’t happen in static, compartmentalized, narratively resolved units, and that any attempt to represent reality has to take this into account. The disintegration of The Fourth World through the proliferation of potentialities reminds me of the perpetually unraveling plot of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (from 1973), and also of the rapid evolution and disintegration of Free Jazz (Albert Ayler died in Nov 1970, when Superman’s Pal Jimmy Olsen #133 was on the stands), which took the vernacular conventions of its populist roots and subjected them to fragmentation, repetition, compression, and elongation – toward an infinitely receding horizon of resolution.

I was particularly impressed with the period of Fourth World titles when they were expanded to 48 or 52 pages to include reprints of Golden Age Simon/Kirby stories, and odd episodic sidebar stories like Young Gods from Supertown, which imposed an even more un-wrap-uppable cross-generational simultaneity on what was already an exponentially diverging rhizome of storylines. One of the generally forgotten major preoccupations of the early modernists (including Marcel Duchamp) was the possibility of giving material expression to time as “the fourth dimension” – my sense (and this may be a sign of my own mental problems – I also think that the Don Rickles clone “Goodie” Rickles was a brilliant character) is that Kirby shifted his own interest in this problem from the technological sublime Hatfield describes (“I’m actually witnessing a four-dimensional universe!” – Reed Richards, p 158) to the structure of the medium itself.

ELEVEN: KIRBY AND GENDER

SARAH BOXER:

Hi All — If it’s not too late…

Before the men’s locker closes up to me forever, I’d like to speak up as the token gal here. I’ve been truly honored to be allowed in as you all discuss manly and boyish stuff like Cap and the Fourth World (even if I have had, at times, to ride on my son’s coattails to do it). But now I have a little confession to make. Ahem.

The only bit of Kirby’s work that I actually even kind of halfway enjoy reading is the romance comics. I know. I know. I’m a hideous stereotype of my fair sex. Well, so be it. From reading Hatfield, I understand that these romances were the bread n butter of Kirby and Simon’s comic book business (before Kirby joined Marvel). So I’m not alone here. Many people who were repelled by other Kirby comics must have gobbled these romances up like candy. Sour candy. Superego candy. I see I’m using a lot of eating metaphors. It’s time for dinner…

Okay, now I’m back.

One appeal of the Simon and Kirby romances is that, as Hatfield observes, Kirby put a lot of his class anger into them. Look at the comic titled “Shame”. The woman who stars in this episode tries to pretend she comes from a high-born family in order to win her high-born man. She ignores her own low-class mother when she collapses in the street. In the end, the girl’s shame at rejecting her own family becomes stronger than her shame of her family. She trades one sort of shame for another. She goes back to her family and gets her man too.

The same message is pounded in over and over in the romances. Shame. Shame. Shame. (Here’s the plot of “The Perfect Cowboy”: Small-town girl falls for a smooth-talking big-time movie-star cowboy. But in the end she goes back to the boyfriend she grew up with. He’s like a comfy shoe. She never should have tried for a fancier shoe.)

These romances are period pieces; they are dated, in a way that Captain America is not. The figures remind me of something out of a Vogue pattern book. Different bodices. Different trim. Different moral high-grounds. They also look just like the kind of comic that Lichtenstein used to use (and maybe mock) in his paintings. (It’s hard to imagine Lichtenstein copying Cap or The Hulk.) The only variations are the different settings, different hair colors, different clothes, and the different variations of moral blindness: Why don’t you try on this kind of shame for a change?

I kept thinking of a line from Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz. “If I ever go looking for my heart’s desire again, I won’t look any further than my own backyard, because if it isn’t there, I never really lost it to begin with.”  Which actually makes no sense. But the moral is clear: Stick to your roots. Don’t strive. If the superheroes are Kirby’s id, these romances are his superego, his mother, his moral roots. (There’s something to be written about the mothers of cartoonists, but that’s for another day…)

These stories are dreadful in a way but also kind of wonderful. As I’ve noted before, one thing I find literally repellent about the Marvel superhero universe is the nauseating, clanking weight of each character’s history — the way these stories resemble soap operas. Soap operas for men. So it’s kind of ironic that one thing I particularly like about Kirby and Simon’s romances is that these too resemble soap operas, but in a different way. They aren’t heavy like soap operas. They are light like soap operas. The stars of the romances have no history. Without any background whatsoever, you can pop into them and pop out of them. Each woman is any-woman — spunky but tame, campy but prim, the girl next door with a sense of adventure. And like soap operas, they are trashy, compulsive
entertainment.

That’s it. I’ve weighed in as the token gal. It’s been fun hanging out in your locker room.

DOUG HARVEY:

I [heart] romance comics too!

TWELVE: KIRBY AND DITKO

R. FIORE:

Before we wrap there’s something I’m a little curious about.  Going in my assumption would have been that while Kirby was the more accomplished of the two, Steve Ditko would be considered essentially in the same league.  I would have seen them as rough-hewn talents who produced significant bodies of work in adventure comics in the period when newspaper comics were no longer hospitable to adventure — not that either was sufficiently genteel for newspaper comics in the best of times.  I assumed it was the consensus that the two were basically comparable.  But I note Jonathan Lethem speaking of “[T]he Fiore side of things (Kirby is “like” Steve Ditko, Stan Lee, Gil Kane, etc. . . .” in such a way as to imply (if I don’t misinterpret) that Kirby is on a higher plane.  Anyway, what I was wondering is, would the panel consider Kirby and Ditko to be peers or do you consider Kirby to be on another level altogether?

DOUG HARVEY:

Kirby’s a better visual artist. And while I love Mr. A, I find Ditko’s imagination to be somewhat more paranoiac and addicted to rationalization than Kirby’s more generous and open-ended vision.

DAN NADEL:

I just wanted to chime in here and thank everyone for such a great roundtable. I’m sorry to have been absent the last couple weeks — our newborn baby has consumed all my time (surprise!).

But, I can break long enough right now to say that I’d put Kirby above Ditko as an artist and writer. But I’d place Ditko ahead of Kirby as a uniquely observant cartoonist whose ability to imbue his characters with nuanced emotions (well, between 1960 and 1970, say) is hard to top. Also, Ditko’s psychedelia was more delicate (and way more influential) than Kirby’s, which I appreciate, though this is a minor point. Suffice to say that for scope, vision, and level of achievement, Kirby wins out. Ditko remains a fascinating story, though, and one that is mostly untold.

GLEN DAVID GOLD:

What Dan said (if I write a book about comics, it’s going to be called “what Dan said” except when he disagrees with me).

But also maybe this: I have framed on my office walls about six Jack Kirby pieces (that number keeps changing) and three Ditko Amazing Spider-Man pieces.  When collector folk come around, they react to one or the other of artists from nostalgia or aesthetics or narrative or something else.  My wife, however, hates Ditko.  She has a very good eye for abstract art and photography, and has led me many places I would never have gone.  When I asked her why she preferred Kirby (and she would probably dicker with the word “prefer,” as she’s more of a Lynda Barry/Edward Gorey type — she gets my interest in Kirby) she went to this page and told me exactly why it sucked:

She pointed out that unlike Kirby, Ditko doesn’t make allowances for how they eye travels from panel to panel.  The motion is chaotic and when you look at the page design as a whole, there’s a lot of interruption to the flow.  And even though Jack’s anatomy is often crazy, it makes sense emotionally.  She tapped the Goblin’s arm in panel 3 and pointed out that it makes no sense, and that unlike Kirby, there’s no hyper-realistic reason for it making no sense.  I had her read a few early ASM issues and she tossed the Essentials back with a shrug.  ”Dude is frightened of women.”  True.  Kirby wasn’t.  (He also, unlike every cartoonist I can think of, never drew porn. Even Romita did a nude Medusa.  Some of Kirby’s women are erotic, but there’s never as far as I can tell been a Kirby nude. Mebbe too big a kettle of fish to open here at the last minute, but I’ve always been curious about that.)

I think Ditko’s plotting, emotional engagement, humor, expressive gestures and overall weirdness make him interesting.  I’ve wondered how working with Stanton influenced him (I read Blake’s book but can’t remember that information too well).  I have a Ditko/Stanton piece that’s typical of theirs.  For six years, it looks like when Stanton drew his femmes fatales, Ditko drew the men being menaced and overwhelmed and whatnot.  Now there’s a division of labor.

BTW, speaking of nothing, I went to the Clowes show at the Oakland Museum last night. Holy smokes!  Has anyone ever noticed that guy is a good artist?  Because he is.

JONATHAN LETHEM:

It’s funny, because in my general thinking I always rate Ditko so high, but when I glance at pages now I tend to find myself thinking, “This must not be the best work, there must be something more consummate that I was thinking of” — Ditko’s style always seems “too early, he’s getting to where he wants to go but he’s not there yet” or “too late, he’s tightened up and is repeating himself,” but never reaching fulfillment. Still a master — paranoid, baroque, psychedelic, and inimitable, but being asked that question after dwelling for these past weeks on Kirby’s breadth and generosity and development and influence — even despite his identifiable limitations or sloppiness — it feels a bit like being asked, “Who’s the better band, the Rolling Stones or The Buzzcocks?” I mean, nothing against the Buzzcocks, I love ‘em. But.

JEET HEER:

I think the Rolling Stones/Buzzcocks comparison is fair enough. Ditko is one of the most interesting artists ever to work in mainstream comics but Kirby is a universe onto himself. Or to put it another way, Ditko is Harold Lloyd to Kirby’s Charlie Chaplin. It’s no knock on Lloyd — whose movies are all worth watching — to note that he’s not as universal and inescapable as Chaplin. Or Ditko is Ben Jonson and Kirby is Shakespeare. Or Ditko is the Three Stooges and Kirby is The Marx Brothers. Or maybe I should stop.

GLEN DAVID GOLD:

I just realized this: Unlike Ditko (and most of the other comic book artists you can compare to Kirby), when we think of Kirby we eventually say he’s like Dick or Blake or Miles Davis or Jimmy Stewart or Henry Darger or his work is like constructivism or futurism or iconography.  Something about Kirby makes us want to find an analogy for him and all the analogues seem to have big holes in them so far.  Could be why we’ve just don’t 24,000 words on him and I bet we could do 24,000 more.

CONCLUSION

JEET HEER:

Glen is of course right that this discussion could go on much longer. Nearly twenty years after Kirby’s death, the cartoonist still looms as large and nearly inexhaustible figure who continues to inspire both passion and resistance. I’m grateful to all the roundtable members. There have been many memorable moments in this discussion – not to pick favorites but I relished how Glen zeroed in on Kirby’s war years as a crucial biographical turning point, Jonathan’s ode to Kamandi #10, Robert’s fantasy about Blake living through Kirby’s era, Sarah’s insight into class shame as the engine of the Simon and Kirby romance comics, Dan’s focus on Boy’s Ranch as Kirby’s first big expansion of his artistic range, and Doug’s insistence on seeing Kirby as a visual artist. I also want to add that I personally found Hatfield’s book a great jumping off point for thinking about Kirby and comics in general. Virtually every page of the book offers a fresh way to think about comics as a visual storytelling form. Throughout the discussion, I’ve tried to play the devil’s advocate and occasionally give voice to the nay-sayers who find Kirby to be too bombastic an artist to be taken seriously. But one measure of an artist’s worth is the amount of intelligent commentary his or her work generates. By that criteria, Kirby’s reputation is in good shape and continues to grow.

There’s a bit in Quentin Tarantino’s original screenplay for Natural Born Killers in which Mickey and Mallory Knox, after being arrested, convicted, and incarcerated, reunite in the middle of a prison riot. They kiss. In his stage directions, Tarantino describes the moment like this:

This kiss has been a year coming. Now they’re doing something everybody told them they would never do again. For this moment they are the only two people on earth.

Natural Born Killers was directed by Oliver Stone, who substantially reworked the screenplay, to Tarantino’s initial dismay. (He ended up with “story by” credit.) In the final version, the stage directions become dialogue… in the mouth of tabloid journalist Wayne Gayle, the film’s real villain, who’s describing the moment in the most saccharine terms possible for the audience watching the riot live on TV at home. Yet at the same time Stone fades the dialogue down and cranks up the Cowboy Junkies version of “Sweet Jane,” Mickey & Mallory’s love theme. The camera swirls around them, the lights bathe them. An asshole tells us what a romantic moment this is supposed to be and thereby the moment is mocked; the film itself shows us how romantic it is and thereby the moment is revered.

In Night Business #4 there’s a scene which the reunited male and female vigilantes Johnny and Chase make love. (There’s no other way to describe it than to use that soap-operatic term.) Here and only here, Marra abandons his panels and their wide gutters and cramped figures for a two-page spread of repeating images of their bodies floating against a black background, moment overlapping moment. The captions read, in part:

…TIME IMPLODES… FOR A MOMENT ALL OF THEIR FEARS, OF DEATH, THE VIOLENCE SURROUNDING THEIR LIVES, THE BRUTALITY OF THE CITY, ARE ELIMINATED… THEY ARE THE ONLY TWO PEOPLE ON THE PLANET…

I always thought Stone was taking a swipe at Tarantino by taking the young writer’s romantic two-against-the-world clichés — delivered, mind you, to celebrate the love between two sociopathic spree killers — and putting them in the mouth of a venal, amoral hack. Winking reclamation of tough-guy b-movie tropes were Tarantino’s stock in trade then as now, but the winkiness of it had yet to develop into the self-critique in evidence in Death Proof and Inglourious Basterds. It took Oliver Stone, of all people, to properly puncture the po-facedness of the stage direction. Yet it also took Oliver Stone to take it seriously, to use lighting and editing and camerawork and music to acknowledge the very real power of the moment he was reminding us not to trust at the very same time.

That’s what I get from Marra over and over, and never more than in Night Business #4. In that sex scene, the woman’s breasts and buttocks are inflated to shining tautness like an erotic balloon animal, the man’s muscles and veins bulging like he was made entirely out of penises. She’s wearing a motorcycle helmet to hide disfiguring facial scars. He’s unconscious. They just got finished murdering several people who were in the middle of raping a prostitute as part of a gang initiation. It’s all deeply ugly and silly and reprehensible and preposterous. It’s also undeniably beautiful, featuring Marra’s best use of blacks to date — I’m having a hard time tearing myself away from looking at the shadows on Johnny’s cheeks and chest or Chase’s back and collarbones long enough to write this post — and paced with precisely the same manipulative expertise as the genre trash it’s pastiching. Throughout the issue, individual moments pop with genuine illustrative power; the action sequence’s blows connect with palpable impact, while standalone images have the weird beauty of all that Pettibon Marra’s been mainlining lately, or Basil Wolverton’s grim-faced spacemen, or the turned-away angst of ’50s romance comic covers. In Marra’s blood-soaked hands — and this is his best handiwork to date — you can have your cake and eat it too. You can have a heart, then turn around and break it.

In the meantime, Hernan Migoya (with translation help from Eric Reynolds) was kind enough to pen an obituary of his friend Josep Maria Berenguer, the legendary editor and publisher of El Vibora and the La Cupula. Bernguer sounds like a rare kind of publishing raconteur, and Migoya’s obit along with Eric’s tribute, make me wish I’d met him. Meanwhile, Sean T. Collins has a review of Benjamin Marra’s Night Business #4, concluding our Marra twofer, as promised yesterday by Tim.

Elsewhere around the way….

-The great Bob Levin writes about Willie and Joe: The WW II Years. This would be your essential comics read of the day.

-You can view the CSS comics anthology, The Cartoon Crier, right here.

-Robot 6 has a UK comics news round-up.

-Gavin Lees reports back from Stumptown and reviews a bunch of new small press titles.

-And Jen Vaughn has a MoCCA report over at The Beat.

A portrait of Berenguer by Spanish cartoonist Carlos Gambarte exclusively for TCJ. Gambarte published in El Víbora.

It’s Martí’s turn.

Famed Taxista (a.k.a. The Cabbie to American readers) creator Martí, a legendary survivor of the drug culture that killed many of his generation in 1980s Spain, walks up to the platform and gives his speech in front of the microphone to a grieving audience in one of the wide rooms of Barcelona’s main morgue:

“Sorry, I just found out about Berenguer’s death. I phoned him a couple of days ago, to ask him for another advance… But he outsmarted me this time!”

Everybody laughs. Berenguer’s son, Manel, then speaks to close the ceremony. His are the most anticipated words of the day…

“If we are taught that wine was Jesus’ blood, then Ballantine’s was my dad’s — so, in order to honor him, I’ve brought these for you to drink my father’s blood,” and then he opens a case of bottles of Scotch and proceeds, along with his sisters, to pour a glass for everyone present.

As you can see, Berenguer’s was not your typical funeral. He was not your typical publisher, either…

Josep Maria Berenguer was born in Barcelona in 1944. He was the son of a traditional bourgeois family, as most of the Catalan publishers are — Barcelona has for decades been the Spanish town with the strongest traditions in literature and comics publishing.

What probably made the difference with Josep Maria was his thirst to learn — he studied art, and from a very young age he travelled a lot during a time (under Franco’s dictatorship) when Spanish citizens were not often able to travel or encouraged to learn foreign languages, even if they came from rich families. Fluent in English and French, Josep Maria’s first merit was, no doubt, his cosmopolitism — he went to the U.S. and France and experimented with painting, photography and architecture, with a special focus on “geodesic domes.” In the ’70s he lived in a wonderful house in the suburbs of Barcelona, called La Cúpula (“The Dome”). This would also become the name of his publishing company.

Josep Maria connected with many young Spanish artists at the time over democratic (and, in some ways, hippie-anarchist) ideas and a not-so-controlled means — comics — to express their frustrations and lust for freedom. In those first years of Spanish Democracy (established in 1976 after Franco’s death), Josep Maria gathered this group of emerging, and somehow healthily subversive talent, and created a way for them to channel their creative spirit. El Víbora was born.

This underground comics magazine (subtitled as “Comix for Survivors”) began in 1979, with Berenguer receiving financial aid and expertise help by another veteran Catalan comics publisher — the charismatic Josep Toutain (founder of the international Catalan Communications agency). The staff of young artists curated every issue by general consensus during now-mythical editorial meetings at Berenguer’s La Cúpula house.

Max (Gustavo, Peter Pank), Gallardo & Mediavilla (Makoki), Nazario (Anarcoma), Mariscal (Los Garriris), and Pons (Sarita, Escalera de vecinos) are some of the comic legends that contributed every month to El Víbora’s explosion of visual and narrative talent. There were no limits, even if censorship was still in place in Spain — in fact, the original title Berenguer wanted for the magazine was GOMA 3 (the name of the particular explosive used in those times by the basque terrorist/nationalist organization ETA), but the censors refused to allow it.

El Víbora was an instant success; it soon reached 40,000 copies sold each month. In its pages, you could find social criticism, radical politics, hardcore sex, and positive hippie musings. During the early ’80s, it became a vindication of reality over commercial comics — Berenguer, like Gary Groth, didn’t like genre comics, even if in Spain there were few superheroes. But in Spain the medium itself was considered banal, something for kids — that’s why El Víbora’s impact was so strong. Berenguer’s goal with his magazine was to reflect Spanish reality — or, at least, satirize it. He achieved both very successfully.

He also introduced American underground cartoonists to Spain (Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, the Hernandez Bros) and, later, the most revered independent artists, too (Peter Bagge, Dan Clowes, Chester Brown), so La Cúpula’s relationship with Fantagraphics was always very close and warm.

The ’90s saw a decline in the creative spirit that fueled El Víbora. Times changed, and many excellent new El Víbora contributors (like Iron, Miguel Ángel Martín, Paco Roca, Rebollo) were not so politically or socially committed, and preferred to act more as entertainers with their comics (there were exceptions: Jaime Martín, Mauro Entrialgo and Álvarez Rabo, for example). Berenguer didn’t understand this new wave, with their light, almost cynical approach… and neither did the most faithful readers. El Víbora started a slow but steady loss of audience. This agonizing decline lasted more than a decade, until El Víbora’s final breath, in 2005.

But in the meantime, Berenguer still did some pretty amazing things — along with his partner and Production Chief, Emilio Bernárdez, he created Kiss Comix, a pornographic comics mag that they managed to publish in France and the U.S., as well as Spain. Much like Fantagraphics did with Eros Comix in the 1990s, the profits from Kiss funded a new line of independent comics (the Brut Collection) that helped to springboard new Spanish talents as Juaco Vizuete, Santi Arcas & Daniel Acuña, Quim Bou, Sequeiros, the Rau team, and many more.

After El Víbora’s death, La Cúpula had several bad years where many questioned its publishing strategies. Like in many countries, the time for magazines had passed in Spain (Kiss Comix folded a year ago, after a 20-year run), and there was a lack of scouting ability in the company. But with the coming of the “graphic novel” as the most appreciated format in comic shops, La Cúpula found its way again, publishing new work as well as repackaging old material from its impressive catalogue in marvelous new editions. So, we still expected a few more quality professional years from Josep Maria.

His illness was sudden and he died after a few months, on April 23^rd. He didn’t suffer much. He was very much loved by all of the Spanish professionals in the comics field, though he had had his fights with most of them due to his strong convictions and sometimes stubborn opinions.

All in all, he was a very good person. He had a wonderful freedom of mind, especially for a product of the ’70s from an obscurantist country, as Spain was in those days.

He has been, unquestionably, the most relevant underground Spanish publisher in the history of comics.

I would add, “God bless his soul,” but I am sure God wouldn’t; and, anyway, Josep Maria wouldn’t allow him to either. So I’ll just say thanks to you, Josep Maria, for blessing our lives with your friendship.

Hernán Migoya was editor-in-chief for Ediciones La Cúpula and El Víbora from 1992 to 1998.

Thanks to Eric Reynolds for the translation assist.

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So yeah, I teased you all last week with art that kind of worked in the same manner as Katsuhiro Otomo’s, and now we see the man himself, via DJ Teck * Morning Attack, a new eight-page color comic Otomo created for the Japanese artist magazine Geijutsu Shincho as a centerpiece to an 83-page(!) feature on the artist its the April 2012 issue, which I just happened to obtain from the Kinokuniya bookstore in Manhattan prior to attending this year’s MoCCA festival.

This is not to be confused with Otomo’s upcoming period shonen series, his big return to longform comics after two decades of doing other stuff; the Geijutsu Shincho story is a special, akin to Otomo’s framing sequence to the 1987 theatrical anime anthology Robot Carnival, in that it depicts the arrival of a colorful mechanical intruder — here a guy in a happy mecha suit broadcasting peppy English-language phrases above its head — with the result being a colorful annihilation of an indigenous people. One might suspect a certain critique of foreign adventurism in the suicide-style explosion depicted above, and that would be in keeping with the artist’s point of view; active since 1973, Otomo was part of a wave of Western-influenced artists that challenged the traditional means of manga creation, but his idiosyncratic approach does not extend to any particular affinity for Western politics, as his Akira vividly demonstrates.

This is from 1980; excuse the fuzziness, but Geijutsu Shincho is bound like it’s meant to stop a bullet. One of the great things about its long Otomo feature — there’s texts from a variety of authors, all in Japanese, of course — is the scads of art samples from the first ten years of Otomo’s career, which is to say everything prior to Akira, save for the 1980-81 esper mayhem serial Domu: A Child’s Dream. Part of Otomo’s idiosyncrasy is that he’s apparently disinterested in seeing any of his earlier work presented in English, and so all we can read of his copious short stories and visual experiments is collected in the 1994/95 Mandarin Paperbacks/Random House Australia release of Memories, a tie-in to an(other) anime anthology (and not to be confused with the 1992 Epic Comics edition of Memories, which only contains the title story). It’s a shame, really – wouldn’t you want to read 1982′s Boogie Woogie Waltz, just going by the visual departure of the cover art?

Oh, but I understand such hypothetical releases would be the the stuff of art comics kids and older-school otaku who remember Studio Proteus and “video comics”; as I’ve said before, Otomo doesn’t seem to carry a lot of credit with today’s manga readers or anime viewers. The newer, younger styles have outpaced him, though even a youth-friendly publisher like Viz has maintained its Viz Signature and SigIKKI lines of older-skewing books, many of the latter culled from the monthly Shogakukan seinen anthology IKKI, the June ’12 issue of which I also happened to pick up.

Of its 440 pages, 8 are in color, including:

This is one half of a double-page spread for Sunny, the present serial by the great Taiyō Matsumoto, just now up to its second collected edition in Japan. It’s tempting to see the Tekkonkinkreet creator as the inverse of Otomo, in that the younger artist works constantly at new manga, and wields a very brushy, sweeping, calligraphic style that evokes classical Japanese art.

However, both Otomo and Matsumoto share an individualism, eschewing the heavy use of art assistants, for the most part, to chase their personal visions. If the former had his days of glory in North America, though, the latter talent has proven to be a harder sell, despite the affections some circles hold for him. Tekkonkinkreet only broke through after multiple publication efforts and a high-profile anime film adaptation, and while I personally consider Viz’s 2009 publication of GoGo Monster to have been the best domestic comics release of that year, it was met in manga/anime circles with varying degrees of coolness, and some outright mockery; I seriously doubt sales were very strong, and I don’t expect to see anything of its sort released again from a ‘mainstream’ manga publisher in the immediate future.

And yet, despite it all, I am reminded that another world of comics exists, a popular, commercial world where artists toil on long-established properties in anonymity. Yet this too is not without its charms — and its difficulties in translation — as demonstrated by my childhood imaginary friend, super-assassin Golgo 13:

Such class and economy! It is my ritual, every MoCCA, to shell out the five bucks and change for the most recent issue of Big Comic (“Comics for Men”), and to see in its 330 or so pages what Golgo 13 is doing; he has always been doing something, in every single issue, since his strip debuted in 1969. Yet Golgo 13 is a creator-owned property, still maintained by early gekiga artist Takao Saito, age 75.

But the credit you’ll see on Golgo 13 is “Saito-Pro,” indicating that a production company of hirelings has been maintained — as is part of Saito’s regular process — to actually produce a considerable amount of the content on the page; in Saito’s case, this probably means everything but the characters’ faces, if not everything full stop. Hence, the dizzying effect of those perfect skyscrapers, a staple of the feature, and almost certainly among the dedicated job duties of (let’s say) Saito Pro Functionary #73, a guy or gal specializing in drawing background materials, probably from copious photo reference and file clippings.

Yet this is a tradition of quality, so you find sealed inside Golgo 13 a very direct, old-fashioned respect for storytelling clarity – a sobriety imposed by studio regulation. Even compared to the other middle-aged man-targeted Big Comic features — a veterinary serial, samurai and crime dramas, fishing, cooking (lots of cooking) — the Saito Pro work is dignified, though it is a dignity of people performing assigned work, of filling roles. Not everybody is going to call themselves a “creator” here, and fewer still will be profiled in a magazine, and here, perhaps, we see a fundamental disconnect between the searching, Western-informed aesthetic of Otomo and his predecessors, though Matsumoto demonstrates qualities of both: a continuing dedication to solitude and classicism, and the perils, I guess, of translation into foreign comics preferences, as Golgo 13 too has rarely found much of a place among English-translated manga.

And so I continue to peer onto these shelves, when I really should be downtown.

***

PLEASE NOTE: What follows is not a series of capsule reviews but an annotated selection of items listed by Diamond Comic Distributors for release to comic book retailers in North America on the particular Wednesday, or, in the event of a holiday or occurrence necessitating the close of UPS in a manner that would impact deliveries, Thursday, identified in the column title above. Not every listed item will necessarily arrive at every comic book retailer, in that some items may be delayed and ordered quantities will vary. I have in all likelihood not read any of the comics listed below, in that they are not yet released as of the writing of this column, nor will I necessarily read or purchase every item identified; THIS WEEK IN COMICS! reflects only what I find to be potentially interesting.

***

SPOTLIGHT PICKS!

Kiki de Montparnasse: And what better way to begin this week’s slightly abbreviated tip sheet than with a tome from MoCCA exhibitor SelfMadeHero, a UK publisher only now seeing its 2011 English translation of a 2007 Casterman release from writer José-Louis Bocquet (also recently of Drawn and Quarterly’s The Adventures of Herge) and artist Catel Muller distributed to Diamond-serviced North American comic book stores? It’s 416 pages devoted to the life of the early 20th century Parisian artist’s muse, winner of the audience-awarded Essentiel FNAC-SNCF at Angoulême 2008 (the book, not the muse). Reviewed by Hayley Campbell at this site; $24.95.

Fallen Words: This, in contrast, was a proper MoCCA debut, being publisher Drawn and Quarterly’s sixth and newest release from Yoshihiro Tatsumi, a 264-page collection of very old stories adapted to comics from the oral tradition of rakugo. Apropos of nothing, chance and circumstance may have designated Tatsumi the official representative of the mid-century gekiga style for North American observation, but hints of the style’s influence can be found elsewhere. For example, Discotek Media recently released a new R1 dvd edition of Panda! Go Panda!, a 1971-72 series of theatrical shorts from the eventual founders of Studio Ghibli, and while Hayao Miyazaki’s character designs for the main cast are basically in keeping with the Ghibli ‘look’ (in a foundational sense), some of his periphery characters carry themselves in a rougher manner:

Seriously! Is that cop not Tatsumi as fuck? In an old-timey anime kinda way? Am I seeing things? Maybe Discotek’s June release of the contemporaneous and more evidently older-skewing manga-derived Lupin III television series — Miyazaki’s directorial debut, albeit in collaboration with Isao Takahata — will provide a missing link; $19.95.

–

PLUS!

The Bulletproof Coffin: Disinterred #4 (of 6): This is the ‘cut-up’ issue of my favorite superhero title at present, David Hine’s & Shaky Kane’s better-than-the-original sequel to their Image-published satire of comic book consumption, now focused harder than ever on the act of reading and falling into comic book genre narratives. I believe 84 individual drawn panels were composed discreetly by Kane, then assembled at random into 21 four-panel grids, representing fragments of ‘lost’ comics from the world of the series, and then scripted-over by Hine. Correct me if I’m wrong; I could be. The creators promoted their effort via a gala dis-assembly of a copy of Stan Lee’s & Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four #2, reactions to which reminded me of the time Alan Moore exhorted readers of Promethea to physically pull apart the final issue of that series as participation in a ritual act of destruction/creation, the psychological effect upon myself being an odd relief of my completest tendencies. Of course, if everyone just bought two copies… Preview; $2.99.

Dial H #1: Actually, this is a pretty busy week for superhero stuff, and chief among several series debuts is writer China Miéville’s revival of the Dave Wood/Jim Mooney concept of short-lived superpowers spurting from a mystery dial. The project is ongoing, and drops in close proximity to Miéville’s imminent prose novel Railsea. The artist is Mateus Santolouco, and the (primary) cover is by Brian Bolland; $2.99.

X-O Manowar #1: Unless I am gravely mistaken, this is the first release from a revived Valiant Entertainment, bearing the name of the once hugely successful ’90s alternative-mainstream publisher to continue exploitation of the various properties that remain so held. It is notable here for the presence of writer Robert Venditti, of various Top Shelf sci-fi projects such as The Surrogates and The Homeland Directive. The artist is Cary Nord. Preview; $3.99.

The Boys #66: Noteworthy as the beginning of the final storyline for Garth Ennis’ & Darick Robertson’s superheroes-as-weapons-of-a-hegimon worldbuilding playground/Bronze Age-y spandex soap opera, the unevenness of which is exemplified here by the now-presumed absence of Robertson from active interior participation (Russ Braun fills in, as he often does). Unfortunately, the catch-as-catch-can state of the series’ art may yet go down as its most convincing evocation of the present superhero scene. Preview; $3.99.

Fury MAX #1: Meanwhile, Ennis begins a new Marvel project under the Mature Readers MAX banner, which appears to be reserved specifically for his presence these days. The artist is Goran Parlov, which suggests a series set in the world of Ennis’ The Punisher MAX, if likely the more comedic zone of the Barracuda side-story. Nick Fury, that pliable Lee & Kirby creation, will defend America for an indeterminate length as of this writing, though be aware that issue #2 should be out later this month, and issue #4 will apparently involve the assassination of Fidel Castro, or perhaps a good faith attempt, or certainly at minimum an attempt; $3.99.

Action Comics #9: Kind of a three-in-one, multi-story, possibly standalone installment of Grant Morrison’s ongoing Superman project, concerning in some part the President Superman character from toward the end of Final Crisis and sporting another special appearance by the welcome Gene Ha. Small sample; $3.99.

Skeleton Key Color Special: Dark Horse has been quietly but steadily slipping out comic book compilations of shorts from its newest Dark Horse Presents anthology, and this particular exhibit constitutes a revival for an Andi Watson concept dating back to the mid-’90s with SLG, concerning a girl with a key that unlocks alternate dimensions, and the fox spirit that accompanies her. Drawn in a very cute monochrome color manga-ish style. Preview; $3.50.

Spirit World: And here’s some choice Jack Kirby reprints, specifically a 108-page hardcover compilation of materials composed for DC’s 1971 entry in the b&w comics magazine sweepstakes — intended by Kirby to be a slick color affair, which the publisher found to be too costly — chock-full of drawings, collage, fumetti and Sergio Aragonés, at least for its sole extant issue. The remaining stock was eventually distributed in color to issues of the anthology titles Weird Mystery Tales and Forbidden Tales of Dark Mansion, and I believe that’s the format it’ll be seen in here. History; $39.99.

Tangles: A Story About Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me: But it’s not all fantasy, no – here’s a new entry on the comics memoir scene, a Skyhorse Publishing edition of a 2010 Canadian graphic novel from artist Sarah Leavitt, concerning the affects of disease on her family; $14.95.

Heavy Metal Vol. 36 #2 (May 2012): Finally, here is the official 35th Anniversary issue of the newsstand Eurocomics institution, reprinting the original Jean-Michel Nicollet cover to 1977′s issue #1 with three variant ‘cover’ versions. Inside we are promised work by the late Moebius, along with François Boucq, Miguelanxo Prado, Tanino Liberatore, Paolo Serpieri, Matthias Schultheiss (haven’t seen him in a while), Alfonso Azpiri, Massimiliano Frezzato, and others. I am unaware if any (or all) of this content is reprinted, but a lineup like that does encourage some perusal; $7.95.

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Ah, there we go. Another column for the books. Thank you, and good morning.

Joe McCulloch stops in with his weekly roundup of the most interesting-sounding new comics. And longtime readers of Joe’s will be happy to see the return of one of his more idiosyncratic enthusiasms.

Finally, Matt Seneca reviews the latest from cartoonist Benjamin Marra, Lincoln Washington: Free Man. Another writer for us, Sean T. Collins, independently sent in a review of a different Marra comic that we will run very soon. Marra’s work is very appealing on different levels, but it is very interesting and somewhat surprising to me how uniformly positive and celebratory the response to Marra’s work has been. I don’t think I have yet read a negative review! I’m not trying to criticize the books myself—I have enjoyed all of the comics by him I’ve read (which doesn’t include the title under review today)—but Marra’s work touches on a lot of extremely sensitive issues, and it’s not hard to imagine a less sanguine reaction. Maybe it’s just that the kind of people who read these kinds of comics are generally speaking also the kind of people who are hard to offend. Though Johnny Ryan … And here the suicide note ends in a scrawl.

The first MoCCA festival I’ve missed in something like a decade was held in New York this weekend, and from all reports I’ve heard, went pretty well. One panel I regretted missing was this one featuring local retailers, in which Comics Journal columnist Tucker Stone revealed that Bergen Street Comics was not planning to stock Before Watchmen. Which seems like a pretty gutsy move. I wonder if any other stores will follow suit.

And now for a few quick hits:

The Paris Review excerpts Kelly Gerald on Flannery O’Connor, cartoonist.

Moto Hagio has become the first manga artist to receive the Japanese Medal of Honor.

Noel Murray interviews Guy Delisle, and Michael Cavna interviews Marjane Satrapi.

Rob Clough reports on a recent Joe Sacco appearance at Duke.

And Françoise Mouly selects and discusses ten of her favorite rejected New Yorker covers, including the R. Crumb gay marriage image that made a bit of news last year.

Well, I finished the Hatfield book so I wanted to circle back to one of Jeet’s earlier questions and then pose another one.

Jeet asks:

4. A superhero cartoonist or a master genre mixer? Perhaps the most conservative aspect of Hatfield’s account is his placing of Kirby within the framework of superhero comics. We’re given only a cursory account of the Simon and Kirby era (when his major genre was, surprisingly, romance comics but also included boys adventure, westerns, war comics, science fiction, horror and many others). The bulk of Hatfield’s book is taken up with Kirby’s work for Marvel in the 1960s and DC in the 1970s, when he re-invented and re-invigorated the superhero genre. Again, this approach seems like common sense but I’m wondering seeing Kirby through the prism of the superhero genre doesn’t diminish his originality as a genre mixer. Here’s another way of seeing Kirby: during the long apprenticeship of the Simon and Kirby years, he mastered the rules for the many genres he worked in and then in the 1960s he confidently started to splice these genres together to create a new meta-genre that was nominally superhero comics but actually had a much wider scope. Thus the Fantastic Four can be seen as a mixture of Challengers of the Unknown style exploration stories, Sky Masters-style science fiction, monster comics (the Thing),  romance and soap opera (the Reed-Sue-Submariner love triangle), space opera (Galactus and the Silver Surfer), a repurposing of older superhero and science fiction ideas (the stretching man in the tradition of Plastic Man, the human Torch, a character who can turn invisible), and many other genres. Hatfield touches on Kirby as a genre-mixer on page 22 arguing that the superhero comic in Kirby’s hand was a “mega-genre” but I’m wondering if more can’t be said about this. To put it another way, Hatfield describes the Fourth World books as “the climax of [Kirby’s] career in superheroes” (p. 143) but, thought these comics have superheroes in them, I’m not sure if they are superheroes or some new genre, a mutant cosmic fantasy.

Well, CH does a good job of explaining what Kirby did to transform the superhero comic by radically broadening its scope via his expansion-based ideas. He holds onto the superhero category, which makes sense since that was the genre which Kirby was exploding. We could call it SF or something else, but really no genre really can lay claim to the Fourth World work or the ’80s work. It’s just too deeply itself. So, Jeet, I think it occupies its own space, but I’m not sure where, aside from inventing another category to slot it into, we can go. CH is coming to the Fourth World work after calling FF a more or less SF book, which works for me, and his close readings of the Fourth World material don’t seem to be hindered by superhero expectations, so… maybe it’s OK.

Anyhow, Hatfield’s most interesting and impassioned idea about Kirby comes midway through the book (p. 145) when he discusses the “technological sublime”, which in Kirby’s case meant a quasi-romantic awareness of, and awe at, the ineffable. This feeling then bolsters Kirby’s explorations into “soft” SF futurism, lead by narrative drawing (as opposed to prose exposition) (p. 153). It’s a very good bit and one that Hatfield embroiders on for the remainder of the book. By the end, Kirby emerges as a frustrated visionary — stymied by his medium, but continually trying to ask the big questions.

But the unfortunate thing about focusing so much on the superhero stuff is that CH only gets to touch on something really important: Kirby’s earthiness. On page 151, CH qualified Kirby’s Futurism: “Kirby, though his imaginings often carried the whiff of something touchingly Old World, Mittleeuropean and folkloric, was an avid forecaster of the future.” That “though” seems like a mistake. Kirby’s roots are in that Old World as experienced by Depression-era boy. Those tales, which even us suburban Jewish boys grow up with, are pretty well ingrained. This goes towards the previously mentioned “Gothic” nature of Kirby’s imagination, but also helps account, I think, for a lot of the (sometimes goofy) humanity of the work, not to mention the constant attention paid to villagers, hills,  barons, kingdoms, etc. It’s all the stuff you get as a lower-class European Jew.

Which is why I do think its regrettable (but, understandable, as it IS a tangent when you’re building an argument based on world building, Futurism, and awe) that CH omitted any real analysis of the Western and Romance comics. Kirby’s West is the the West of someone who never so much as visited before drawing those comics, and the West that you see in, for example, the German and Italian visions of it in pulps and films. It’s the great expansive place, somewhere beyond the beyond. To me, Boy’s Ranch (1950-51) is Kirby’s first great act of visual/poetic/moral expansion. The art does what CH discusses — leading the way through open description and a sense of scale that dwarfs the actors, and a story like Mother Delilah hints at what’s to come, with its riffs on parenthood, moral ambiguity and tragedy. I guess what I’m saying is that Kirby’s thematic and artistic expansion happened earlier, an in a genre that would very much appeal to a Jewish boy from the Lower East Side — it was the ultimate America. Alongside that stuff is the Romance work, also looked at only briefly in the book, and which was an enormous part of Kirby’s output.

Finally, did anyone else find it odd that the book ends with The Eternals? In his first chapter (I think), CH notes his own ambivalence to the 1980s work — Captain Victory and Silver Star being the two best books — but to me those works are key to Kirby’s oeuvre. As Glen noted about Silver Star, they look back on Kirby’s earlier themes and visually tilt towards the abstract. They kind of remind of me of an exhibition I just saw at Pace of the last two years of Jean Dubuffet’s painting career. He’d eliminated figuration and the paintings are just loose grids of line-based color. Beautiful, core works. Not as good as his earlier work, sure, but still very much his own, and an extension of his language. For a book as focused on visual language as CH’s, it seems a little strange to leave out his subject’s final, frequently beautiful, and certainly innovative works.

GLEN DAVID GOLD:

[Dan Nadel wrote:] To me, Boy’s Ranch (1950-51) is Kirby’s first great act of visual/poetic/moral expansion. The art does what CH discusses — leading the way through open description and a sense of scale that dwarfs the actors, and a story like Mother Delilah hints at what’s to come, with its riffs on parenthood, moral ambiguity and tragedy. I guess what I’m saying is that Kirby’s thematic and artistic expansion happened earlier, an in a genre that would very much appeal to a Jewish boy from the Lower East Side — it was the ultimate America.

Very nicely said.  Whenever Kirby got a chance to work with continuing characters (even if no sort of “continuity” was built), it seems like his landscapes broadened.  My limited knowledge of the romance comics is that the stories are surprisingly emotionally complex but the illustrations are (deliberately?) wooden, as if he was working for some reason with a finite number of poses, with characters framed conservatively.  He seemed freer with the western stories.

FIVE: SUPERHEROES AND THE EMBARRASSMENTS OF COMICS

R. FIORE:

Haven’t seen the purported book we’re discussing yet, but here are my reactions to the questions posed:

The quote from Gary Groth raises an interesting point about the ethics of criticism.  The reticence he expresses about wholeheartedly endorsing the work of Jack Kirby to the general public stems from the irreducibly juvenile nature of the straight-faced superhero adventure story.  A reader who appreciates comic art and has no particular aversion to the straight-faced superhero adventure story can’t help but appreciate Kirby’s work.  Within his particular field he’s Beethoven — always keeping in mind the relative level of artistic achievement of comic books and classical music.  Part of his reticence — and mine, for that matter — about endorsing Kirby wholeheartedly to the general public is in knowing that not everyone shares this conditional acceptance of the genre, but another part is simply the fear of appearing childish.  It’s less a matter of what he or I think as “What would the Goyim think?”  Thomas M. Disch once wrote an essay called “The Embarrassments of Science Fiction” about how the discomfort the childish aspects of the genre cause its more artistically ambitious practitioners.  The embarrassments of comic books are the same thing with gold stars and oak leaf clusters.  The thing is, when you have arrogated to yourself the role of publicly judging the work of artists you have an obligation to honestly acknowledge the quality of an artists work without any thought of how that acknowledgment might be embarrassing to yourself.

The last half of the 20th century saw a popular insurrection against shame as a tool for maintaining social order. It consisted of people refusing to feel shame for anything from sexual proclivities to continuing to read comic books into adulthood.  People of Gary’s and my vintage are willing to openly discuss our enthusiasm among those we know will share it but less so among the general population. We were not ashamed of ourselves but could still imagine being shamed by the opinions of others. The difference these days is you’ll have serious journalists like Ta‑Nehisi Coates, or for that matter literary novelists like Jonathan Lethem, talking about their enthusiasm for comics in front of God and everybody. It strikes us as a bit odd.

The thing that might seem curious to the innocent observer is that Gary would choke on Kamandi but swallow Donald Duck. When we speak of Carl Barks we speak of an artist who subordinated himself a set of characters and a style dictated by a corporate entity, as opposed to Kirby, who as much as anyone invented his idiom himself.  For those familiar with the respective works there’s no mystery to it at all.  It is a curious truth that much of what commends itself the attention of an adult reader in commercial comics was created not only for children but for pre-adolescent children. The quality in Barks’ work that leads you to recommend it without reservation to any open minded reader, beyond his absolute mastery of the medium, is sophistication.  You find the same sophistication in the work of John Stanley. For all his excellencies I don’t know that you would call Kirby’s work sophisticated.  His appeal is predominantly to the senses, and when he has ideas to express they tend toward the crackpot.  Moreover, the emotions and motivations expressed by the anthropomorphic animals of Barks’ stories have an objective correlative with the emotions and motivations of real people.  The operatic emotions expressed in Jack Kirby’s comics apply only to the godlike creatures who have them.  They are in the final analysis stories about characters with attributes that are impossible battling menaces that don’t exist.  While you have little reservation recommending Carl Barks or John Stanley or for that matter Jack Cole to a civilian as it were, you know that in order to engage with Kirby the reader has to be willing to sign on to the superhero idea.

It’s misleading to apply criteria developed for fine art to art produced to make a buck. In such art the desire to make a buck is the lead melody and personal expression of the artist is the counter-melody, which may harmonize or be discordant. In this type of art having one single artist to point to as the author for instance is not necessarily a great imperative.  Superhero comics are an art form that exists primarily because people want to buy it.  This is unlike for instance the comics of Harvey Pekar, which exist only because Harvey Pekar wanted them to, and operated at a loss for many years.  By now it’s quite likely that if superhero comics ceased to be viable commercially people would still want to create them, but as they are still commercially viable there’s no reason that the commercial form won’t dominate.

The only reason superhero comics exist in the first place is that at a certain point in history children were given the privilege of deciding what kind of stories they were told, in books they bought with their personal pocket money.  This isn’t something that occurs in societies that allow child labor, where the child’s earnings will all go towards their families’ bare subsistence, but in more affluent societies, where children are given spending money by their parents, or spend the proceeds from what work they are still allowed to do for their own amusement.  These child-engendered artistic products appear through a process of trial and error, which in effect goes something like:

“Would you like this?”

“Unh unh.”

“Would you like this?”

“Unh unh.”

“How about this?”

“Maybe.  Do another and we’ll see.”

“And this one?”

“Yeah!  I’ll take a lot of those!”

Once the child-generated thing the superhero comic book exists in the market its appeal can spread to other readers, but it’s not something adults would have generated for themselves.  As time goes on the target audience shifts to the oldest one that is likely to entertain the superhero idea.

The adults who initially come to produce this art might be craftsmen, or they might be technicians, or they might be hacks, but for some of them the material engages their creativity.  The superhero comic engages the creativity of a Jack Kirby because it incites his artistic ambitions.  It engages the creativity of a Jack Cole because he sees what is intrinsically comic about the concept.  (If Jack Kirby is Beethoven, Jack Cole is Fats Waller.)  It should be noted that while Art Spiegelman has no use for Kirby, he does have a use for Cole, and Kirby and Cole were in the same business, the business of selling comic magazines to children for pocket change.  By the second generation, the one that comes after Kirby, you have cartoonists and writers drawn from the ranks of superhero comics enthusiasts, and their pursuit of the form comes naturally.

It ought to be remembered that the purpose of the “collaboration” is to maximize the number of pages produced, and when he got paid by the page Kirby had a practical interest in this system himself.  What occurs to me is that most of the collaborating takes place after the work has left Kirby’s hands.  As I understand the process, Lee and Kirby would discuss the basic plot orally, Kirby would pencil the entire story by himself, then hand it in for inking and writing and lettering the captions and dialog.  As such Kirby is in the position of the director of a silent movie who improvises the entire story from a rough scenario, if the director played all the roles himself.  Stan Lee is in the position of the writer of the title cards.  The caveat here is how much input Lee actually had at the plotting stage, and since that’s become a point of contention and there’s no written evidence, by now there’s no way to know.  What we do know is that since Lee was the paymaster, he would have as much input on editorial direction as he wanted.  Since we have a body of work that Kirby did afterwards without Lee, we can infer that input by comparing the two.  On balance, however, I think we can say that on balance, creatively speaking Lee was essentially Kirby’s caddy.  A caddy might provide direction and advice, but the golfer plays the game.

This doesn’t render Lee’s contribution insignificant.  The bane of the comic book had always been lousy writing, against which not even an Alex Toth could prevail.  As editor Lee broke this age-old curse by writing all the captions and dialog himself, or nearly so. Having Kirby and Ditko to cook up the stories allowed him to do more captions and dialog in the same way that having someone else do the inking allowed Kirby and Ditko to draw more pages.  Lee could keep things light while laying it on thick, and if he spent much of his time telling you how much fun you were having, he never forgot that fun is what it was supposed to be.  If you watch recordings of Johnny Carson on the old Tonight Show you see that the key to his success was his knack for communicating enthusiasm, of signaling by his reactions that the spectacle before you was the wildest thing you’d seen in your life.  Stan Lee brought a similar quality to comic book writing, and I don’t know if anyone else in the business had the brass to pull it off in the same way.  More to the point, he was better at it than Kirby, whose captions and dialog, while serviceable, were flat and clumsy by comparison.

I would have to agree with Hatfield that superhero comics are the heart and soul of Kirby’s achievement.  The thing that truly engaged his creativity was the titanic struggle between powerful beings, the opera on paper.  While his superhero comics were enriched by what he learned working in other genres, they were ingredients and not the main dish.  To put it bluntly, if Kirby’s career had consisted of everything he did besides superhero comics I don’t think any of us would be talking about him.  Ever hear of Jack Kirby, did some wild monster comics in the ’50s?  Invented the romance comic.  Really?  Hmm.

Furthermore, I believe it was not until Kirby, Ditko, and Lee remade the genre that the straight-faced, straight-ahead action-oriented superhero comic became anything more than lucrative, lousy things that kids liked.  The superhero comics that had artistically distinguished themselves before that, Plastic Man and Captain Marvel, had been send-ups in whole or in significant part.  It wasn’t until Kirby came into his own that the superhero story in earnest truly entered the realm of good comics.

JEET HEER:

Both Dan Nadel and Robert Fiore have posted some meaty comments, which I wanted to respond to and perhaps use to spur further discussion.

As Dan notes, it’s fair enough for a study of Kirby to focus on his superhero work. For better or worse, that’s the genre that  Kirby is most associated with and the lasting repository of his reputation. When Kirby started drawing comics in the late 1930s, the superhero quickly became a popular but slightly disreputable off-shot of the pulps and adventure cartooning (fusing together the rip-roaring style of Roy Crane with the mystery-man tradition of the Scarlett Pimpernel, the Lone Ranger, and the Shadow). But as Hatfield persuasively argues, when Kirby returned to the superhero in the 1960s, he not only brought with him the lessons learned from other genres like romance and horror but also transformed the genre by giving it more cosmic ambitions.

And now nearly twenty years after Kirby’s death, the superhero has almost become the default mode of American popular entertainment, as seen not just in countless video games and Hollywood movies but also in the way that characters from other genres (I’m thinking here of the James Bondian super-spy or the Sherlock Holmesian detective or the Harry Potter-esque wizard) are transformed into superheroes.

The cultural triumph of the superhero, for good or ill, wouldn’t have happened without Kirby’s crucial reinvigoration and expansion of the genre in the 1960s.

Having said that, for reasons that Robert Fiore very powerfully outlined, the superhero has been a suspect genre for decades not only by outside critics like Fredric Wertham but even by those who love comics and have themselves been formed by the superhero. There are all sorts of reasons to question the superhero – not just for aesthetic reasons but also on political, emotional, and gender grounds.

From Marshall McLuhan in the 1940s to Art Spiegelman in the 1990s, lots of critics have seen the superhero as inherently authoritarian, if not fascistic. This accusation can be contested based not just on Kirby’s personal history (his war record and life-long commitment to liberal democracy) but also within the comics themselves where Kirby’s persistent embrace of the outsider, the freak and the underdog is as far as possible from fascism.

Emotionally the superhero is very much grounded in adolescent angst, which is both hormonally potent but also, for adults looking back in retrospect, embarrassing. (Adolescence is much more embarrassing than childhood, which perhaps explains the curious fact that Robert alluded to, that Carl Barks’ duck comics are more reputable than Kirby’s superheroes).  In gender terms, the sheer hyper-masculinity of superheroes can be off-putting.  All these considerations feed into aesthetics, of course, and there is a critique of Kirby that acknowledges the potency of his visual imagination but also sees him as severely constrained by his commitment to the superhero.

I don’t necessarily agree with the critiques I’ve outlined here but I wanted to put them on the table as something to think about.

In reading Hatfield’s book, it might be worth asking to what degree the focus on superheroes offers a skewed view of Kirby’s career. As Dan Nadel noted, it’s curious that the book ends on The Eternals, when Kirby went to do some more major works (in a generally science fiction vein) in the 1980s. Hatfield’s decision to end on The Eternals only makes sense if you see Kirby’s work on superheroes (and indeed more narrowly on superheroes for Marvel and DC comics) as the core of his achievement. That’s a defensible point of view, but perhaps also worth arguing with.

SIX: PHILIP K. DICK AND KIRBY

JONATHAN LETHEM:

Meanwhile, I’ve got this for you folks. Plot thickens, etc. (scroll down just a bit for Kirby Kontent.)

DOUG HARVEY:

Whoa!

JEET HEER:

The link Jonathan sent out reminded me that there is an entire subset of Kirby fans and commentators that basically see him as the comic book counterpart of Philip K. Dick — that is to say as a visionary or seer in the guise of a pulp hack. The major text in this tradition is Jeffrey J. Kripal’s Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal (University of Chicago Press). Kripal — who is a big figure in religious studies — basically sees both science fiction and the superhero genre as manifestations of transcendental or supernatural experiences by various creators. He quotes a writer named Christopher Knowles who argues that, “something very, very powerful hit [Kirby] around ’65 or ’66, and transformed him from an already imaginative man into a psychedelic shaman disguised as a freelance pencil pusher.” (Kripal 154)

I have to confess that as a rather old-fashioned historical materialist, I find such claims to be absurd. Kirby was intrigued by Erich von Daniken-style pseudo-science but he took that stuff and used it the right way — as the raw material for fantasy comics! And of course the great and admirable thing about Dick’s Valis experience is that Dick (unlike say L. Ron Hubbard) resisted the temptation to become a seer and prophet of a new religion. My understanding is that Dick never came to a definitive judgement about the meaning of the Valis experience (fortunately we have the co-editor of the Exegesis of Philip K. Dick as part of this roundtable and he can correct me if I’m wrong).

I don’t want to assign any more readings but the Kripal book does pursue all this in more detail. I have to say, it strikes me as nonsense, but feel free to disagree.

R. FIORE:

Don’t see it. As these things are figured in science fiction Dick was never really considered a hack. He had aspirations to write literary fiction, he had short stories published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and Galaxy, which were the prestige markets at the time insofar as there were any, he had stories adapted on the X Minus One radio show, he had novels published in hardcover and by the better paperback houses (as well as crummy ones), he won the Hugo award and was frequently nominated for the Hugos and Nebulas. I don’t know if you could really call Kirby a hack in the comic book world; a hack in comic books could be awfully damned hacky. I suppose Dell and DC were what you could call the reputable houses and he didn’t work for them in his early career, but he wasn’t scraping the bottom of the barrel, either. Captain America was a big seller in the 1940s. I don’t think comics fandom started establishing the pecking order of “Golden Age” comic book cartoonists until the 1960s, and by then Kirby was a star. Or am I supposed to be looking through the lens where every science fiction writer and every comic book cartoonist is a hack, rather than the way they were viewed within genre?

The main way in which Dick and Kirby were analogous was that they were both adopted as counterculture figures in the 1960s. In the world of literary fiction Dick’s reputation has been incrementally building from that of a cult figure into a literary figure. It’s sort of like watching an ape evolve. Kirby is simultaneously square in the main line of commercial comics and a cult figure in art comics, but I don’t see him being taken seriously in the art world the way some are beginning to consider Dick a major writer in the literary world. A better analogy with Dick would be Robert Crumb, who goes from being a total outlaw to a kind of Brueghel of his time. Fletcher Hanks is an example of a pure hack who comes to be seen as a primitive back door visionary.

As for Dick as a supernatural visionary, I would lean towards Michael Bishop’s theory that the Valis experience was a mild stroke. The best book on Dick is Emmanuel Carrere’s I Am Alive and You Are Dead.

JEET HEER:

These points are fair enough. Hack is too strong a term — perhaps it would be better to say that at the start of their career Dick and Kirby were both journeymen pulp creators but they managed to make a name for themselves as visionaries despite the fact that they never left the pulp tradition. The other point of comparison would be their incredible productivity (and the resultant unevenness of their work) and their engagement with Californian culture (which Kirby came to late in life but really embraced in his 1970s work). I should add that the author I mentioned — Kripal — sees them both as genuine mystics whose works contain a valid religious message (a position that I reject — or can only accept in the general form that all interesting art has a spiritual component). But perhaps it is better to say that Kirby and Dick are too idiosyncratic to be compared.

JONATHAN LETHEM:

A completely fascinating series of posts and almost impossible to do it all justice.

First, suffice to say I passed that link along in a spirit of astonishment that Kirby’s omnivorous and archetypal imaginings could ever be mistaken for specifically prophetic in that way — the rabbit-hole of millennial conspiracy thinking is a deep one.

Second, as a Dick scholar, I’d want to throw in that though I enjoyed Carrerre’s book myself, his family and others who knew him seem to regard it as obnoxious affront, for the liberties taken. Lawrence Sutin’s is of course the factually reputable biography, and a solid job it is too. An Italian scholar named Umberto Rossi has just published a remarkable monograph called The Twisted World of Philip K. Dick: A Study of Twenty Ontologically Uncertain Novels.

I like the comparison of Robert Crumb and Dick, which seems to catch something exactly.

The SF writer I’d compare to Kirby is Robert Heinlein. Neither is the inventor of the landscape, and neither transforms it upon their first arrival, but rather hatch their mature style slowly. Then, when the flowering does come, they seem as definitive as a Duke Ellington, Picasso, or Bob Dylan, and for a while every other creator has to react/bow or stand apart in defiance of their style. In both cases a dominant editor/publisher figure (Lee/Campell) holds them up as THE model for others to adapt their work to. And then they stick around long enough to become self-referentially eccentric, and to strike many readers as embarrassingly entrenched in a past style. Silver Star equals The Name of the Beast.

“Hack” is a very peculiar lens, which, as Mr. Fiore points out, either applies to everyone working outside the canons of consecrated taste — all cartoonists and SF writers, in other words — or to those within any given field who dishonor it with hurried, paltry, or imitative work. Or “hack-work” might be applied to the hurried, paltry, or imitative work done at times by those who might be seen as true artists when working at their best. It’s no secret that Dick considered himself to be doing hack work at times — depending on the context of the conversation, or the state of his self-regard, he might sometimes have called his whole career ‘hack work’. I doubt Kirby was prone to the same self-judgement…

So much more I’d like to say in reply to all of this, but no time at the moment!

R. FIORE:

To walk my casual statement back a bit, I have not read every book about Philip K. Dick (though I have read nearly every book by Philip K. Dick) and I say Carrerre’s book is the best largely because I was so taken with it that I assumed it had to be.  The best book and the most factually accurate book about Dick are not necessarily going to be the same thing, though a factually accurate book on this subject presents special challenges and is entitled to extra credit.

Popular artists do their apprenticeships in public.  Standards are lower, gatekeepers are indulgent, pay is poor, and young people always want to be big name professionals right now.  Juvenilia which for legit authors doesn’t see the light of day until the heirs get greedy is part of popular author’s body of work from the start.  Robert Bloch’s autobiography Once Around the Bloch illustrates just what making a living as a commercial writer entailed.  Here you have a big name in his particular patch who made his way into slick magazines and got to wet his beak in movies and television, and yet his career is just a mad treadmill of never-slackening production.

There’s a folk perception of science fiction that was formed I think largely by low budget movies and television and an assumption that they were an accurate representation of what was going on in the magazines where the form developed.  Uniquely among popular forms science fiction always had a baseline commitment to big, important ideas.  It isn’t like crime fiction where you have one large segment that’s devoted to violence, thrills and sex and another large segment that’s devoted to intellectual puzzles about train schedules and exotic poisons and another segment that has literary ambitions to plumb the dark heart of the criminal act.  Ideas are what science fiction is or was about and every other literary value could be sacrificed to the pursuit of ideas.  What I like to say is that science fiction is literature, but it’s badly written literature.  Should Philip K. Dick be admitted to the canon Theodore Dreiser will no longer be the worst prose stylist in respectable American literature.

DOUG HARVEY:

[after mentioning  his off-topic Kramers Ergot 8 review] …although whether PKD had a stroke or heard the voice of God or what’s the difference is a stretch too, so I don’t feel that bad.

R. FIORE:

I would say it would make a great deal of difference whether Dick had a genuine supernatural religious experience or a medical episode he mistook for a supernatural religious experience.

JONATHAN LETHEM:

I realize I may have failed to weigh in on exactly the matter on which I would be most expected to weigh in. A part of my disinclination is simply “Exegesis burn-out”, after spending far  too much of the past two years first in the editing, copyediting, and proofreading of the monstrous manuscript, and then in the aftermath, where along with light promotional duties I was asked to play the role of the sounding-board for everyone’s responses to it.

I do see an opportunity here to say a couple of things that I may never have said quite as clearly as I’d have liked — possible precisely because this exchange between Doug and Bob (“It makes no difference” v. “It makes a great deal of difference”) reduces some of the murk around the thing to an apparently simple binary:

For what it’s worth, I find this question of whether or not his explicit visionary episodes were triggered by a stroke strikes me as leaving the actual fact of the 8,000 pages of writing, and the matter of their contents, completely unconfronted. Or perhaps it would be better to say the question leaves what interests me in the late phase of this great writer’s efforts completely undescribed. Suffice to say any number of millions of humans have had strokes. Only one of them did what Philip K. Dick did.

Even if you quest around for a more exotic diagnosis — Temporal Lobe Epilepsy, say, which has been proposed for Dick (as with Kirby and PSTD, of course, none of us will ever know, but that hasn’t stopped speculation), as it has also been proposed for Saint Theresa of Avila, and Dostoyevsky, and a few other interesting people — and which has been specifically associated with bouts of graphomaniacal literary production — you still don’t find that anyone except Philip K. Dick wrote the Exegesis, or even anything very much like it, in the whole history of humankind.

And as a student of his work, I personally find the effort to split the last writings completely away from the “great novels of the ’60s” unconvincing. In fact, evidence of a visionary gnostic sensibility is traceable as far back (at least) as Cosmic Puppets, an unredeemable crappy fantasy novel written early in his 1950s apprenticeship. And by the time of the mid-’60s — in and around any of the work that would — and does — qualify him as a canonical writer (one who, as Bob points out, is canonical like Dreiser, i.e. despite the genius having to drag the prose into the canon like a butterfly dragging a lead sinker), all of the primary concerns of the impossible Exegesis material are already in play: the trapdoor philosophizing, the eschatological and ontological obsessions, the theological raptures and solipsistic terrors. He also had episodes, in his life, quite a lot like the episodes of the late ’70s (voices in the night, depression breakdowns and exultant fits of productivity). Unless you want to suggest that he began suffering a series of tiny strokes sometime in the ’50s… there’s no way to make that diagnosis really encompass the tendencies that become so explosive later on.

The only reason I can imagine getting worked up on the matter of denying Dick really heard God’s voice is if you A. believe there is a God and B. believe he spoke to you and told you stuff that contradicted the stuff Dick claimed God said (up to and including, I suppose, “that guy Dick is going around claiming he heard me speak, but I never said a word to him.”) Since I don’t believe in God, I can’t really get very interested in this — and when people who I suspect also don’t believe in God do get worked up about it, it doesn’t coming out sounding any different to me than when people say, “But Philip K. Dick was really crazy, wasn’t he?” In both cases, my translation of the remark ends up being: “I don’t really want to encounter that material. It’s easier not to have to.”

Since I don’t look on the Exegesis as revelation, or even, really, philosophy, but as “writing by a writer I like” — and since, in fact, there’s intermittently astoundingly rich and mind-bending and funny and provocative and trippy writing contained in it — all the virtues that drew me to the writer in question to begin with — I’m fighting the good fight to encourage people to abandon the “crazy/not crazy” or “God/not-God” framing that seems to be the only way anyone can think to approach the book.

Except I’m not really fighting that fight, I’ve really given it up already — except for writing this e-mail.

Hey, I even got Kirby’s name in there once, folks!

DOUG HARVEY:

Sorry, I didn’t mean the topic was uninteresting or insignificant, just that it probably won’t make the final cut in a roundtable article on Hatfield’s Kirby book. But for the record, my understanding (and I’d hazard Dick’s and possibly Kirby’s) allows for the possibility that “a stroke” and “hearing the voice of God” are just different ways of describing the same phenomenon; from a medical/materialist POV and from a mystical/subjectivist POV. Which are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

Alterations in brain function have been inextricable from supernatural religious experiences (prayer, chanting, fasting, yoga, whirling, flagellation, trepanation, mushrooms…) throughout our species’ history, and I don’t see how the possibility that PKD’s experiences may have coincided with a physiological change makes them less valid than those of, say, some one who sits in one position under a tree for forty-nine days. What I want to know — and I’m sure some of you have better intel on this than me – is whether Kirby ever dropped acid. Because my friend Scott? In 8th grade? Said there’s no way he didn’t, man.

R. FIORE:

Oh, yes, I agree with that, totally beside the point as it doesn’t relate to Kirby.

DOUG HARVEY:

Unless he dropped acid!

(Continued)

The Reconstruction-era narrative of a recently freed black man “possessed by the power of a million souls of slaves eternally suffering from lifetimes of racial injustices” (cue trip exclamation points), Lincoln Washington: Free Man features Marra’s signature dynamic plotting and overdriven action, but benefits immensely from its basically factual milieu. Even if the events of this former slave-fights-KKK story are massively amplified for dramatic effect, they all most certainly happened at to someone some point or another, from rapes real and faked to virulent, systematic racism. It’s well and truly impossible for even Marra’s typically over the top plotting to overstate the horrors of slavery and the Jim Crow South, and the sense of legitimacy the setting lends to the book’s explosive conflicts give every squeezed-out eyeball and ripped-off arm a strange gravitas. For the first time, we root for a Marra hero for a reason beside vicarious bloodlust — everyone who gets dismembered, beheaded, or I-don’t-even-know-if-there’s-a-word-for-getting-the-spine-torn-from-your-living-body-ed richly deserves whatever happens to them, and even worse.

With its literally black-and-white presentation of good versus evil, Lincoln Washington is a superhero comic in all but name, and the book’s artwork entrenches it deeply in American comics’ most popular idiom. Never have Marra’s anatomical distortions looked more Kirbyesque, or his action sequences moved with such speed and vigor, or his panels communicated their content more simply and forcefully. The meticulously detailed renderings of Marra’s early comics are long gone –  the excess is all in the content, and it’s the professionalism of hero comics, the craftsmanlike command of form, that’s being imported here. But neither measured construction or genre riffing is the most noticeable aspect of the book. Where superhero comics use Nazis as their fallback impossible-to-overstate villains, Marra here continues his streak of using American white racists. It might be just-add-water controversy-baiting, but it also gets at a fundamental truth of violent comics: we read these things to see people who need to feel some pain get got, and the fact that so very few comics feature this type of content makes it all the more urgently necessary.

But as ever with Marra, the masterstroke is in the violence. The strange realism and the ideological legitimacy of the book are both handily matched by career-best action scenes whose scorching brutality go well past anything else the artist has mustered up previously. The remote mechanism of weaponry is almost completely left by the wayside here: the violence featured is obscenely, gloriously hands-on, an orgy of bloodletting that might be the most accomplished reading yet of the age-old “what if someone with superpowers got really fucking pissed and just lashed out” chestnut. It’s only after finishing the comic that it emerges as a think piece. While it’s going, all a reader can do is grip the newsprint pages with slowly tightening fists.

Underneath the considerable surface thrills of seeing a dude use one Klansman like a baseball bat in order to swat another’s head off, though, is the cold fact that Marra is probably the best there is at what he’s doing right now — that “alternative comics” may very well be handily beating the mainstream at its own roundhouse-throwing game. Marra’s made a note-perfect choice of subject matter, but the truth is that when an artist is creating something this purely effective, watching their work in motion is consummately satisfying no matter what it gets up to.

This is the first of three parts. In this part, Kirby’s work in general is discussed. Hatfield’s book is examined in greater detail in parts two and three.

ONE: OPENING REMARKS

JEET HEER:

In a memorable 1995 exchange with Art Spiegelman, Gary Groth tried to make the case for the stature  of Jack Kirby in the comics pantheon but acknowledged that the man who did so much to create the Marvel universe (as well as much else) could be hard to defend. “No one I’ve heard, not even Gil [Kane] has mitigated my skepticism about Kirby’s work,” Groth said. “Whereas Mike Barrier wrote a great book telling us why we should like Carl Barks’ work and I agreed entirely with his argument as to why Barks was an important creator, I’ve never really read anything that’s done that for me [with Kirby]…”

I think it’s fair to say that Charles Hatfield’s Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby is the book that meets the challenge that Groth thought had gone unanswered. While acknowledging everything that is problematic or even disreputable about Kirby’s work, Hatfield makes a compelling case that Kirby’s lifetime of “delirious graphiation” makes him central to the history of American comics.

The questions below are designed to pick up some of the central ideas of Hatfield’s book with an eye towards measuring the scope of Kirby’s achievement. I’ve often posed these questions in terms of dualities with a mind towards pointing out some of the tensions and contradictions in Kirby’s career, but also (I hope) as a way of spurring conversation about how Kirby in fact transcends some of the categories we might try and impose on him.

1. Kirby the cartoonist versus Kirby the visual artist. A key argument that Hatfield makes is that Kirby was a cartoonist, that almost all his drawings were done with narrative intent and need to be seen as storytelling rather than illustration. “The guiding idea behind Hand of Fire is that Kirby’s drawing is storytelling and that, conversely, his storytelling almost always used drawing, not scriptwriting, as its vehicle; the narrative and the drawing were coextensive, mutually animating and reinforcing, and inseparable. Kirby was a cartoonist (a word whose glory we have sacrificed in our haste to give respect to ‘comics creators’ and ‘graphic novelists’). Cartooning, as I define it, is emphatically not the same as illustrating a prior text; Kirby generated stories through drawing.” (p. 18) As articulated by Hatfield, these ideas almost seem like common sense but isn’t there another way of seeing Kirby, as a visual artist first and foremost? Since Kirby’s death, there have been important museum exhibits of his work as well as an increasing market for his original art (and publications like the Jack Kirby Collector reprinting copies of his pre-inked pencil work). I myself on occasion find myself often gliding over the textures of Kirby’s art, enjoying them simply for their surface pleasure without a mind to their narrative content. This question is perhaps most pertinent to Doug Harvey but everyone should be free to weigh in: is there is a case for valuing Kirby’s visual art divorced from its narrative intent?

2. Kirby the collaborationist versus Kirby the auteur. For most of Kirby’s career, he worked within a comics production system based on a division of labor, collaborating with editors, writers, and inkers.  The long-terms collaborations with Joe Simon and Stan Lee were the most famous examples of Kirby being a team player but even after he took an auteurist turn in 1970, he worked with inkers and, for better or worse, had to follow editorial dictates (as with DC cancelling the Fourth World books or Marvel trying to integrate the Eternals into their continuity).  At the end of the book Hatfield reflects that, “The underlying problem for the critic has to do with, again, the need to locate Kirby’s authorial voice, if not autonomy, in the face of a market and a genre justified mainly in heteronomous terms. Simply put, it is hard to find Kirby the Auteur amongst all the commercial imperatives, the ‘failed’ projects, the unexpected hits, the feints and reversals, the very things that made his career arc in comics the looping, whirling, crazy dotted line that it was…”  (page 252). Interestingly, the tension between individualism and group effort was a major thematic concern for Kirby (think of how the many groups he created like the Fantastic Four were riven by internal disputes, how they fought against each other as much as against the villains or think of how Kirby’s soldiers are often drawn as having uniform faces while his heroes are often grotesquely distinct, as with the Thing or the Hulk). I’m wondering, though, if collaboration should be seen as always a failure to live up to an auteurist ideal. Didn’t Kirby’s collaboration provide the necessary precondition for his productive career, just as the Thing found expression for his heroism in the context of the Fantastic Four?

3. Stan and Jack. Related to the question above, it might be worth revisiting the much disputed (and litigated) authorial battle between Stan Lee and Kirby. Hatfield offers a balanced account of their team efforts, arguing that Kirby “provided the conceptual material, the character designs, the unmistakable graphic style, the pace, and, eventually, the plotting and overall direction of the Marvel books with which he was linked [he] did not solely author any of the seminal Marvels of the period. His work was constrained and subliminally altered at the editorial level, with text that reshaped and at times redirected his plots. Furthermore, Lee’s vitalizing influence saturated Marvel and determined its editorial ethos. Kirby worked harder but, commercially, Lee made things happen.” (p. 95). Is this a fair assessment or is there more to be said about the troubled partnership between Lee and Kirby?

4. A superhero cartoonist or a master genre mixer? Perhaps the most conservative aspect of Hatfield’s account is his placing of Kirby within the framework of superhero comics. We’re given only a cursory account of the Simon and Kirby era (when his major genre was, surprisingly, romance comics but also included boys adventure, westerns, war comics, science fiction, horror and many others). The bulk of Hatfield’s book is taken up with Kirby’s work for Marvel in the 1960s and DC in the 1970s, when he re-invented and re-invigorated the superhero genre. Again, this approach seems like common sense but I’m wondering seeing Kirby through the prism of the superhero genre doesn’t diminish his originality as a genre mixer. Here’s another way of seeing Kirby: during the long apprenticeship of the Simon and Kirby years, he mastered the rules for the many genres he worked in and then in the 1960s he confidently started to splice these genres together to create a new meta-genre that was nominally superhero comics but actually had a much wider scope. Thus the Fantastic Four can be seen  as a mixture of Challengers of the Unknown style exploration stories, Skymaster-style science fiction, monster comics (the Thing),  romance and soap opera (the Reed-Sue-Submariner love triangle), space opera (Galactus and the Silver Surfer), a repurposing of older superhero and science fiction ideas (the stretching man in the tradition of Plastic Man, the human Torch, a character who can turn invisible), and many other genres. Hatfield touches on Kirby as a genre-mixer on page 22, but I’m wondering if more can’t be said about this. To put it another way, Hatfield describes the Fourth World books as “the climax of [Kirby’s] career in superheroes” (p. 143) but, thought these comics have superheroes in them, I’m not sure if they are superheroes or some new genre, a mutant cosmic fantasy.

These are some points to start off the discussion. Feel free to answer which ever ones strike your fancy and also to raise new issues and problems.

TWO: MODERNISM, COLLAGES AND THE WAR

GLEN DAVID GOLD:

[Jeet Heer wrote:] “1. is there is a case for valuing Kirby’s visual art divorced from its narrative intent?“

Haven’t gotten the Hand of Fire book yet, but that don’t stop me from wanting to talk. I assume that everyone else knew about Andrei Molotiu’s writings about this long before I did. The Dream Machine should be right below. This is one of the very few non-collage pieces of art Jack is known to have done for himself. I.e., there was no client.  (His collages are a whole other topic we could jump on. Does Hatfield?) It’s gigantic and I can’t look at it enough. Neither could he — it was over his desk for the last fifteen years of his life.

Now, I’m not an art scholar, so please excuse my flailing. Is this abstract? Or representational? I feel like all of the small parts of this could be constructed in some 3D sculpture. They are pistons and turbines and valves and switches. But when you add them up, they become shapes and ideas rather than objects. That face on the far right? The white part, like the front quarters of an insect? Is there a narrative here? I feel like there’s an implied narrative (i.e. the machine probably hums to life and one part influences another, a narrative of something functioning) but not an overt one. If I look at it I might assign meaning and movement to it — it’s God’s iPod — but does that mean I’m bringing storyline to the party?  Because there are other times where it’s a just visual feast, as abstract as you want to get.  There was no commercial intent to this piece.

Exhibit #2. This is currently my favorite Kirby cover from the Silver Age, and it couldn’t be more different than The Dream Machine in its intent.  Once you get beyond the positioning of the characters, how the eye follows in circles and jumps around the page, the expert direction of our attention, just try to unpack all the levels of observation and TIME going on here.  An enemy hand is pushing a button while Fury, alarmed, draws his pistol. There’s an element of depth of field — I can’t remember the critical term — it’s what von Sternberg was obsessed with, the space between his camera and Dietrich’s face, which he filled with flats and scrim to indicate distance.  Unknown hand in foreground pushing a button on a machine observing (and x-raying — another level of space) an image of Nick Fury, who is reacting while, in the background a Hydra agent recoils because…well, because he’s evil, I suppose.  It’s not a busy image, or overloaded with places we can look, but it tells such a winding narrative in a single panel that it makes my head spin.  This is about getting you to buy the comic book — it’s very much about commercial intent.

And #3:

My hunch is that this is about as close to pure Kirby storytelling as you’ll see from his peak period. I find it literally impossible to make this abstract.  It was drawn, however, for people who had already bought the comic.  It was about giving them their money’s worth, and for Jack that meant in this case two guys beating the stuffings out of each other in such a way that the reader is drawn into their bodies.

I’ll have more as I think about it or as you do…

GLEN DAVID GOLD:

Also I truly don’t know what the state of Kirby scholarship is and I don’t want to restate the obvious if everyone is already talking about this.  But:

[Jeet Heer wrote:] In a memorable 1995 exchange with Art Spiegelman, Gary Groth tried to make the case for the stature of Jack Kirby in the comics pantheon but acknowledged that the man who did so much to create the Marvel universe (as well as much else) could be hard to defend. “No one I’ve heard, not even Gil [Kane] has mitigated my skepticism about Kirby’s work,” Groth said. “Whereas Mike Barrier wrote a great book telling us why we should like Carl Barks’ work and I agreed entirely with his argument as to why Barks was an important creator, I’ve never really read anything that’s done that for me [with Kirby]…”

In that discussion, Spiegelman also said, ”I suppose there’s something about Kirby’s sensibility, the optimism of it, that just puts me off.  There’s an unpleasant exuberance, like a teenager chattering so excitedly he keeps spritzing you with his saliva… I wouldn’t even use the word ‘respect’ for Kirby, because I sort of like [his work], but I don’t really respect it… I don’t study his work.”

Which is too bad, since Jack Kirby is the only major cartoonist to have killed Nazis.  And he didn’t do it from a distance — he killed Nazis using the same hands that later drew Thor, the Aryan God of Thunder, hammering Mangog (old testament villain name, more or less) in the snout.  Kirby shot and stabbed Nazis for about six months in 1943 and 1944, and I would argue that experience didn’t just change his life but shaped his work from that moment forward, in that an underlying PTSD worldview took him places he wouldn’t have gone otherwise.  For instance: Kirby deepened the emotional realm of the Marvel Universe by the re-introduction of Captain America in Avengers #4.  There has been plenty of talk of Lee and Kirby developing “Heroes with Problems” in the 1960s, but look at what they did first.  The FF (they bicker a little), Thor (his girl loves him, but not his human alter ego, a la Superman — not much of a revelation there), Ant Man (come on!), the Hulk (strictly a monster book when Kirby was handling it).  The heroes’ problems were pretty minor.

Avengers #4, with the introduction of Captain America, now had a hero with a truly nuanced, complex unsolvable problem: Post traumatic stress disorder.  Cap responded from his thaw by freaking out, flashing back, displaying hypervigilence, remorse, guilt, nightmares, delusions…the list goes on. And with that, the Marvel universe was really born.  Every character had to have emotional layers like that from then on. And the world of Marvel was based on a trauma that Kirby suffered through.

(If you’re wondering why I credit Kirby with the cap revival rather than Lee —  I suspect that Martin Goodman suggested the Sub Mariner, the Torch and Cap returns and Lee told Kirby to do it.  But as far as specifics, what are the odds that Lee, who served stateside, and who hadn’t written a single word about world war two combat until then, would create a Cap without a Bucky, a Cap damaged by wartime experience?  Or that Kirby, who had seen horrors of the battlefield, would do so?)

When discussing whether Kirby is worth studying, I’d say that makes him a prime candidate for analysis.  And we haven’t even gotten to what his art LOOKS like.

JEET HEER:

Glen, you’ve given us a lot to chew on even before most of us have had a chance to crack open Hatfield. A few quick comments:

1. Hatfield doesn’t write about Kirby’s collages in any substantial way, although they are alluded to. A significant omission?

2. What Hatfield does do is trace the evolution of Kirby’s style from his early attempt to master the illustrational realism of Hal Foster, Alex Raymond and Milton Caniff to his subsequent move towards greater abstraction and glyph-like forms. There’s an argument to be made that late-period Kirby is closer in spirit to Gary Panter and Lynda Barry than he is to Foster and Raymond — that is to say he’s a cartoonist interested more in abundant, florid mark-making and jungle-thick visual saturation than he is in representational accuracy.

3. Roundtable members might want to check out Hatfield’s comparison of Kirby to Futurism and Cubism (pages 45-46): “Though often described as cinematic by admirers, in a sense his style represents a distinctly uncinematic approach to evoking movement in static form, a way that recalls, as I’ve noted elsewhere, Futurism in its decomposition of movement and Cubism in its all-at-once depiction of different perspectives.”

4. All of which suggests that Kirby can be seen as a vernacular modernist, to borrow J. Hoberman’s phrase.

JONATHAN LETHEM:

[Jeet Heer wrote:] “1. is there is a case for valuing Kirby’s visual art divorced from its narrative intent?”

I’m also waiting eagerly for the Hatfield to arrive, but here’s an off-the-cuff response to a couple of the already remarkable ideas zinging around here. First, while I’m all for the valorization of “cartoonist” (and “comic book” as opposed to “graphic novel”) I’m a bit leery of the false choice being proposed here between frame/still/fragment and narrative/movement/storytelling. It feels imported from film studies, where the risk of a visual study of the stylistic meanings of, say, film noir, based too much on stills — frame enlargements and, even worse, promotional photos of the actors on set taken by set photographers and often lit or posed differently than in the film — has raised alarms at times… but precisely what defines the very strange difference between comic book and film narrative aesthetics (and in my mind makes comics’ adaptation to film such a disaster area) is that comics are a medium of stopped-and-framed narrative moments, of punctuated equilibria, to borrow a term from evolutionary science. And an art equally made, it can’t be emphasized enough, of the gaps or silences, abyssal vacancies, between. Film smooths, surrounds, and interpenetrates our sensorium — comics rupture it and force us to make constant on-the-spot repairs. Kirby was always-already making individual artworks with little frames, even when he draws a page like that kickfight with Batroc. The more so when he draws a cover, obviously — and the leap to that magnificent Dream Machine painting isn’t so distant, I think — it’s full of narrative implication of the kind that Kirby had learned to master, precisely in the way it demands you make little (or, huge) leaps of resolution between the abstraction and the signification. Forget the red herring of “commercial intent” (which plenty of abstract painters had, by the way.) No 20th-century painter would ever have conjured up such a thing. It’s a psychedelic-modernist comic book without gutters.

A different thought on the same subject: the fundamental gesture of modernism toward the non-modernist artifacts it encounters — premodern art of all kinds, commercial culture, new media like film or sound recording etc. — is to fragment it.

And so, it is precisely by doing this to himself, in that prodigy-turned-consummate professional-turned-outsider artist way Kirby has — moving through Milton Caniff to Gary Panter on his own imperatives — that makes him, in this wonderful phrase, a ‘vernacular modernist’ (and then we’re back to borrowing from the vocabulary of film criticism, of course.)

GLEN DAVID GOLD:

[Jeet Heer wrote:] “1. Hatfield doesn’t write about Kirby’s collages in any substantial way, although they are alluded to. A significant omission?”

As a reader I felt the same way about Kirby’s collages as I did the harp solos in Marx Brothers movies — they were things I didn’t like but put up with because they made an artist I revered feel happy, and besides, the good stuff would start again in a moment.

But as an art collector I think they’re often quite beautiful.  Like Monsignor Lethem, I think the idea of an artist having commercial intent is as relevant to critique as an artist being hirsute or smelling like lilacs when he paints.  Nonetheless Kirby was denigrated throughout his career by guys like Will Eisner, who told me face to face that Jack lacked artistic intent, that he only wanted to keep his family fed.  So everyone here might all be smarter than that, but the condemnation has been in the air for quite a while.  I suppose the collages make the argument more complex, in that they never really worked in print, they were hard to do, they had to be sent to a different printer to be incorporated into the comics, and the complexities of creating and printing them couldn’t be evidence that Kirby was just trying to keep his family fed.  They’re WEIRD, which strikes me as being the first place to look for artistic intent — weirdness.

[Jonathan Lethem wrote:] “I’m a bit leery of the false choice being proposed here between frame/still/fragment and narrative/movement/storytelling.”

Damn.  I forgot we could argue with the precepts of this whole thing.  Me too!  What he said.

[Responding to a comment from Lethem on PTSD:] Where it gets really dire (for me at least) is Silver Star.  Kirby’s last personal creation is a revamp of Captain America in which a super soldier is born in a moment of combat stress.  His superpower is disassociation, the hallmark mental PTSD state.  His enemy, Darius Drumm, is vague and shape shifting, with uncertain powers.  By the final issue, Drumm is the angel of Death, and Silver Star is turned to a desiccated husk.   It makes little narrative sense unless you read it as a man wrestling with communicating the sense of dis-ease that was overwhelming his ability to see straight.

DAN NADEL:

I’m wading into the Hatfield book but am currently bogged down by his discussion of Charles Pierce.

Anyway, as to the collages… I don’t think Hatfield can be faulted for giving them scant notice since his primary focus is on Kirby the storyteller and these collages wonderfully do not tell a story in the a-b-c way the rest of his narratives function. I love these collages. A lot. A few notes: Kirby was known as an inveterate consumer of magazines — Look, Life, and tons of science mags. I always imagine these collages arising from perhaps a chance encounter with, say, Rauschenberg, in an issue of Look or some other general interest mag and it making a passing impression that melded with his love of science mags. This is an oversimplification, but it accounts for the sheer abstraction of things combined with their “science” edge. Here’s wonderful collage on top of art by Pollock, Dubuffet, Picasso and others, I think.  Richard Prince eat your heart out.

More than anything else it reminds me of Oyvind Fahlstrom or about a dozen mid-career artists in NYC right now. Glen is correct that Kirby did these “for fun” and then inserted them when needed. That need, I would speculate, might’ve arisen from wanting to articulate the awe he must’ve often felt. That thing that can’t be articulated that, to my mind, he gets closest to in narrative terms in projects like Silver Star, where he’s grasping at ways of speaking, ways of feeling.

I like Jonathan’s use of the term vernacular modernism to describe Kirby’s standalone visuals. They occupy a place not unlike, say, Sister Corita (wait, stay with me) in that it’s art created for mass production without a gallery/museum in mind. But it’s as “pure” as anything else. As to Kirby and the “I just needed to make sales” thing. I love that that was the way he deflected questions of motivation. I’m sure he meant it, and it was very real — I mean, he really DID need to make sales — but, that drive to do so came from somewhere (i.e. his childhood, etc.) and the fervency with which he went about doing so goes far beyond anything necessitated by money. In other words, Don Heck needed to make sales, too. So did Eisner (thus his work for the army). More interestingly, I think that “need” allowed him cover to work through his fantasies. It was the trick he used to fire himself forward. We all need those little tricks internally and externally. That  may have been his.

Anyway, all of this is to get around to saying in response to Jeet’s first question: Yes, there is a major case to be made for looking at Kirby’s art apart from its narrative. Individual panels, whole pages, covers — these are all art objects that need examining — both as raw Kirby (e.g. pencils, in which you can see and begin to understand his gesture) and as collaborative works (e.g. all his many inkers). The pencils, in particular, give it away — those drawings (because they’re more “drawings” than comics at that stage are so passionate and so heavily rendered/worked-on that they didn’t need inking, really. Kirby completed the art. And he didn’t need to. That’s what really gets me — he could have roughed-in more areas, left out backgrounds more often, etc. But he drew the picture he needed to get down on paper — not just the schematic an inker might need to embellish. Those pencils give the lie to Kirby’s own dismissal of his work.

JEET HEER:

Kirby Round-tablers:

Jonathan and Glen have raised a host of interesting points, so I’ll add a few comments to push us along.

1. The characterization of Kirby’s “optimism” was from Spiegelman and does seem like a misreading, particularly if we’re mindful of the pessimistic work Kirby did in the 1970s and 1980s. I’m wondering though if there wasn’t some optimism or ebullience in the 1960s Marvel work (perhaps because of the writerly balance provided by Lee?). Those 1960s comics do, at least superficially, seem to be brimming over with a gleeful delight in world-building.

2. Hatfield eschews a biographical approach to Kirby in favor of formalism but Glen and Joanthan are right of course that a psychobiographical approach to Kirby could be potentially very rewarding. Ideally we’d have a full-dress biography of Kirby along the lines of Ellmann on Joyce or Michaelis on Schulz. The experience of the war is, of course, central but I think it also has to be seen as reinforcing the lessons of the Kirby’s childhood in the tenements of the lower east side.

3. Furthering the biographical interpretations and the importance of war, there is one particular experience that might have been formative. As a solider during the war, Kirby helped liberate a concentration camp, so he would have been one of the first (and few) Americans who had some eye-witness experience of the Holocaust (I was told this by Dan Nadel and am curious if he has any more information about it). I’m struck by how frequently Kirby allergorizes the Holocaust in his work from the mid-1960s on (which the late, great historian Peter Novick argued was the period that the Shoah started being seriously addressed in America). Of course, Kirby being Kirby he did so in pulp science fiction terms of space monsters that threaten to destroy humanity (from Galactus onwards). To pick one example of many, Machine Man: The Fight Robot #3 (June 1978) is a fairly typical late-period Kirby: a badly printed 35 cent comic about a robot with an identity crisis. But the villain is Ten-For, the Mean Machine, described as “a Holocaust specialist.” As Machine Man says at the end of the comic, “Didn’t you hear that space-devil?! He said he was a Holocaust-specialist! This entire planet may be in danger!” This brings us, interestingly enough, back to Spiegelman since one could easily argue that it’s a strike against Kirby that his response to the Holocaust was to recast it as a space opera. In a sense, Kirby and Spiegelman represent two opposite reactions to the Holocaust: Spiegelman’s instinct is to make make the Holocaust something that can be plausibly narrated by scaling it down into an animal fable (i.e. going down from a human level to the level of mice and cats) whereas Kirby achieved the difficult feat of making the Nazis even more grandiose and over-the-top than they were in real life (i.e. the Red Skull, Hydra and all the other totalitarian bullies Kirby created). But that’s what Kirby did: take all the bits and pieces of the world around him — historical events, personal experiences as well as the visual environment — and translate it into comic book terms.

4. I once wrote a slightly overheated paragraph about Kirby’s relationship with big-H History which might be pertinent here: “Jack Kirby was the immigrant crowded into the tenements of New York (‘Street Code’). He was the tough ghetto kid whose street-fighting days prepared him to be a warrior (the Boy Commandos). He was the patriotic fervour that won the war against Nazism (Captain America). He was the returning veteran who sought peace in the comforts of domestic life (Young Romance). He was the more than slightly demented panic about internal communist subversion (Fighting American). He was the Space Race and the promise of science (Sky Masters, Reed Richards). He was the smart housewife trapped in the feminine mystique, forced to take a subservient gender role (the Invisible Girl). He was the fear of radiation and fallout (the Incredible Hulk). He was the civil rights movement and the liberation of the Third World (the Black Panther). He was the existential loner outcast from society who sought solace by riding the waves (the Silver Surfer). He was the military industrial complex (Nick Fury). He was the hippies who rejected the Cold War consensus, and wanted to create their own counterculture (the Forever People). He was the artist who tried to escape his degrading background (Mister Miracle). He was feminism (Big Barda). He was Nixon and the religious right (Darkseid and Glorious Godfrey). He was the old soldier grown weary from a lifetime of struggle (Captain Victory). There was hardly any significant development in American 20th century history that didn’t somehow get refracted through Kirby’s whacko sensibility. Jack Kirby was the 20th century.”

GLEN DAVID GOLD:

About the concentration camp — In the Jack Kirby Collector #27, they reprint an interview with Ray Wyman where Jack says the following (transcription errors are my own):

[Jack Kirby quote:] Once I had an old guy with a little gray beard run over to me.  I can hear his thin little voice as he looked into my eyes.  Tears were running down his cheek.  He couldn’t believe his eyes.  He blinked a couple of times and he said, “You’re Jewish.”  I said, “Yeah, I’m Jewish.”  So he said, “Come with me.”  So I ran after this little old guy with the rest of my squad behind me.  It’s a long road; I remember some farm buildings and a factory.  It could have been an ambush but we figured that it probably wasn’t.  I mean, what would the Germans be doing with this little gray beard?  Then we came to this walled-in place, this stockade, and he pointed;  “There, there,” he said.  I stopped.  German guards were leaving by the dozens…They knew that I am a Scout.  They knew that this big division was right behind me.  I was standing there looking at them as they yelled out “fuck you” in English…I thought I was going to see prisoners of war, you know, some of our guys that got caught in some of the early fighting, but what I saw would pin you to the spot like it did me.  Most of these people were Polish; Polish Jews who were working in some of the nearby factories.  I don’t remember if the place really had a name, it was a smaller camp, not like Auschwitz, but it was horrible just the same.  Just horrible.  There were mostly woman and some men; they looked like they hadn’t eaten for I don’t know how long.  They were scrawny.  Their clothes were all tattered and dirty.  The Germans didn’t give a shit for anything.  They just left the place; just like leaving a dog behind to starve. I was standing there for a long time just watching thinking to myself, “What do I do?”  Just thinking about it makes my stomach turn.  All I could say was, ‘Oh, God.”

In many ways I think that war was the last human war.  We were just a bunch of guys with guns.  The danger was always very real — there wasn’t an unknown enemy figure coming up against you, you could see their faces and you fought them at very close quarters.

I’ve been compiling Kirby quotes about WWII from every interview I can find.  My idea has been to do exactly what you’re talking about, a way to accommodate Kirby’s personal experience when discussing his artwork.  I started out thinking about violence but one of the first quotations I saw stopped me dead long before I got to “violence.”

[Jack Kirby quote:] There was one shell that had hit, and I saw these Germans laying in a perfect circle except the bottom half of their bodies were missing, see?  The shell evidently hit right in the middle of this group.  You see a lot of these nice designs if you’re an artist.

DOUG HARVEY:

Glen’s “only major cartoonist to have killed Nazis” riposte to Spiegelman’s Kirby-bashing is LOL brilliant, and the “You see a lot of these nice designs if you’re an artist” quote is one of the best  “artist statements” – by any artist, ever – but Kirby was a way better collagist than Harpo a harpist.

JONATHAN LETHEM:

This research of yours, Glen, suggests a fascinating and horrible inquiry that could explode the bounds of our round-table on the book completely. I’ve been fascinated for a long time by the subject of the change in the work of those who really did go and serve in the European hell –apart from macho war novelists like James Jones or filmmakers like Sam Fuller, who made it central to their career,  it was a rare case (i.e., Kurt Vonnegut), who later chose to dwell on the subject directly (if they were willing to mention it at all). But the saturation of those facts through the art is a profound thing. Case in point, Jimmy Stewart, who returned from his very distinguished and extensive career as a commander on bombing runs (there’s some reason to believe he may even have been over Dresden — certainly he helped destroy any number of cities) refusing to talk about it, but who then plunged into a series of Hitchcock films and Anthony Mann films (and a couple of others by Ford and Preminger) that excavated the dark, cynical, even nihilistic depths of his previously sunny, resilient star image.

This in particular is just beyond nearly anything I’ve ever heard from a veteran. Incredible –

[Jack Kirby quote:] There was one shell that had hit, and I saw these Germans laying in a perfect circle except the bottom half of their bodies were missing, see?  The shell evidently hit right in the middle of this group.  You see a lot of these nice designs if you’re an artist.

DAN NADEL:

Kirby seems to have only once discussed the war with this kind of depth. He tells stories in other interviews, but not like this.

Anyway, two striking things about the below:

1) We never find out what happened after Kirby said “Oh, God”. What he did next would, I imagine, determine a lot about what he felt in the future.

2) The “design” bit is completely amazing, and jibes with “I had to make sales” matter-of-fact attitude. Something about that way Kirby dealt with things at the surface level.

And, to respond to one of Jeet’s questions:

[Jeet Heer quote:] 1. The characterization of Kirby’s “optimism” was from Spiegelman and does seem like a misreading, particularly if we’re mindful of the pessimistic work Kirby did in the 1970s and 1980s. I’m wondering though if there wasn’t some optimism or ebullience in the 1960s Marvel work (perhaps because of the writerly balance provided by Lee?). Those 1960s comics do, at least superficially, seem to be brimming over with a gleeful delight in world-building.

The optimism reading is a fair one. Glen brings up a good point, re: the mournful vibe around Captain America, but otherwise those comics are peppy, crisp, and verbally ecstatic. A lot of that is Lee, but Kirby, particularly in FF, and perhaps owing to Sinnott’s inking, was creating a gleaming and soft future vision. The hard edges of his work were dulled a bit (this opens up a whole discussion about what inking does to meaning) and he probably WAS a bit happier. He was on top again and creating for an audience of kids. So, there is a sunniness there. But lurking behind it is… everything else. Thor is VERY dark and sad, for example. So I think with a small amount of effort anyone can get past the optimism. There’s a great case to be made (and Hatfield sort of does it by asking us to think about narrative drawing) for reading Lee/Kirby as drawings, not as dialogue & story. If you just read the drawings it’s a very different experience. It’s not fair, of course, but so what.

THREE: KIRBY’S MASKS AND RAGGED SURFACE

SARAH BOXER:

I can’t bear Kirby’s overheated, crowded pages, so I end up focusing on his surfaces. First thoughts about Captain America: I prefer a super-smooth superhero. What are those fish scales doing on Cap’s back? Are they chain-mail? Hair? Rippling muscles? (My son says definitely chain-mail.) I looked it up on the web and was charmed by the answers offered:

“so he can wield his mighty shield,” which made no sense to me (my son says it does make sense because the chain-mail allows him to grip the shield in case he loses a hand) and “good on thermodynamics,” which also made no sense.

I conclude that the fish scales are a triple-thick layer of protection – chain-mail, hair and rippling muscles – all in one. And now that you ask me to be Freudian, I see a triple-thick psychological defense. The marks of Captain America are all defensive – the shield, the Hermes-type helmet, and the scales. I asked my son what Cap’s superpowers are, and he said he doesn’t really have any. He just has ordinary weapons but he’s still awesome. (Is that true? I mean the part about no superpowers?) And what about that white A? Is that the symbol of Cap’s inner shame?

Another thought: Glen mentioned the Silver Star and his bizarre superpower – dissociation. What does this mean? How does he use it? In any case it does seem related to ptsd. When your psychological defenses fail you – when your chain-mail skin fails you – you get dissociation, ptsd. (Or perhaps dissociation actually is  another layer of defense.) All this also makes me wonder about the Silver Surfer, whose layers fall away to reveal a super smooth superhero, totally frictionless, totally undefended.

As to Kirby & modernism, I don’t see it. It’s pure narrative fantasy with every inch crammed with meaning & emotion. That ain’t modern. It’s horror vacui.  Which is also a defense.  Against vacuums.

P.S. I loved Glen’s comment linking Kirby’s collages with Harpo’s harp
solos. Hilarious.

P.P.S. I don’t yet have the book you’re discussing.

JEET HEER:

Welcome Sarah — I have to say, I’m delighted by the level of conservation and debate we’ve managed to achieve even before Hatfield’s book has arrived. I love the comment about Captain America’s “fish scales.”

About Captain America’s powers, I have to confess I didn’t know the answer to this one. I knew he was a “super soldier” thanks to a serum but what does that mean? Here’s what I found on the web (and Captain America experts can correct if it’s wrong):

“Captain America has superhuman powers that include increased agility, strength, speed, endurance, and reaction time superior to any Olympic athlete who ever competed. The Super-Soldier formula that he has metabolized has enhanced all of his bodily functions to the peak of human efficiency. Notably, his body eliminates the excessive build-up of fatigue-producing poisons in his muscles, granting him phenomenal endurance. He also has the ability to heal very quickly.”

GLEN DAVID GOLD:

I love your kid. Tousle his hair for me, if he’s up for that sort of thing. If he’s anything like a Kirby kid, he’ll say, “Aw, g’wan Ma.”

[Sarah Boxer wrote:] “And what about that white A? Is that a symbol of Cap’s inner shame?”

Yes.  Yes it is.  I’m glad we’re all on the same boat here.

[Sarah Boxer quote:] “Another thought: Dan mentioned the Silver Star and his bizarre superpower – dissociation. What does this mean? How does he use it?”

The first ten pages of Silver Star are among the most bizarre Kirby ever drew.  You’ll get some scans to confirm I’m not lying here, but: it begins with a little girl playing guitar in some ethereal place, trying to “reach out” to a soldier — Morgan Miller — so she can sing him a birthday song.  We intercut between her and the battlefield, with her lyrics as narration.  Morgan is fired upon, his buddies are blown up, he starts to fade into “Kirby Krackle” (Scan #1) and then he picks up a tank and throws it.  Back on the little girl as she walks away dejected. “I thought you’d project to me if I wrote this song…There’s no light here.  It’s very dark…and I know that you could change this into a fun place.”

We cut to a battlefield hospital, where Silver Star “ACTS like a weirdo,” meaning the doctors are arguing whether his complete unresponsiveness means he’s gone into a coma.

No, he hasn’t.  He’s projected himself out of his body and into…well, Scan #2 & #3…a place just called Elsewhere.  Into which the villain, for no easily explained reason, also projects.  While (remember) Silver Star is still non-responsive in a field hospital.

And the little girl?  We find out later: trauma victim.  After her family farm blew up, she’s a child “frozen in time and space for ten years!  — A child — Alive in stasis!”

[Sarah Boxer wrote:] “As to Kirby & modernism, I don’t see it. It’s pure narrative fantasy with every inch crammed with meaning & emotion. That ain’t modern. It’s horror vacui.  Which is also a defense.  Against vacuums.”

Yay!  I only know modernism as a literary term so I defer to you.



JONATHAN LETHEM:

Very quickly on a busy morning (and stalling until that book arrives) –

Those Silver Star pages are insane. Who knew Kirby was the secret auteur of “What Dreams May Come?”

In Shame,

JL

For the second installment of this roundtable, go here, and for the third installment, go here.

A graphic novel memoir based on Ohio cartoonist Derf’s high school memories of infamous serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, and backed up by interviews, outside sources, and copious end notes, My Friend Dahmer began in 1997, in the comics anthology Zero Zero, and continued in 2002 as a 24 page, self-published comic of the same name. That 2002 Eisner-nominated one-shot was a perverse twist on autobio comix — an exorcism of Derf’s pent-up, creeped out memories about Dahmer’s terrible, potentially fate-sealing formative years. The pamphlet version is loose and visceral, even for Derf, whose style — stretched-out, heavily-inked, almost primal illustrations of middle American life — in books like Trashed and Punk Rock & Trailer Parks, already feels nervous and off-the-cuff.

Some of that original, reckless purity is gone in this vastly expanded, redrawn, and researched version. But the move towards objectivity also affords Derf the chance to turn a wacky, messed up anecdote (“you know, I went to high school with Dahmer”) into the definitive piece of literature on the notorious murderer. With all the Dahmer data he could find, and a head full of memories he can’t shake, Derf tries to connect with the young serial killer in-the-making, with parents too caught up in their own problems, who was a full-blown alcoholic by high school, and a closeted homosexual in an unforgiving region and time period.

A special kind of frustration is aimed at teachers and administrators who seemed too blissfully ignorant of the oddball teen who reeked of booze and acted out by imitating a person with cerebral palsy. One of the most instructive panels in My Friend Dahmer is a large, full-page image, which foregrounds Dahmer, outside of the window of a classroom, slamming down a beer. Inside the classroom, a hippie-dippie teacher instructs bored students, unaware and not all that interested in a teenage fuck up desperately trying to drink his pain away.

If only someone, anyone, especially a godammned adult, would’ve stuck it out and given a shit about this clearly disturbed kid, perhaps life could’ve been different for him and his 17 victims. Derf isn’t exactly placing blame — plenty have lives worse than Dahmer’s and don’t kill people — and his empathy stops with Dahmer’s first murder, but Derf is filling some gaps in the Dahmer story. Gaps that exist because of shoddy reporting, an American media desire to demonize and simplify, and because Dahmer, upon arrest, chose not to victimize himself or explain away any of his actions.

My Friend Dahmer is also about what it’s like to be 16, self-involved, and lack the faculties to empathize. To Derf and his buddies (“the Dahmer club”), Jeff was a funny freak that they kept around for entertainment. That was, in its own way, their attempt to reach out to the lost soul. Particularly telling of the way that adolescent mischief can sprint from anarchic fun to real-life dread is a sequence in which Derf and friends collect money to pay Dahmer to go to the local mall and do his palsy shtick. On the way, in preparation for the performance, Dahmer devours an entire six pack. “Each of us in the Dahmer club had a moment when the realization hit that Dahmer was not just odd, but truly scary,” Derf narrates, “this was my moment.”

We know how Dahmer’s narrative ends. There are too many paperbacks and websites that will detail Dahmer photographing his victims and drilling holes into their skulls while they were still alive, and all that. Derf’s My Friend Dahmer locates Jeffrey Lionel Dahmer of Bath, Ohio, a deeply troubled, weird, sometimes hilarious youth. A sequence, gleaned from one of Derf’s sources, finds Dahmer, lust and violence already tied together in his head, stalking a shirtless jogger day in and day out, with plans attack the guy. One morning, Dahmer makes the decision to wait in the woods with a baseball bat and take him out. Fortuitously, the jogger doesn’t show up that day. Dahmer shuffles back to his parents house. His urges, though unfulfilled, temporarily subside.

Fresh on the site we give unto you part one of an epic roundtable devoted to Charles Hatfield’s excellent new book, Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby. Jeet Heer assembled, moderated and then edited a murderer’s row of critics to discuss Hatfield’s ideas and Kirby in general: Jonathan Lethem (novelist and comic book writer), Glen Gold (novelist and comic art collector), Sarah Boxer (cartoonist and critic), Doug Harvey (art critic), Robert Fiore (comics critic) and, ahem, yours truly. The conversation covered a lot of territory so we’re running it in three parts today, Wednesday and Friday. Here’s a little piece of one of Glen Gold’s posts:

Which is too bad, since Jack Kirby is the only major cartoonist to have killed Nazis. And he didn’t do it from a distance — he killed Nazis using the same hands that later drew Thor, the Aryan God of Thunder, hammering Mangog (old testament villain name, more or less) in the snout. Kirby shot and stabbed Nazis for about six months in 1943 and 1944, and I would argue that experience didn’t just change his life but shaped his work from that moment forward, in that an underlying PTSD worldview took him places he wouldn’t have gone otherwise.

Also on deck today is  Brandon Soderberg’s review of My Friend Dahmer by Derf, which I’ve heard praised by a lot of different kinds of readers.

And elsewhere on the internet, Daniel Best has the latest brief filed in the ongoing Kirby-related litigation. I imagine there’ll be an avalanche of MoCCA and Stumptown reports soon enough, so stay tuned…

Here I am on the road. Again.

New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri. Nothing is sadder than traveling east on Interstate 70 when you leave colorful Colorado and the mountains and enter the dullest part of the entire country. Kansas was a perfect choice for the black and white real world in The Wizard of Oz. Hazy white at the edge of the horizon like old film. No color. No real blue in the sky. No shadows. No mountains. No turns. I fell asleep at the wheel and it didn’t matter cuz it is so flat and straight.

Driving home to Pittsburgh for family emergency. Long story. Usual story. All good. Made it to St. Louis and Kevin H’s house. Within an hour there are boxes of mini-comics strewn all over the floor and we pick up our conversation from the last time I was here.

Now I’m at Ted May’s house. New issue of Injury is back from the printer and looks super sharp. Look for this one soon boys and girls. The best issue yet of this already remarkable series. What? You’ve never read Injury?! It is a prime example of “pure cartooning”. What does that mean? Ask Kevin. He’ll talk your ear off about pure cartooning.

Today, hanging out with Ted and Mardou and their dotter Veronica. I snuck away from the pool party in the back yard to do a Skype call to the Stumptown Comics Festival. The idea was to do my comic book layout workshop but I fear it was more like a puppet show. I couldn’t see the audience and so I just did my riffs to the mirror image of myself. And as much as I may be used to that – ahem – it was a little hard to gauge if the audience was picking up on what I was laying down. I heard them laughing so that is always a good sign. I think it went well. Apparently, it was a full room. But Jason Levian, who moderated the panel, could have been fibbing to me. Thanks, Jason! Thanks, Stumptown fest. Thanks everyone who showed up. Email me if you are interested in my correspondence course. Glad to be a part of such a great show.

Writing this one on the run – so please enjoy these photos I took at Kevin’s house of some choice zines and minis. Over and out!

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Great comics from Steven Gilbert circa mid 90s

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GPOY (Johnny Ryan)

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An old zine of mine from 1997 – landscapes of San Francisco. I haven’t seen this one for a decade.

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Jeff Levine’s zine Destroy All Comics – the first incarnation before the Slave Labor Graphics run. This is from 1994. Kevin said he read this one “a thousand times”.

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Destroy All Comics interior. Fawn Gehweiler was (is) awesome.

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Assorted minis – spy the Tom K mini on top and Mat Brinkman micro mini also

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Tom Hart minis – Maria was my jam

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Marc Bell pile

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uber rare Sammy Harkham

Pearson’s art is aesthetically pleasing. Beyond the story and the themes, I simply enjoy looking at the shapes and colors he puts on the page. His plucky heroine Hilda is a marvel of compact but expressive character design. She lives in a cabin out in the woods with her mother, and befriends every weird creature she meets in the forest in this light fantasy. With her oval head, jutting & triangular nose, stick-figure legs, oversized red boots, blue hair and huge eyes that owe as much to Warner Brothers as they do to manga, there’s a tremendous sense of balance and power that she contains. Her torso, roughly shaped like a triangle, gives her a base that can explode into action at a moment’s notice but still be funny and cute at the same time. Pearson varies his page design to fit his story’s needs: some pages, filled with tiny and invisible elves, have up to eighteen panels. Other pages that contain mountain-sized giants might only have five or six, with the last panel taking up two-thirds of the page.

The plot of the story is simple: as it turns out, Hilda and her mother live smack-dab in the middle of elf-country, only the elves are invisible to human eyes—if the proper paperwork has not been submitted. A new elf prime minister is ushered into office with the mandate of getting rid of Hilda and her mother, and the book opens with the elves throwing rocks, ripping up books, and trying to forcefully push the duo out, before Hilda routs them with a push broom. Meanwhile, Hilda spots a mountain-sized creature at midnight, only for it to quickly disappear. The allusions to Jonathan Swift essentially drive the comic, as Hilda experiences the feeling of being a giant threatening a tiny civilization (as with L. Gulliver and the kingdom of Lilliput in Gulliver’s Travels) as well as being a nearly insignificant speck to a pair of giants in love (a different take on the Brobdingnagians). While visual jokes abound in this book, the story of the elves is one of bureaucracy and procedure run amok to the point of a total diffusion of responsibility. On the other hand, the tale of the Midnight Giant is one of despair-inducing loneliness, a theme that runs through every one of Pearson’s comics. While the book ends on an up note, Pearson can’t resist unleashing a final gag that’s emotionally devastating until Hilda herself comes to terms with it.

Pearson does something interesting when the Midnight Giant finally finds his lost companion. Earlier in the book, Pearson goes big to emphasize the hugeness of the giant and his relationship to Hilda and her environment. When the giants meet, Pearson switches to a nine- to twelve-panel grid that emphasizes the core similarity of Hilda, the elves, and the giants. The hugeness of the giants is conversely toned down as the reader understands that their emotional needs are the same as that of Hilda and the elves: the desire for quiet, the yearning for companionship, and the need for their own space. The book is largely about the ways in which we get in our own way trying to find these things, and Hilda’s reaction at the end shows that she understands how to get out of her own way at last. This book is a perfect blend of warmth and cynicism, of hope and pessimism, and of reality and fantasy. The fantasy and all-ages format forces Pearson to play to his strengths while minimizing his weaknesses as a storyteller, and he has the potential to create a series of books that could some day be remembered as classics.

AND NOW JOE MCCULLOCH NEEDS  TO HAVE SOME WORDS WITH YA

Crossed: Badlands #4
By Jamie Delano, Leandro Rizzo & Digikore Studios
Published by Avatar Press, Inc.

So: Garth Ennis vacates the premises, and Crossed immediately transforms into an Italian gore movie version of The Walking Dead circa 1981, by which I mean the pace is guided by a certain cack-handed dreaminess while characters occasionally speak like they were not originally written in English. “Like to know a some of your story,” remarks outdoorsy down-South protagonist Gregory, having recounted his tale of spontaneously blacking out and vomiting blood upon hearing the murders of his wife and disabled son by phone to a scantly-clad, Amazonian-proportioned and waterboarding-prone prisoner conditioning and interrogation specialist named Steve who theorizes as to the Islamofascist origins of the series’ zombie-ish aggro plague when not flashing back to nights spent coked up in a skyscraper penthouse over the burning skyline of Atlanta.

We are no doubt well and truly in for 120 pages of American satire from Northampton, England’s own Jamie Delano, he of accents and grue and tumbling narrative captions, but this debut number is less a work of cutting pulpy critique than trustee of a surrealism born from shrillness so ultrasonic as to resemble a Ryoji Ikeda composition built around vumming cracks and glitches in your sound equipment. As Steve tunes into her trusty radio, the scene shifts to dubious white supremacist homosexual pothead Leon, bumming around his dad’s militia compound with nothing to entertain him save for reminding Cousin Ray — a dear ringer for Johnny Ryan’s Loady McGee — of his propensity for incestuous cocksucking in exchange for drugs. Meanwhile, near a pier at the edge of an inferno, a pair of nude teenage Christian hottie twins slowly creep into skintight wetsuits while fretting over (1) uploading naked pictures of themselves to their stepdad’s computer, prompting their mom to stab him in the testicles; (2) speeding off in mom’s car while she got gang-raped by infected police officers, a scene accompanied in artist Leandro Rizzo’s depiction by a topless cheerleader standing in sunglasses atop the squad car, waving a machete; (3) subsequently machine gunning their biological father to death (illustrated supra); and (4) if they’ll ever have consensual sex. “But the way the fire is flushing out those freaks, I’d gamble on the other, scary kind,” remarks one twin, before the other gazes into a sniper lens at a multi-pierced bodybuilder standing in a lake of fire dressed as a tribal shaman and screaming with a corpse in his arms.

I am narrating for a reason. Not because Delano’s plotting is slick or deep, but because it barks and staggers erratically through a dimestore hellscape while characters spit dialogues adapted to the usual precisions of the life. As Steve lays dreaming on the final page — “…pinned helpless under the relentless assault of some sick dream monster…” — I can imagine how such raw stock, this potential hysteria of Jamie Delano, might benefit from a picturization less beholden to realist proportions than the C-grade Zenescopeisms of Rizzo and his hot women and stilted action, which drag the whole production across the border of where weird comics become something people start to ask about, like, “Do you really like this? Are you making fun of it?” Duly, the importance of art in this visual medium is reaffirmed, because here we don’t have a comic that howls with HELL ETERNAL, no. This comic is a black diamond slope for devoted assholes. In sum:

THAT WAS NICE. LET’S CHECK IN WITH ABHAY KHOSLA FOR A COMICS NEWS BREAK!
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So then what happened is a DC-affiliated writer Chris Roberson tweeted that he would no longer be pursuing or accepting work at DC or Marvel. Roberson initially only cited a Comics Alliance article critical of those companies’ ethics as an explanation—before giving an interview to Amazing Heroes or whomever explaining his position further.

In response to his tweets, DC announced that it was immediately retaliating against him by refusing to publish something called The Fairest, a series previously promoted to mainstream media outlets as having been directly inspired by the success of Roberson’s work on Cinderella comic books.  DC Co-Publishers Dan Didio and Jim Lee were then questioned about this retaliation at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books (presumably while Jonathan Franzen answered the hard questions at The Gathering of the Gargoyles on some kind of foreign exchange student system I was previously oblivious to).

Pressed, Jim Lee explained that DC needed to retaliate against Roberson because he was worried about ‘internal morale’:  “You have to imagine from our perspective, for our own internal morale, what does it say for a company to hire somebody who’s that vocally against our principles and yet we’re still paying them.” And sure enough, after firing a freelance writer repulsed enough to risk irreparable comic career damage in order to voice opposition to DC’s lack of business ethics, internal morale at DC is probably back to being sky-high. “We fired someone who’d already quit.  I’ll show you my tits if you give me beads,” one DC staffer might have been quoted as saying, at the internal morale Mardi Gras that no doubt ensued once Jim Lee rescued the company’s spirits.  DC employees are probably preparing a parade float at this very moment, for a parade demonstrating their internal morale– a parade float made out of broken dreams and the lamentation of widows, but a parade float nonetheless. (In other news, Internal Morale 27 is the title of my favorite porn film.)

Lee began his response to the questions at the L.A. Times Festival of Books by bemoaning the fact that Roberson hadn’t contacted him first: “I don’t know the writer Chris and it certainly would have helped if I could have talked to him or if he had reached out to me.” DC comic creators probably all agree with Jim Lee that he’s easy to reach, happy to find compromises with the creators who work for him, and open-minded to their concerns– because if they don’t agree, I guess Jim Lee has to fire them.

In attacking the Comics Alliance piece mentioned above, an upset Lee claimed that there were two sides of the story and that fans have over-focused on Alan Moore’s side of the story.  Unfortunately, Jim Lee’s side of the story, like almost every other story Jim Lee has ever worked on, is apparently shipping late.

NOW, how about some Eat More Bikes kaiju with Nate Bulmer:

NOW BACK TO THE COMICS

The Core
By Dieter Vdo
Published by Hirnplatzt

This is a recently published Austrian mini-comic, full color, that details the Wicked Witch-style frustrations that occur when a well-built man who may or may not be suffering from alopecia shows up out of nowhere on August 7th, 3012 for an indeterminate mission in “The Belgium.” While party-crashing, he rips off a dude’s ears and is then invited by a dog creature to head into “the core,” as all champions must. The whole thing is drawn quite well in a style that could briefly be described as Johnny Ryan mixed with Matt Furie, and although it is neither as violent or as funny as the work those two put out, it is light years beyond most of the mini-comics that try to play around in in the same territory. It’s also Austrian, so you know, bragging rights.

Alec: How To Be An Artist
By Eddie Campbell
Published by Top Shelf, 2001

This is still an extraordinary, life-affirming piece of work. But reading it again in light of current events, one event near the final pages leaps out and steals all attention. It’s almost unfathomable to see how little the comics community currently cares for a man who was once accosted at the urinal for signatures. One wonders now–if he’d been more of an groveler, would the fans of today be more accommodating? How much of Alan Moore’s current reputation–as prickly, as difficult–is due to the fact that he so long ago abandoned being the sort of kept pet that so many of comics creators today pride themselves on behaving like?

Wolverine #305
By Cullen Bunn, Paul Pelletier, David Meikis, Rain Beredo
Published by Marvel Comics

This is the debut of the new Wolverine creative team, and if you were pressed to describe their first issue in the most succinct fashion possible, the word “throwback” comes to mind. Now, “throwback” isn’t synonymous with “classic,” but even if it were, there’s no “classic” period of Wolverine to point to unless you start to monkey around Wittengenstein-style with the agreed upon definitions of words like “classic” or “good” or “tolerable” or “I guess since I’m not crying this is okay.” Now, this is not a horrible comic, just an incredibly generic one–a buxom barmaid tries to bed Logan, he turns her down while imagining her ripped asunder, the comic consistently skirts drowning in an issue-length internal monologue containing passages like “The churning in my gut tells me the place is still crawling with old ghosts. Coming back here…it feels like i’m tearing open painful wounds.”–and while incredibly generic Wolverine comics are certainly bad, they’re only bad in a sheepish, dopey fashion. It’s melodrama on mute, as if the people involved are embarrassed to have to write like this, but remain unconvinced that an alternative method exists. They’re probably right. It’s Wolverine: what can you do?

Aquaman #8
By Geoff Johns, Ivan Reis, Joe Prado
Published by DC Comics

Aquaman, huh? This guy doesn’t really deserve a mythos. The best part about this comic is the part where it’s revealed that, prior to the orange shirt with the scales on it, Aquaman’s original getup was just a necklace, no shirt at all. And while Geoff Johns is so fan-service-oriented he probably watches Paul Levitz sleep at night, the question now becomes: is that fan-service enough? Because you gotta be one hardcore gap-filling son of bitch to get your big balls out and pen the story of the day when Aquaman looked at the shirts of the world, nodded his head and said, “Orange. I’m going with that orange one.”

New Avengers #25
By Brian Michael Bendis, Mike Deodato, Will Conrad, Rain Beredo
Published by Marvel Comics

This comic ties into the Avengers Versus X-Men series, although the story it tells is set thousands of years ago in the magic city where Iron Fist got his powers, or learned fighting from, or … whatever Iron Fist’s background is. That secret Asian stereotype city he talks about, where they filmed Kung Fu Panda. It’s in the mountains. That’s where the comic takes place. In the story, we find out that some guy was having dreams about the Phoenix destroying the world thousands of years ago. The guy–he’s important in Iron Fist comics, but those comics got canceled–decided to train a red haired chick to do something, and at the end of the comic, it cuts to the present day so that the guy, who is still alive, can say “we knew this was coming.” This comic costs four dollars.

Battle Scars #6
By Chris Yost, Cullen Bunn, Matt Fraction, Scot Eaton, Andrew Hennessy, Paul Mounts
Published by Marvel Comics

This is the final issue of a mini-series that sold so poorly that Marvel decided to increase its meager profits by printing the cover on the same cheap-ass paper they use for the interior, which results in an object that feels like it should be free. And while it wasn’t clear at first what the purpose of Battle Scars was, it’s now become totally apparent: this comic existed so that Samuel L. Jackson could become the in-continuity Nick Fury of the Marvel Universe, both in print and on celluloid. It did so by conjuring up a non-descript black dude named Marcus Johnson, killing his mother, and then revealing that if you gouged out a nondescript black dude’s eye and shaved his non-descript head, he magically turns into Samuel L. Jackson. Also, you can throw in some dialog to reveal that he’s actually named Nick Fury, Junior, because his mother had sex with Nick Fury Senior a long time ago, and nothing says “Thanks for the fucking and letting me raise our illegitimate son on my own” like giving him a secret name that he finds out about after you get waxed by some Transformers-looking piece of garbage. And then your comics will look like your movies, which will fix some of your cross-branding problems for your intellectual properties. And in the end, isn’t that what really matters?

And the indefatigable Rob Clough reviews Luke Pearson’s lovely-looking Hilda and the Midnight Giant.

Elsewhere, we have the first of what I expect will soon be a flood of new interviews with Alison Bechel based around her new memoir. This one was conducted by Maud Newton for Barnes & Noble.

Andrei Molotiu has posted his introduction to the catalog for “Party Crashers: Comic Book Culture Invades the Art World,” a show that appeared at the Arlington Art Center in late 2010.

Today would have been Walter Lantz’s birthday, and Gary Panter has a tribute to him. Tomorrow would have been Bill Blackbeard’s birthday, and Caitlin McGurk has a tribute to him.

Bill K sent me this Nadja Spiegelman blog post on doing research for her latest YA Toon Book.

The often controversial Domingos Isabelinho gets nice in this fine short essay on the cartoonist John Porcellino.

Fred Tooté also gets star treatment in Cruisin’ With the Hound. Spain, Tooté and their buddy Tex are like the Three Musketeers – fighting, philosophizing, cruising for babes, drinking in bars, scarfing Watt’s famous Bar-B-Q pork sandwiches, and driving up and down the avenues, looking for excitement. Fred is the craziest by far, driving like a maniac, climbing up the walls of buildings, espousing outlandish theories, and making a public display of himself whenever possible. Inhibitions are not part of his makeup. Once he got into booze and speed, it all went up a notch, recalls Spain. “Fred collected National Enquirer when it was real gory and he would go through these periodic things of finding Jesus. When he came down from the speed he’d have some kind of return to Jesus so he ripped up all his National Enquirers.”

Elsewhere, there’s more on yesterday’s interview with Chris Roberson, as well as reflections on DC Comics and creator’s rights in general. First from Tom Spurgeon and then, at length, from Heidi MacDonald, who explores a little-known event last fall.

Happier links are out there, too, like this fine piece by Steven Brower on cartoonists who went into advertising. And this NY Times article on the state of sports cartooning. Not to mention this fine interview with Guy Delisle by Mike Rhode, and the always happy event of more Michael Deforge comics.