Yesterday, we published the latest installment in Sloane Leong's series of interviews with her fellow residents at Angoulême's Maison des Auteurs. This week's subject is Pao-yen Ding.
I think that I admire different cartoonists every time, but I have always liked and influenced me. I think Umezu Kazuo, I like his anxiety and full of childlike plots, full of wrinkles. Strokes and naked bloody performances are my favorite elements, so the impact on my performance and content is great.
Why do you find that dreams are an important source of inspiration?
Although it is not always the case, sometimes people will do some impressive dreams. They can have feelings that they have never had in reality. For example, when I was a child, I was fascinated by UFO aliens. I always hope that I can witness the UFO in a day. And once it happened in a dream, I dreamed that I was experiencing an incredible UFO sight with the people around me. The huge aircraft and the dazzling light were in the sky for a long time. Of course, I don’t know that it is a dream now, and that I fully believe that the joy of the heart and the unbelievable atmosphere are not realized in reality. Of course, I will be disappointed when I wake up, but I will always remember that feeling. Since then, I have felt that dreams are incredible things. It seems that I can experience all kinds of feelings instead of reality, so I started to be interested in dreams. But in fact, boring dreams are still still the majority.
We also have Frank M. Young's review of Typex's comics biography of Andy Warhol.
Warhol focused on images that we tend to see through, due to their familiarity. There is no resonance to his early subjects. And that seems the point of Warhol’s work—his portraits broke away from representational complexity and reduced their subjects to silkscreened layers of casually applied color. At Warhol’s headquarters, appropriately named The Factory, his paintings were often the work of other people—supervised by the artist, but made with less input from him as the 1960s careened onward.
Typex tells Warhol’s story without hero worship or bias. Neither hagiography or warts-and-all expose, his Andy gets to the heart of the blank slate that Warhol appeared to be—an image he carefully cultivated, and one which baffled and/or annoyed his fellow artists. The artist/writer studied Warhol’s life and career from different viewpoints; the bibliography of works cited is long and varied. He joins events and figures in a satisfying way, and respects the reader’s intelligence. He seldom resorts to expositional dialogue—the bane of this type of book—and allows events to happen as part of the multilayered fabric of a high-profile social and artistic life.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—Interviews & Profiles. Carolina Miranda interviews Jaime Hernandez.
What’s it like to check in with these characters every so often?
I have to admit that with Hopey changing so much, it was hard writing her into this new story. I didn’t really like her. I thought, I don’t like her as a person. I don’t like what she’s doing. I don’t like how her life turned out. She is one of those friends you’re disappointed in.But I really like where Maggie goes. I like her because she screws up all the time. She wears her heart on her sleeve and I want you to know everything that she’s thinking. With Hopey, I don’t want you to know everything. There are certain characters, you don’t want to know what they’re thinking.
Amanda Hess profiles Lisa Hanawalt.
At 35, Hanawalt has created a whole universe of anthropomorphic characters with deeply human concerns and base animal instincts: alcoholic he-horses, anxious she-moose, dog-girls reeling from trauma and cat-women struggling to succeed in a cat-man’s world. Hanawalt began populating the universe through alternative comics, then in illustrated journalism for magazines like Lucky Peach, in three books she made for adults and one she illustrated for children, and as the production designer of “BoJack Horseman,” the oddly moving show about a washed-up and depressed sitcom star who is also a horse. Now, she has created her own animated series, “Tuca & Bertie,” which represents the summation of all of her weird, wild work.
Agueda Pacheco Flores talks to Simon Hanselmann.
How have people reacted [to your new exhibit]?
I overheard a few people, a couple of businessmen, [I was] sort of spying. He was like "Oh, I could never put this on my Instagram" and a lady he was with was like “Oh, I could. I love aliens."
There's no aliens in the show; there's a witch and and an owl, but I'll take that. That's at least a compliment.
How do you explain your art to those who regard comics as something for children?
I think they need to see the craft element in it. I don't think anyone can deny the craft in the comics. There's 170 pages on the wall that have all been meticulously hand-drawn and painted in an obsessive way. I spent 3,764 hours producing this work.
I had this [experience] trying to convey what it was when I did a [recent] tour. Some of them did find it a bit repulsive. It ties in to the opioid crisis, it ties into housing crisis, homeless crisis. It's just about how people live. I think they did gain some perspective on what it's like for people.
Laura Kenins talked to Emily Carroll.
What is When I Arrived at the Castle about?
On its surface, the book is about a would-be vampire hunter infiltrating the castle of a vampire, only to become lost and beguiled in her serpentine lair. What it’s really about is my own creative process and a rough period of burnout I was going through at the time the book was written. It was drawn intuitively, without knowing exactly what it was or where it was going, plot-wise. I drew each page of this book entirely on its own, without knowing what the next one would be.
Alex Dueben talks to 2dcloud's Maggie Umber.
For 8+ years we paid our artists on time, but the risks took their toll. Nearly every book – even a lot of the mini-comics – cost us as much as buying a car. We want to continue 2dcloud in order to get our debts to cartoonists, publishers and creditors paid up and we want to push altcomics further into realms that no one else is venturing into. That being said, if this Kickstarter fails, we will scale down to a completely different company. We’re in water too deep to continue without support from loving readers!
—News. Lion Forge and Oni Press announced a merger, followed by a round of layoffs.
The consolidated publishing effort will be run out of Portland, Ore., where Oni is based. James Lucas Jones, publisher of Oni, will be president and publisher of the new enterprise. The merger was negotiated by Edward Hamati, the president of Polarity, a media company [Lion Forge cofounder David] Steward founded last year to help develop Lion Forge characters outside comics.
Nora Krug won this year's Lynd Ward Prize.
The Evens Journalism Prize was given to Cartoon Movement, and Takoua Ben Mohamed won the Encouragement Prize.
It seems like only yesterday that we learned the Chicago Reader had hired a new slate of excellent cartoonists to create weekly strips. Now they're already cancelled.
—Reviews & Commentary. Ed Park reviews new books by Mira Jacob and Bill Griffith.
As a Pratt student in the early ’60s, Griffith caught a late-night revival of “Freaks,” and was immediately drawn to Schlitzie. Attempts to render this vision came to naught, but years later, embedded in San Francisco’s underground comic scene, Griffith was inspired to cast a pinhead as one point in a romance-story parody; in the last panel, he gave him the name “Zippy.” Zippy became the titular star of a weekly strip in 1976, which was picked up a decade later for daily syndication, allowing Griffith to showcase his hero’s hyperverbal, free-associative riffs seven glorious times a week. The collected works read like a looking-glass version of “Doonesbury,” the same cultural and political inputs producing something wildly random and addictively funny. (Peak Zippiness for me remains 1985’s mind-blowing “Are We Having Fun Yet?,” with cameos by everyone from Officer Big Mac to Leona Helmsley.)
Adam Gopnik reviews a new biography of Dr. Seuss.
Unlike most of the great children’s book authors and illustrators — Edward Lear, Beatrix Potter — Geisel was not in any way an obsessive or driven visionary, a prisoner of childhood locked in his own imagery or mythology. Instead, he worked (and could have easily stayed in) advertising, animation and political cartooning — to all of which he was, you soon get the sense, more naturally inclined than to what he called, cheerfully, “brat books.” (He never had children of his own, nor seems to have liked other people’s much. “I like children in the same way that I like people,” was his tactful but giveaway standard answer.) Geisel/Seuss, it turns out, made a shrewd though far from cynical decision to write to, though never down to, an audience of children at a moment when that audience was becoming a market — and though his own values and imagination shaped the books he made, his choice to make those kinds of books in the first place turns out in part to have been a response to the new market for them.
Scott Cederlund writes about the latest Jaime Hernandez collection.
After the emotional rollercoaster of The Love Bunglers (reviewed here back in 2014,) Is This How You See Me is a bit more classically Love & Rockets, centered on the core Maggie/Hopey relationship that has anchored so much of the emotional heart of Jaime Hernandez’s work. This love affair has been one of the great romances of comics that even their own marriages to others cannot fully put this relationship to rest. Looking at Hernandez’s last handful of books (including The Love Bunglers and The Miseducation of Hopey Glass), there was the feeling that these two moved beyond each other. The great loves of the 1980s just didn’t or couldn’t survive into the 2000s as they maybe finally grew up beyond the need of the other one.
—Misc. Ivan Brunetti is auctioning off several pieces of original art, including preparatory art for a pair of New Yorker covers, and much more.
I'm not sure this experiment of saving all the links to the last day really worked...
