This week at the Journal, the domination continues-Katie Skelly's enthusiasm for writing reviews, interviewing people and being the subject of feature articles now sees her starting a five day tour of comics for our Cartoonist's Diary feature. Day 1 is up now--set an alarm for the rest of the week.
But wait, there's more: in today's clean up position, we've got Matt Seneca on Shaky Kane. And while this review of Good News Bible is unquestionably the first to utilize an Emily Dickinson comparison, keep an eye on that date stamp. It won't be the last!
Is Shaky Kane A Major Artist, though? If you're forking over the 25 pounds sterling (or however much that is in countries with proper dental care) for a collection of early work, you probably aren't much in doubt. Still, it's a question worth asking - this book adds to Kane's available output by a fairly hefty percentage, and none of that output goes down with particular ease. Dude is a weird-ass cartoonist, basically, and if anything the itchy, uncomfortable technicolor deconstructions of American pop culture his work currently trades in are a lot easier to grapple with than the comics on display in Good News Bible.
This is difficult stuff, work that originally appeared in anthology issues alongside (somewhat) more conventional comics. To analogize with some other influential weirdo British art, Kane's strips in the Deadline comics magazine functioned a little like Brian Eno's synthesizers did in Roxy Music, adding outre bits of pure bizarrerie to a bouquet of forward-looking but still definable material. Like Eno, Kane eventually proved himself more than capable of putting together solo works that retained his individualism while acting, at least superficially, like the commercial objects they're packaged and sold as. But, you know, imagine an album of just the blorps and whizzies that Eno contibuted to those Roxy records! It'd be awesome if you're into that kind of thing, and so is this book. Kane's work on The Bulletproof Coffin is the kind of stuff pretty much anyone who's interested in comics can get something out of; Good News Bible is the connoisseur's choice, unfiltered and very strange.
I was in Portland to catch the 2018 Synchronized Skating Championships over the weekend, while I was there, I stopped by the Hilton to meet the team from Delaware, and ran into a whole bunch of some of America's best comics retailers. I was lucky enough to book a room across from the Valiant chill-out suite, which was open 24/7, but I wasn't lucky enough to get over there and grab my own commemorative shotglass featuring the character Bloodshot. It's an interesting show, not dissimilar to the ABA's Winter Institute in its mission to bring retailers together with publishing partners to promote the upcoming frontlist and forge stronger relationships, but because it's comics, it's also got a more wildcat quality to it, where retailers can really get into whatever particular issues they have going on in roundtable sessions or a more public forum, and this year's show was no different--there's been a lot of financial upheaval in the direct market in the past year (Shannon O'Leary's annual retailer piece for PW covers this well) and ComicsPRO's organizers had been upfront that this year's meeting would focus on problem solving a lot of those issues. The main response to the meeting so far has been the cloak and dagger methods used by Marvel during their portion of the meeting (due to their size, financial importance and history with the direct market, Marvel and DC have entire portions of ComicsPRO dedicated solely to them at the beginning of the weekend, whereas all other sponsors and publishers present in open door sessions during the final days), but it's my hope that ComicsPRO will make public the "conversation starter" portion of the "Industry Discussion" session they ran at the beginning of the wider meeting. A series of powerpoint slides containing the greatest concerns that retailers currently have, built off the aggregation of a membership wide survey with the intent of discussing solutions, I thought it was one of the most constructive sessions i've seen out of anything comics related. The conversation that followed those slides was broad ranging, intelligent and solution oriented. If some of the publishing partners don't want to hang out with that kind of conversation? That's their loss.
