First, we have the great Bob Levin here with us today, bringing the story of publisher Malcom Whyte to the masses. Everything Levin writes is worth reading.
Whyte had been an admirer of underground comix since the afternoon he had walked into Gary Arlington’s tiny store in San Francisco’s Mission District and been introduced to a tall, skinny fellow named Bob Crumb, who sold him a handful of first edition “ZAP” Number Ones for a quarter apiece. Whyte, as a married man with three children, who had been into, he recalls, “drinking martinis and not eating dope” had missed out on the early days of rock poster collecting, immediately recognized he was being invited into the ground floor of the latest exciting development in the graphic arts. He would stop by Arlington’s once-a-week, buy comix, meet artists, and acquire work from them. “They were interesting guys,” he says, “doing wonderful work, and I was in awe. I’d just go ga-ga.”
They were also artists whose choice of content had limited their audience and restricted their possibilities. By the mid-nineties, most of them worked in relative obscurity. Now, he hoped to bring them at least some of the attention and rewards they deserved.
Meanwhile:
—Interviews. The 2D Cloud site has a short talk with the pivotal former cartoonist (and new publisher) Julie Doucet. Make It Then Tell Everybody has a very worthwhile interview with Christopher Butcher, cofounder of TCAF. (I miss Butcher's blog.)
Speaking of TCAF, here is video of the panel featuring Lynn Johnston and Kate Beaton:
—Awards. The Society of Illustrators announced the winners of its first Comics and Cartoon Art Annual.
—Funnies. Study Group has a preview of Mark Connery's Rudy.
Also, this really is one of the greatest comic-book covers ever. (I'm not exactly out on a limb there.)
—Misc. Robin McConnell has a photo diary of the first leg of his and Brandon Graham's Inkstuds tour. And Travel + Leisure has gathered mostly the usual suspects into their list of the United State's best comic-book stores.
—Misguided Editorials. This anti-self-publishing editorial in The Guardian is fascinating, not because I can't follow the logic, but because its conclusions do not in any way match up with my own experiences with self-published zines and comics.
And probably the less said about Amity Shlaes's slapdash National Review editorial calling for conservative graphic novels the better. I say that not because of her political stance, but because of her lazy ignorance: she seems entirely unaware of the many right-wing(ish) cartoonists, including pantheon figures from Chester Gould and Harold Gray to Steve Ditko and Chester Brown; she credits Edward Said as co-author of Joe Sacco's Palestine; and thinks "manga" is a synonym for "fantasy," which leads to bizarre nonsensical sentences like this: "This attitude, high-minded though it be, is itself a bit of a manga." Readers of this site may enjoy her characterization of the cartoonists at White River Junction, though.
