How do you decide what titles you are going to carry in the shop?
Lots of input from lots of employees. We have a computer that tracks sales so we can guesstimate regular weekly comic book sales, so that's a little easier. But only if it stays with a consist writer and artist or creator, and there isn't a crossover no one likes, or the comic isn't late, etc etc etc. Other than that, it's learning what creators you like, and what the customers like, and how can you bridge the knowledge there to show people things they would enjoy reading. But it all comes down to sales. There are some amazing books and creators that just don't sell in our area, or will sell in one of our stores because every employee there is enthusiastic about it, and won't in others where it's not the thing they're into. But even that can get swamped in the massive output of things coming out. It's hard to remember your favorite new comic from 3 weeks ago when you've had to try to deal with 300 new comic books and graphic novels since then. Especially the graphic novels. It's not like reading a 20 page comic book #1 issue to see if a new series is worth recommending, a 300 page graphic novel is a whole other commitment. And there a lot of those coming out every week now. Even some of my favorite creators have put out stuff I haven't gotten around to reading yet.
The other thing we do it try to keep our eyes open at conventions and online. We're lucky that the Small Press Expo (SPX) is our hometown show, partly started by the founder of Big Planet Comics, Joel Pollack. The original SPX site was 3 blocks from our Bethesda store. We can walk around SPX and buy boxes of comics to sell at our stores, and be surprised how many local people didn't see them at the show, or didn't have time to make it around and see every comic. We just ordered Zainab Akhtar's ShortBox comic line, since it's a bunch of great comics published in the UK that might not make it over here easily. One of our employees, Kelly, got into those. Another employee Kevin, first spotted Peow! Studio in Sweden. A lot of these we order since they look great and we might want some for ourselves! But it's having a diverse store that will have something different. If you visit a lot of comic book stores, sometimes you can walk out without buying anything since it's the same as every other comic book store you've been to.
Elsewhere? Elsewhere is a lot of articles about the Josh Brolin movie coming out. Lots and lots of those. The only one I've finished reading is this Groovy one. It features the following page, which is as perfect a page of Marvel Comics. Who hasn't been assaulted by fists of shattered illusions and broken promises? That's one of the more apt definitions of growing up fiction has ever produced.
Today on the site, comics scholar Michael Tisserand tells the little-known but important story of Eugene Majied, the Nation of Islam cartoonist who inspired Muhammad Ali, and, in the process, changed history.
For Muhammad Ali, it was the right comic at the right time. As Chicago writer Jonathan Eig recounts in his acclaimed biography Ali: A Life, the young boxer, then named Cassius Clay, was standing outside a skating rink in his hometown of Louisville, Kentucky, when a member of the Nation of Islam approached him with a copy of the newspaper Muhammad Speaks.
The man who sold him the newspaper — “a black brother dressed in a black Mohair suit, white shirt and a black bow,” as Ali later remembered him — hoped to convince Ali to go to a meeting. Said Ali: “But I had no intention of going to any meeting. But I did buy the Muhammad Speaks paper. And [one] thing in the paper [made] me keep the paper, and that was a cartoon.”
Not just any cartoon. In the list of cartoons and comics that changed history — think Benjamin Franklin’s "Join, Or Die" or Thomas Nast’s “Boss” Tweed caricatures — the four-panel comic "How We 'Lost' Our Language" in the December, 1961, issue of Muhammad Speaks is certainly more modest and lesser known. Yet its influence has been widely felt. By introducing Ali to the Nation of Islam, it not only helped shape the future of sports. It also changed the wider culture when Ali emerged as an outspoken political figure who championed black rights and protested American military involvement in Vietnam.
Olivia Jaimes is a pseudonym, and the cartoonist requested the email interview for fear that a conversation might reveal clues to her identity. “I’m a pretty private person and I want to be insulated from the whole ‘Big Thing’ that a classic comic strip is,” she wrote. “The pseudonym lets me do that, and I’m really grateful for it.”
It may have been a wise move. The transition from Guy Gilchrist, the previous cartoonist, has not been met quietly.
The nominees for the 2018 Glyph Awards have been announced.
—Interviews & Profiles. Over at LARB, Alex Dueben talks to the novelist and comics writer Mat Johnson.
I’d fallen in love with the novel. One of the reasons was because the novel was cheaper. For two dollars I could buy a brand-new comic book, or for the same two bucks I could go to the used bookstore that was in Reading Terminal Market in downtown Philly and I could pick up a novel that I would read for two weeks. The novel was easier to carry around. Girls didn’t look at me funny. I became a writer and a novelist and got my MFA at Columbia. I had one book that didn’t do particularly well, either commercially or critically. The second one did worse. I hit a dead end with that.
David Hyde was a former publicist at Vintage who was now working at Vertigo. I knew him and he knew about my love of comics. He said, you should come over and pitch. It seems so obvious now, but at the time there was far less collaboration going on between literary fiction and comic books. I was a Columbia MFA so it felt like I was a classically trained ballerina who was stripping out by the airport on the weekends. Comics have changed a lot in the American imagination. What we thought about comics then was superhero stories, and now superhero stories are primarily film and our understanding of the graphic novel exists in a way that it didn’t before. At the time it felt really crazy. The job I have right now I’ve had for 10 years and when I interviewed for the job, I had on my resume that my comics were coming out and they said, that’s just a crazy thing you’re doing on the side, right? That’s not what you’re really doing?
I do not use a computer. I do not know how to use Photoshop. Why teach the machine how to do my job? Everything is analog. I draw on conventional office paper and use conventional office supplies essentially. Pentel rolling writers which were the first rollerball pen. Alex Toth told me to use that pen. And I use color pencils and markers. Mostly Berol Prismacolor brand. As Art Spigelman says “it is more like writing” in that sense if one uses “dry” media. One of my jobs as a young man was to be an assistant to oil painters and I enjoy not having to have a separate studio in which to make art. Cartoonists are lucky that we can be relatively clean in that way. I do use the airbrush. That’s fun. But it is water based. I use the airbrush mostly for background paintings that I am hired to do by Dash Shaw. But I also did a Silver Surfer story for Marvel with the airbrush. The airbrush is fun because it is like drawing with colored air. And it is water based paint.
Today at The Journal, we've got a nice long conversation with Craig Thompson, whose influential travelogue Carnet de Voyage finds itself entering the deluxe hardcover re-issue territory with an all-new publisher. Here's Craig on what happened when he got outside of the studio:
I think I was pretty good about it then. Before I did comics my modes of expression were letter writing and keeping a sketchbook. I did that since I was a teen. Like a lot of cartoonists I lost the habit of because you get into more of a productivity, this is my job sort of zone. You’re not keeping a sketchbook for fun and for play anymore. But at that time, when I was working on Blankets, I was trying to draw more from life. That original France trip in 2001 was right in the middle of working on Blankets so I was trying to discipline myself to draw anywhere. I guess that’s reflected in Carnet de Voyage. I was pushing myself because I came from that cartooning tradition of just drawing goofy cartoon characters from my imagination. I always had art teachers growing up who criticized me for never drawing from life; I just drew cartoons. Once I was in my twenties I was dabbling in that for the first time and trying to learn how to draw from life. And tapping the pleasure of that, too. It’s nice to get out of your own head. That’s a big moral from Carnet de Voyage. When I work on my graphic novels I’m isolated in my studio all alone and really sweating over everything in isolation, but Carnet de Voyage really got me out of my comfort zone and I was just drawing everywhere. I’d be drawing on trains and planes and on camelback while adventuring through the Sahara desert. I was also interacting with people and it wasn’t just that isolation.
And that's not all: today's TCJ Review turns towards...a pretty unusual way to promote craft beer, courtesy of Image Comics and Simon Bisley. It's Tegan O'Neil on Alpha King, or, as it would be properly referred to in court, "3 Floyds: Alpha King".
And perhaps that’s a very important point: youthful signifiers become sharply conservative with time. The powerful Bisley who made Slaine doesn’t seem to have much to chew on here. The protagonist is the Alpha King, and I’m sorry, you don’t need to know the plot. You don’t! It’s not that the plot is bad, it’s that the plot is basically an excuse for Bisley to draw his crazy-eyed muscle-man character breaking the laws of physiology by using exaggerated anatomy to express emotional extremity. Without Bisley it’s hard to imagine Sam Keith, working very similar fields at least through his 90s peak, and after him so many artists who absorbed the influence maybe at one or two generation of remove.
Elsewhere, all of social media and more than a few comics news websites was on fire with commentary following the last minute cancellation of Universal FanCon, a comics-adjacent convention that had used Kickstarter as a funding source. There's a sober write-up of the story thus far at the Baltimore Sun (sober in that it relies less on social media posts, which ultimately makes it less fun to read than the Buzzfeed article, which is more of a chaos registry), and a few threads on twitter are working to unravel the history of the organizers, some of whom are allegedly involved with other conventions that were cancelled under mysterious circumstances. This story has been developing at an extremely rapid pace, to say the least.
Twenty-two years ago today, Neurosis released Through Silver in Blood, an album of inexhaustible savagery, an honest passage through depression, nihilism and fear. It was as non-commercial one could get in a musical category not known for commercial properties, made by a band whose members were struggling with mental illness, addiction and homelessness. It resulted in the biggest hit of their lives, influenced countless musicians, and guaranteed them a career that has yet to conclude. This has nothing to do with comics, but around these parts, we celebrate our own holidays.
If you were intrigued by Joe McCulloch's review of Inio Asano's Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction, you now have the chance to read a little of it for yourself. Or rather, a lot of it, as VIZ was very generous in allowing us to preview a whole sixty pages. It will only be up on the site for a limited time, so don't delay.
Let me attempt to begin with a joke. So Walt Disney, Saul Steinberg, and Tomi Ungerer walk into an insane asylum. No wait, I'm telling it wrong. Walt Disney walks into his therapist's office. The therapist says, "Why the long beak?" Because in this story, Walt Disney is depicted as a bird. I'm kidding; I wasn't really attempting to tell a joke, but summarizing the basic plot and visual sensibility of Anna Haifisch's Von Spatz, where Steinberg is a cat, and Ungerer's a mouse, but no one preys on one another. They are all in rehab due to the psychic toll being artists has taken on them.
This is not one of those comics where the biography of an artist is depicted in a cartoonist's approximation of their style. Haifisch has chosen as her subjects three people whose commonality is that they are all cartoonists of one sort or another, and she depicts them in her own cartooned style. The characters are simply delineated, essentially stick figures, distinguished from one another by their animal heads, but the backgrounds pop with color. Trained as a printmaker, Haifisch uses black lines and limited colors to convey pictorial depth and depth of feeling equally adroitly. There's respect for these artists, and affection for them as characters, but they exist on her terms: It's fiction, not biography. Not only did this never happen, there are many ways in which it never could have happened. Anachronisms and shifting contexts form the core of the book's sense of humor. A few moments suggest cartoon characters might be staying at the clinic as well as cartoonists. The book is a deadpan delight, as the logic, or illogic, of its world is slowly charted. The whole thing proceeds with a "ha ha what?" tension, not quite cohering into something that makes sense, and obliquely suggesting the nature of the characters' breakdowns. The tone is absurd but conveys a tired malaise, like a Steven Wright one-liner, or Zach Galifianakis at his most despondent.
Today at the Journal we've got an extensive look into the work of Olivia Vieweg's career as a cartoonist, illustrator and screenwriter, which is then used as a window into what Germany's contemporary comics scene looks like for readers and creators. It's Marc-Oliver Frisch's first article for TCJ. Here's a little taste of what he's got in store:
Curiously, the type of genre material that keeps industries alive in other countries is virtually nonexistent in German film and comics. Sure, foreign genre work is being translated and distributed en masse, but most German-language genre work—the kind of commercial work that won’t require public funding to be viable—faded away throughout the 1980s, and the industries that produced it never came back. As a work of genre, Endzeit happens to be a niche project, in comics as well as in the film industry. Vieweg wonders whether that’s another part of the legacy left behind by the Nazis, and by the public outrage and legislation against “trash” and “filth” that followed in the 1950s.
“People still think this way even today,” she says. “Comics are for children and for stupid people. And genre movies like Godzilla didn’t find any recognition, either.” Vieweg points out that some of the seminal horror films of the 1920s, such as Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, were made in Germany—just like the frequently horrific fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm, which continue to be well-regarded to this day.
“So what the devil happened there?!”, she wonders.
And on the TCJ Review front, we've got a review of a super-hero comic from DC that's written by Kurt Busiek. You'll have to click through to find out which Intellectual Property it is, but i'll give you a hint: the review is written by Noah Berlatsky, and Noah wouldn't know who to enjoy an issue of Suicide Squad even if our decade long relationship depended on it. (It did, and we're through!)
Harry Peter's art occupied an odd middle ground between Henry Darger, Beardsley, and Victorian children's illustration; his stiff figures and fluid lines lent a cheerfully quivering eroticism to images of battle kangaroos, women bound, pink ectoplasmic goo and more women bound. Together, Marston and Peter created enormously popular, sexually adventurous comics for eight year olds, as well as a brief for third-wave sex-positive feminism before the second wave had gotten off the ground. Superhero comics would never be as weird, as daring, or as beautiful again.
Elsewhere, the Doug Wright Awards were announced. It's a fine list of comics and creators, and, if history repeats itself, will probably result in a fine list of winners. And just a reminder to those of you who don't like it when art is ranked against each other, you're absolutely 100% correct. However, caring about that particular argument is boring, and no one likes listening to you talk about it.
The longer pieces in the book tackle tough emotional matters head-on. He talks in detail about his repetitive behaviors, thinking about it from the point of view of what his neighbors might say. He feels bad for his dad that he has to pull the plug on his brain-dead uncle, but is brutally honest in revealing that he has no feelings about his uncle whatsoever. He accidentally breaks a picture when he gets angry about not being invited to go out to a bar and chastises himself for that reaction. Really, the only thing that breaks up the monotony of his daily existence in the book is his traveling to comics shows. These are like palate cleansers, forcing him to abandon habits and reach out to others. He later gets into a long-distance relationship and pulls away yet again. He finally faces up to his depression and gets a new therapist.
This volume is unrelenting in its honesty and in Budnik's need to expand on his fears, feelings, and hopes on every page. This is the ideal version of a cartoonist not censoring themselves on the page, only instead of drawing lurid power fantasies as a way of concealing what really drives him, Budnik is willing to make himself look fragile. He's not just "spilling some ink" (as Rob Kirby and I refer to autobiographical cartoonists digging deep in telling their stories), he's knocked over a whole bottle. That metaphor is especially applicable to Budnik, who compulsively cleans as a way of controlling his environment. He has the option of concealing his feelings and symptoms, yet he chooses not to. I don't get the sense that he's doing this because he's being an emotional exhibitionist. Rather, it seems to go back to that idea of "telling on your secrets" as a way of loosening their power and the sense of shame they bring, even if he gets little immediate relief from this.
Printed images — and the comic book medium’s unique presentation of them — are at the heart of this feature. We have set out to trace the evolution of American comics by looking at 100 pages that altered the course of the field’s history. We chose to focus on individual pages rather than complete works, single panels, or specific narrative moments because the page is the fundamental unit of a comic book. It is where multiple images can allow your eye to play around in time and space simultaneously, or where a single, full-page image can instantly sear itself into your brain. If there are words, they become elements of the image itself, thanks to the carefully chosen economy of the writer and the thoughtful graphic design of the letterer. In the best pages, one is torn between staring endlessly at what’s in front of you or excitedly turning to the next one to see where the story is going. When comics have moved in new directions, the pivot points come in a page.
The weird thing is that for the most part the explanations that follow tend not to focus on the pages themselves, and seem more about the comics as a whole. Which is fine, but why not just make it most influential comics? It is also a lot more superhero-heavy than I think it should be, but that's a matter of taste. Anyway, an interesting experiment in any case.
Cartoonists who draw and invent stories each day—be it George Herriman, of “Krazy Kat,” Charles M. Schulz, of “Peanuts,” or Saul Steinberg, at The New Yorker—get to tap their subconscious for our delight. In “Why Art?,” the audience is buffeted by the constant back and forth between Davis and her art, but we’re allowed, for an instant, to linger in the liminal space between created and creator. It’s a rare and perfect vantage point.
When I pointed out that one can see parallels between the climax of “Master Race” and the Bruce Wayne origin sequence, Miller cut us off. “Oh, it’s not a parallel,” he said with a little chuckle. “He came first and I imitated him.”
The most recent guest of Virtual Memories is Jaime Hernandez, and the most recent guest on Process Party is Keren Katz. Also, Jessica Campbell was recently interviewed on Chicago radio.
Here is video from a recent panel discussion featuring Vermont cartoonists Alison Bechdel, James Kolchaka, and Ed Koren:
Today at The Journal, we've got your very own Joe McCulloch, here with a review of the first volume of Dead Dead Demon's Dededede Destruction, the newest Viz release by Inio Asano. We'll have an excerpt from the title later this week!
The premise of the series is this. Not long ago, an enormous alien spacecraft appeared above Japan, causing some amount of property damage and loss of life as it maneuvered itself into a low hover. A perhaps more serious incident subsequently occurred when United States military aid resulted in the irradiation of Tokyo via an advanced weapon, but people don't talk about that so much because the effects of A-rays aren't scientifically proven, and anyway the presence of aliens has supplied a new excuse for profitable militarization in Japan, to say nothing of the political benefits of patriotism. On the day of the invasion -- which, doing the math from this series' 2014 serial debut in Japan, places it in 2011, conspicuously the same year as the Tōhoku earthquake and the resultant Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster -- young Kadode Koyama's father was either killed or took the opportunity to abandon his family. Three years later, Kadode's mom, a political radical, is a hypochondriac mess of anxiety who wants the nearly-graduated teen Kadode to join her and her boyfriend off the grid in a clean-living commune. Kadode doesn't want to go; she mostly just wants to hang out with her pal Oran, a manic girl with massive twintails who's deeply invested in online first-person shooter video games, but not because she loves warfare. In fact, Oran is disgusted by the hypocrisy and superficiality of society, so she trains herself for domination in a coming world where humankind is rightly brought low: standing tall at the bottom of the drain.
Meanwhile, over at The Beat, James Romberger got his signals crossed and sent a story about Ramona Fradon to somebody besides me, a guy who has spent more time tracking down old Metamorpho comics than is socially acceptable. To add insult to an already unforgivable injury, The Romberger Report also delivers the official final word on which artist was responsible for that classic civil rights comic, Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story: Sy Barry. It's a great piece of detective work by James, and he should be applauded for his work.
And then there's Alenka Figa at Women Write About Comics with the first loud proclamation of "this one, y'all" around Michael Deforge's Leaving Richard's Valley, which reached conclusion yesterday.
But that's not the only comic you can read on the web, thanks to Kevin Huizenga, who has his 2010 Marvel Strange Tales contribution up at his blog. It features Wolverine fighting the Silver Surfer.
I remember the manic hype around Homestuck during its original run online (between 2009 and 2016), which easily consumed the attention on anyone within five or six degrees of it. The oversaturated presence of the webcomic and its rabid fans exhausted me before I even had a chance to want to read it on my own terms. On top of that, it was overwhelming to even think of diving into if you weren't already on the wagon during the first year, and I had missed that cut-off point. The jagged pixel artwork, the torrential updates, and the copious walls of colorful chat conversations were turn-offs for me, and the buzz about it was deafening. The webcomic became a magnetic field that you were either completely absorbed by or fully repelled by. No in-betweens, no casual readers. This sort of fandom environment was the quintessence of the decade. The early 2000s felt to me like everyone was completely in thrall to their particular media fandom (RIP SuperWhoLock) and then something happened in the early 2010s and the open manic enthusiasm started to fade out. Avid fandoms are still around of course, but I think the proliferation of social justice discourse began heavily permeating online social media at this point and readers became more careful as to what and, more importantly, who they wanted to stan for publicly. This is all to say that the virtual participatory fan culture around Homestuck, its generation, and consistent fervent popularity has been my only point of engagement until now, an interesting but distant vantage point.
Now to the brick of a book at hand. Homestuck, Book 1: Acts 1 & 2 is an interesting but overall redundant artifact. Homestuck follows a small group of tweens as they chat online, avoid their guardians, and watch their homes get destroyed by meteors before getting sucked into a video game. In his preface, Hussie is quick to point out that most of the first three acts were influenced by reader submissions and that the virtual locus of Homestuck is crucial; seeing it in static book form means readers miss out on the dynamism its digital nature provides. These books are meant to be supplementary at best. As someone reading it for the first time in book form, this made me less than excited to read further.
The common defense of Apu is that The Simpsons has many stereotypes (the Italian Fat Tony, the sometimes-Jewish Krusty the Clown, the Scottish Groundskeeper Willy). But none of these characters exist in a cultural reality where they are the only representative of their ethnicity: there are myriad Italian-American and Jewish characters on TV, but for many years, Apu stood as a singular representative of desi culture. That’s slowly starting to change with shows like Mindy Kaling’s The Mindy Project, but these programs haven’t yet had the cultural impact of The Simpsons.
There’s a big difference between the self-deprecating ethnic comedy of Kondabolu and Kaling, which belongs to a tradition of Richard Pryor and Jerry Seinfeld, and having a white man do an Indian accent (as Hank Azaria does for Apu). As Kondabolu argues in a conversation with Whoopi Goldberg, there’s an undeniable element of minstrelsy in Apu.
As the spouse of one of my closest friends, Chip Kidd, I got to know Sandy McClatchy as one might know, well, a friend’s spouse. Chip and Sandy met in the early nineties, Chip and I having been friends for a few years before and I first learning of Chip’s infatuation when he mailed me a color-xeroxed eight-by-ten-inch publicity photo of Sandy with the words PROPERTY OF C.K. written diagonally in red across its lower quadrant like bubble letters on a school spiral notebook. Though I felt like I’d been passed a secret note in math class, I offered up my heartiest of congratulations because Chip had been single for a while. Privately, however, I was worried: Chip and I really only talked about comics and dumb stuff; this guy was a poet and opera librettist. What do poets and opera librettists talk about? What was I going to talk about if I ever met him? ...
—Interviews & Profiles. For the NYRB, Claudia Dreifus interviews Art Spiegelman.
I take it that you are no fan of Schindler’s List?
I think of it as the feel-good version of that S&M cult classic The Night Porter. There’s a scene in Schindler’s List in which the commandant played by Ralph Fiennes is in bed with a woman, and he takes his handgun and shoots some Jew he sees out the window. The message there, inextricably linked, is that all sex leads to holocausts. They are somehow joined at the hip: the two concepts.
As troubling was the Best Foreign Film in 1999, Life Is Beautiful. It said, ultimately, that if only the victims could just have taken it all with a song in their hearts and tap-danced their way, Chaplin-like, through the barbed wire, then “life” would be “beautiful.” I read somewhere that the director said he’d been inspired by Maus. If that’s true, I would have liked to go back in time and yank the book out of his hands!
I feel like some people are marathon runners, some are sprinters, and some are in between. As a cartoonist, I’m a marathonist. My normal format when I’m working on books, left to my own devices, is making longform works. When I’m asked to do shorter form work, for me the idea of putting a narrative on a single page is like, How would I even…? I love writing long dialogue. I’m kind of a maximalist, so the idea of trying to fit any kind of a narrative in that small of a space — I know it’s possible and there are people who do it beautifully — but how would I fit a story on a single page? It just seemed overwhelming. It made more sense to me to do… it’s obviously not a gag comic but it’s more of a… I don’t know!
Great Big Story has a short video interview with Daniel Clowes:
News. The New York Times has followed up on The Hollywood Reporter's recent story alleging that Stan Lee may be a victim of elder abuse.
For four decades, Mr. Lee has lived in a relatively modest two-story house in the middle of what has become some of Los Angeles’s most valuable real estate. Dr. Dre is a neighbor, and Leonardo DiCaprio lives down the block, on a street where houses can list for north of $30 million.
Inside the suburban-style home, a nurse and a maid bustled in the kitchen. Although Mr. Lee seemed at ease, the armed guard lent an air of surveillance that made it difficult to entirely relax.
The house is a time capsule of late 1970s Hollywood. Decorated by his late wife, it is dotted with ceramic animals, carved figures in African and Asian styles, and large gilt-framed mirrors hung on mirrored walls. Empty hooks surrounded by dusty outlines sit amid prints and original works by noted artists — Joan Miró, Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder, Salvador Dalí and Roy Lichtenstein — suggesting a home being slowly eroded.
“My wife, she’s the only person in the world that I would know of who would put a big mirror on top of a big mirror,” Mr. Lee said. “And when she was here, she had so many paintings, all over. Most of them have left now. My daughter took a lot of them, and a lot of them have gone elsewhere.”
On Friday, Lee filed suit against his former business manager, Jerardo Olivarez.
Following The Hollywood Reporter’s investigative piece on Lee being a potential victim of elder abuse by his inner circle, the comic book icon filed a complaint in Los Angeles Superior Court claiming that Jerardo Olivarez is only one of the “unscrupulous businessmen, sycophants and opportunists who saw a chance to take advantage of Lee’s despondent state of mind, kind heart and devotion to his craft” after the death of his wife in 2017. Lee, whose time working at Marvel in the 1960s led to the creation of characters such as Spider-Man and Iron Man, alleges that by managing his affairs, Olivarez caused him to lose “a tremendous among of money as money and assets were being transferred to Olivarez by Lee without Lee being aware these actions were being taken.” The amount of money the suit claims was transferred from Lee’s Merrill Lynch Account without permission was approximately $4.6 million. The suit even claims that Olivarez orchestrated a scheme to sell Lee’s blood as “collectibles” in Las Vegas without his permission.
Today at the Journal we've got the conclusion of Alejandra Gutiérrez' Cartoonist Diary. Someone--I wish I could give them credit, but I don't know who it was--liked a Twitter post that featured a brief diary comic by Alejandra online, and I emailed her immediately to ask her to do one of these weekly stints based off that one image. She offered to cover the week she would be attending a porn shoot, and the result has been something even better than I had anticipated. She's an extremely talented cartoonist, and I hope you've enjoyed her work this week as much as I have.
And that's not all, of course. Today we've also got that hot review action for you that I know you crave. Today's is on Bodie Troll, by Jay Fosgitt. Irene Velentzas has the verdict...and the verdict is that it's good.
Fosgitt’s character, Bodie, is reminiscent of a six-year-old hyperactive kid brother who straddles the line between grossing you out and warming your heart with his naïve innocence. Bounding out of his dark hole under the bridge in the opening pages, a fearsome, towering, troll overturns the idyllic pastoral landscape of Hagadorn, vaulting and roaring at any passersby who dare set hoof on his bridge. The page layout itself becomes off-kilter, frantically trying to accommodate a monster that is ultimately no larger or less adorable than a baby goat.
And elsewhere? Well, if you're still hungry, Jessa Crispin has a piece up at In These Times on John Porcellino's most recent book with Drawn & Quarterly that I thought was pretty interesting. The Comics MNT team has been posting some useful and intelligent pieces on their recently inaugurated site, this Ariell Johnson interview is a great example. In press release news, Jason from Floating World didn't just provide a great interview on Wednesday to this very website, he also announced that he would be publishing Zack Soto's Secret Voice sometime next year. Why didn't Jason mention that? Is he just that humble? Maybe he's embarrassed? No, it's gotta be humility! Well, as a friend of Zack's, I couldn't be happier for him. I know, I know, Secret Voice has been published 7 different times by 13 different publishers over the last twenty years, but something tells me that this partnership is the one that will finally convince Zack to do something else with his time.
You can also go and google about all the various job changes that have occurred at various comics publishers, and then speculate as to why those changes were made, and how that will impact the publishing of the comics those publishers make. Some of those websites will have some good gossip to go on, others will be written by people who are better at guessing than others, and some will just be bitter, weird sniping from people who don't understand why they haven't been asked to go work at those places, despite how good they are at imagining ways to fix the Transformers or "the direct market" or whatever. As an alternative to doing that, you could watch a video of the guy who owns Diamond tell all the comics retailers nervous about Marvel tanking their business to have a positive attitude and read The Secret (yeah).
Or you could bounce all this shit and read a comic. I'd recommend it be a 1980's comic by Keith Giffen.
Roman Muradov's comics are often viewed as being cryptic, but they appear much less complicated if you take a closer look at what the artist is driven by: topics mainly revolving around duality, depicted in a style which simultaneously assembles and disassembles spaces.
If you're openly emphasizing your disregard of conventional narratives – or any narrative at all – by provocatively toying with your tinder status between you, a.k.a. the author, and the reader, then you might either be concealing the fact you are unable to come up with something being worth telling, or you're Roman Muradov, who did exactly this when estimating the comparability between his work and its readers at 0.12% on the final page of The End of a Fence, his 2015 debut within the Latvian kuš!-mono series.
But as much as this kind of understatement is an aspect of the persona Muradov has cultivated, it was also an indispensable component of the story Muradov is telling in that book: An extrapolation of human relationships in the wake of dating simulations (like the aforementioned tinder app) situated under the influence of extremely contrarian scenarios like The Atrocity Exhibition and Vermilion Sands, both of which are written by British science-fiction author James Graham Ballard. While borrowing its frayed-out structures from the first collection of short stories and adding the elegiac decadence from the latter, both find their match in sentences collapsing after an erratic downhill race into all-devouring sandy oceans of wordplay, visually manifesting as infernal landscapes painted in interwoven streaks of carmine red at The End of a Fence's final.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—The Hollywood Reporter has a lengthy, sad story about Stan Lee's recent life, and claims of elder abuse.
Back in early February, fighting what he later called "a little bout of pneumonia," 95-year-old Stan Lee had an argument with his 67-year-old daughter, J.C. This was hardly unusual, but it seems to have been a breaking point.
The comic book legend — whose creative tenure at the helm of Marvel Comics beginning in New York in the early 1960s spawned Spider-Man, Black Panther and the X-Men and laid the foundation for superhero dominance in Hollywood that continues with the April 27 release of Avengers: Infinity War — sat in the office of his attorney Tom Lallas and signed a blistering declaration.
The Feb. 13 document, obtained by The Hollywood Reporter, begins with some background, explaining that Lee and his late wife had arranged a trust for their daughter because she had trouble supporting herself and often overspent. "It is not uncommon for J.C. to charge, in any given month, $20,000 to $40,000 on credit cards, sometimes more," the document states. It goes on to describe how, when he and his daughter disagree — "which is often" — she "typically yells and screams at me and cries hysterically if I do not capitulate."
—Salon has published a short excerpt from Harvey Kurtzman biographer Bill Schelly's new memoir, Sense of Wonder.
There are ... ways in which the appeal of superheroes is different for a homosexual male than for a heterosexual male. My straight friends like comics featuring what collectors call “good girl art,” that is, comics that feature the female form prominently and use sexual titillation to at least partly generate sales.
For gay comics fans like myself, virtually all superhero comics feature “good guy art.” Obviously straight guys notice the prominence of the male physique in comics; they just don’t experience it as anything sexual. For gay comic book readers, superhero comics had always presented that extra frisson of the male body drawn as if covered but delineated in ways to reveal the hero’s every rippling muscle.
The Millions has an excerpt of its own, from Genevieve Hudson's new book on Alison Bechdel, A Little in Love with Everyone.
“Your father has had affairs with other men,” her mother tells Bechdel later on the phone. This is the first time Bechdel has heard anything about her father’s bisexuality. In this series of panels, Bechdel’s character is first shown sitting on the floor with the phone pressed to her ear. Her eyes are wide with shock. She moves into what looks like a fetal position. In the corner of one panel, Bechdel has drawn the book Sappho Was a Right-On Woman, filling in the small queer details that had begun to infuse her life. Her mother’s disclosure sheds some light on why it might have been difficult, perhaps even painful, for her to hear that her daughter was a lesbian. Her mother’s relationship with Bruce, the other queer person in her life, had been associated with secrets, lies, and even cruelty. It was not a good precedent for what a queer life could be. When Bechdel asks her mother why her father isn’t the one telling her this stunning information, her mother responds: “Your father tell the truth? Please!”
Today at the Journal, we've got the first installment in our newest column: Retail Therapy. Appearing biweekly, this column will spotlight the people and stores working in comics retail. There's a long history to the relationship between The Comic Journal and retail, and we're glad to be reopening a window to that part of the world at a time when things seem to be changing on a near-constant basis. This time around, the hot lights are focused on Jason Levian, whose Floating World Comics has become a formidable publisher--but the retail roots run deep.
There was a time, not too long ago, when the comics were better than the movies (or video games or whatever cartoon tie ins). The comics represented limitless imagination and freedom and innovation in storytelling. They delivered an addictive mind blowing experience.
Now it seems like the movies are the main attraction and the comics are… above average. I can actually read some of them cover to cover and share that opinion with you. They’re okay.
Someone is like “Oh I loved this Marvel Disney movie what should I read next?” And the answer is too often, well that was it. You saw the movie and that was the thing. Here are some comics where for $4 each you don’t really get much. The movie was actually the best version of this thing.
But that's not all--we've also got Today's TCJ Review, and it's all about The Pervert, from Michelle Perez, Remy Boydell and Image Comics. According to Carta Monir, this is one book you shouldn't pass up.
The Pervert, written by Michelle Perez and illustrated by Remy Boydell, is that big, difficult, trans, queer-as-shit, pull-no-punches sad fucking comic that I’ve been waiting for. And now it’s here, out from Image, shipping now. You need to read it. Unless you’re a trans woman, in which case you might have already basically lived it.
Cathy, Cathy Guisewite’s eponymous chronicle of one woman’s struggles with the “four guilt groups: food, love, family, and work,” ends not with a bang, but a simper. She visits her mom, claiming to have news. Mom shores up the strip's feminist bonafides: “You’re an incredible woman from an incredible time for women! You have to know anything’s possible!” She is visibly anxious. She is preparing for the worst. But there is no need to worry: Cathy, hand on belly, is pregnant. The fetus emits a single, pink “Aack” from within the womb. At last, she has it all.
Despite this attempt to encompass both domestic bliss and feminist ambition, Cathy’s 2010 end seemed to please no one. In a piece for The New Yorker entitled “The Demise of Cathy,” Meredith Blake lamented that, like Family Circus, Cathy is “hopelessly out of fashion.” “Perhaps Cathy spoke to the women of the seventies and eighties,” she allowed, “but nowadays the strip feels, well, cartoonish. The facile jokes about feminine neuroses are the essence of everything that people have come to dislike about chick lit.” Over at The Frisky, Jessica Wakeman was markedly more positive, deeming the strip “groundbreaking” and remarkable for validating the lives of single women. But still, she protested: “I’m not saying the “Cathy” strip was particularly feminist, because it wasn’t: the character was obsessed with finding a husband and watching her weight.” It is “kinda outdated… and certainly it’s still stereotypical and annoying.” The Los Angeles Times criticized Cathy for “starting to feel a bit old,” and compared it unfavorably to Sex and the City, Melissa Banks’s The Girl’s Guide to Hunting and Fishing, and Jennifer Weiner’s Good in Bed. Feministing.com was more measured, recalling that “from what I heard, during her inception in the 1970s, she was actually a breath of fresh air.” But still, the boom was lowered: “I don’t know what happened. It seems that Cathy went from Everywoman to a giddy, whiny, chocolate-eating woman that seems to have no sense of self.” Even the Jezebel community mustered little fondness: The top comment beneath “Cathy’s Last Act Ack” excoriates Guisewite for undermining the strip’s message with a comfortably patriarchal ending.
Beneath this intellectual crust, however, lies the bubbling magma of Cathy-anger. The Observer chronicled the GoComics.com commenters who cheered the end of such a “neurotic wimp,” the Democratic Underground forum threads “for all those who hate the comic strip Cathy,” the blogs that replaced Cathy’s captions and word balloons with expletives and fat jokes. The roundup remarked, with a blinkered sort of innocence, “people really hate this comic!” Look up #WaysCathyShouldEnd on Twitter, and you’ll find a snapshot of 2010 vitriol: “Hoarding experts arrive too late to find Cathy flattened under a heap of diet aids, cats and dating books,” “In a fit of self-loathing, Cathy performs at-home liposuction with a carving knife and a dustbuster; dies of sepsis,” and, perhaps most emblematically of all, “just like Sylvia Plath did.”
—Profiles & Interviews. At Hazlitt, Matthew James-Wilson interviews Anna Haifisch.
I think when Drawn & Quarterly came to me I said, “That book is gone, but I have this other book. Do you want to have a look at this?” I just sent over a PDF of it with the English translation in the comments. Then after that they picked it up.
I didn’t expect this to be happening. I was just like, “Ah, let’s see what happens,” and when they came back and said, “We actually want to do it!” my heart just skipped a beat while I was in front of the computer. I just started gasping and I hit the desk really hard with my hand out of pure joy and almost broke my finger. It was on my left hand, which is my drawing hand, so I was like “Fuck!” But really, it’s a big thing for me since it’s a big publishing house. I’ve always admired Drawn & Quarterly. The German publishing house Reprodukt picks up so many titles from them, so they’re very present here. I grew up with them! I read Julie Doucet in my teenage days.
The Ace Rock’n’Roll Club, the series that caught Moore’s eye, were beautifully formed slices-of-life which introduced, as a part of the supporting cast, Alec McGarry. Alec was a cipher for Campbell, a fictional avatar through which Campbell could filter his own life, ranging from his punk years in Scotland to his sojourn on England’s south coast, to his first marriage and life in Australia. “His appreciation for the sensory phenomena of ordinary existence, as rich as Henry Miller’s, made his autobiographical narratives into instant classics, streets ahead of the largely self-absorbed comic-strip memoirs that were to follow,” says Moore.
Consider Warren Craghead, the TrumpTrump author, who draws in a style that’s vaguely reminiscent of the gonzo mode of Ralph Steadman (best known for his work with the journalist Hunter S. Thompson). Craghead, like many cartoonists, does use Trump’s tweets and speech as source material, but he could not possibly be mistaken for a collaborator. He turns Trump’s words against Trump’s person. For instance, in one of his drawings, Trump is shown as a sweaty, fat, hairy man with saggy breasts, and this image is humorously paired with one of Trump’s own insults: “A person who is very flat-chested is very hard to be a 10.”
Today at the Journal, Rachel Davies talks with Anna Haifisch about her work, its ability to travel across the globe, and what it's like to see her past reintroduced to a whole new audience.
Do you feel that there’s much different of a reception when you release something to a German market versus to an American one?
In Germany, I toured Von Spatz when that came out, and it caught some attention, that’s for sure, but Germany’s very conservative in the reception of comics, or like even visual work in general. It was only when The Artist went on Vice that, back home, people responded to it like, “Ah, okay, the North Americans obviously liked it so it must be good for some reason.” It’s a bit strange to feel that, I mean it doesn’t feel like a rejection or something, but I think without Vice, for example, The Artist or Von Spatz wouldn’t have been so interesting to anybody.
And that's not all! Starting today, The Journal is excited to release an all new Cartoonist Diary--this week, you'll be riding shotgun with Alejandra Guitérrez as she makes her way to a movie shoot. An adult movie shoot, that is. In today's installment, it's all about trip prep.
Elsewhere: I got an "elsewhere" for you. Go dip into this website for a while and get back to me. My current favorite part is the video, which I've embedded below, because it was in watching said video that I found out that one of the things that is now labeled "diverse" is when you make a superhero into a white guy with a beard and a stupid hat, but he still wears a super-hero costume?
In the first place I should probably say that when I was younger and getting sporadically published in The Journal during roughly the last quarter of its initial print incarnation – a healthy run by any stretch as a semi-regular contributor – I never imagined I would be published one day in those same pages (albeit virtual), singing the praises of Crisis on Infinite Earths! I thought for sure and for certain I’d spend the rest of my life publishing sober analyses of all the latest impenetrably minimalist monographs produced by extraordinarily talented but also minutely obsessive middle-aged craftsmen with the time, resources, and patience available to design a single book to within three tenths of a micron of its life. But alas.
[...]
Crisis on Infinite Earths is a book that many people have read, many more people have discussed, but apparently few people have ever actually enjoyed. I’ve seen younger fans approach the idea of reading Crisis for the first time as if it were some sort of chore or obligatory duty – yeah, yeah, if I like DC comics or want to understand Final Crisis or maybe just check another one off the proverbial “1001 Comics To Read Before You Die,” I have to at some point wade through this monster. And I have never understood that attitude, I find it completely alien. Incomprehensible!
And Brian Nicholson is back, too, with a less than rapturous take on Dilraj Mann's Dalston Monsterzz. Here's a chunk from the middle:
This comic also does the always-irritating thing of having a character use "Google" as a verb in a fictional world where the Google-type service is later shown to be called something else arbitrarily; here, the search engine is called "Soosle." Why?
There's also a point where a character says "Time for some exposition" as the author's self-aware joke, that seems unaware of how much stuff has already felt plainly expository, when the reader has been waiting, endlessly, for something to instead be evocative or atmospheric or thrilling. The comic has no style, despite the fact that it clearly wants to be something where its style overcomes its lack of substance. It has polish, but anything it's been applied to it's eroded.
The first moment where the story does breathe, and you see what might be underneath the whole thing, is a fight scene. It's clearly indebted to Street Fighter, or the impossible physics of similar fighting games, and it was so dumb I had to put the book down. I hadn't realized I hated the book yet, because it hadn't slowed down enough for me to see what it was even trying to do. That was the point where I realized the book was mortifyingly shallow, and that the scene of the main character playing video games was meant for a reader to identify with it, so they would be into the fight scenes with a Street Fighter vibe.
What's your relationship between activism and art? Or, alternatively, what frustrates you about some of these discussions around activism and art?
Art is secondary. It should be the glue, or the gasoline, the thing that helps facilitate the change. Like, so much of what I do now is "armchair activism," posting on Facebook, writing email blasts. By itself, without a goal, that stuff is worse than nothing. But ideally it's in the service of unifying and strengthening people, putting pressure, voting the old bums out, pushing the new bums to not be bums.
I fucking LOATHE the shitty smug self-satisfied idea that art is a political means unto itself. Even if it ends up working out like that, I hate the not-getting-my-hands-dirty feel of it.
And then there's this: Jillian isn't the only person who has stopped by to talk about Eleanor's work today--we've also got the book's review, brought to you by the ever insightful Rachel Davies.
While the book remains instructional and educational about art, Davis goes on to prove that this doesn’t have to be entirely simplistic. Davis manages to discuss such complicated issues as how the burden of student loans affects one’s output, feeling far too close to an artwork, and being defined by one past artwork, into two to six page bites throughout the book.
But we've also got another reason for you to stick around today, which is this: a nice chunk of The Case of the Missing Men, a recent graphic novel release by Kris Bertin & Alexander Forbes, published by Conundrum Press.
And with that, i'll bid you a happy Thursday. I have a five year old with a fever, and it's eating my lunch.
Sloane Leong returns today to examine another set of webcomics caught in the Comics Dragnet. In this installment, she also discusses what she calls "Tumblr style."
Mildred [Louis]'s art is exemplary of what I call "Tumblr style," a look that's cropped up around this fourth generation of webcartoonists, a confluence of unexpected, eclectic influences and inspirations coalescing into a single, quirky style and executed through a digital medium. Tumbling is actually a pretty good descriptor of what a lot of internet-born artists go through who cut their teeth on filling DeviantArt galleries with fanart and OCs, spending hours in oekakis and taking cheap Gaia commissions. It’s art that’s been rolled as if in a rock tumbler of inspiration, where there’s little direction applied except for technical and stylistic trends of the current platform being used or the whims of their $10 commissioners. Art history itself is flattened out completely on the internet but especially on Tumblr where Late Byzantine pieces are posted alongside glossy superhero pinups and over-filtered anime screencaps. Your eyes start gliding over the illuminated visual noise. It takes a severe focus to keep from getting haphazardly dented, to instead be polished by the constant battering of styles. Habitual techniques leave deep tracks in one's muscle memory and absorbing the same family of visual vocabulary repetitively makes even microscopic changes feel vast. Sometimes muscle memory will beat out my will to execute a new texture or a new type of line. Only repetition carves space in my mind for it to exist but it's like pulling teeth as I get older. Deeply rooted teeth. With Mildred, I see the impact of the animated Sailor Moon series, cleanly lined and expressive, as well as other early 2000s Toonami toons in the bright cel coloring style, blurred shallow focus, dynamic beady pupils. There are also other cute quirks, for example when tiny panels with character's heads pop-up to continue a conversation with the focal character in the larger panel, an anime/manga technique that I find really charming. It's a style that can swerve hard between being in a constant state of growth and becoming to indulgently emulative of one's inspirations. Often though it gives us something unique and when it fails it was because a risk was taken, which is exciting to me as a reader and an artist.
If the devil is in the details, then Pascal Blanchet is the very devil himself. Known especially for his 1920s Art Deco artistic style with a whimsical twist, Blanchet’s work is a masterclass in simple elegance. Blanchet’s colorful geometric style is a feast for the eyes, mesmerizing the reader with block outlines and silhouettes, somehow giving just enough of a hint to suggest shape without a single line more. Simplistically color-blocked building facades create a riot of color that give way to such intricately woven details as a single archway, clock, or window, which become the heart of the image’s mastery. Blanchet creates breathless articulations of intricate natural and manmade landscapes that produce audible gasps of wonder from the reader.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—Interviews & Profiles. The Scotland Herald interviews John Porcellino.
How much work do you have to put into making your strips look so simple?
I always say, it’s harder than it looks. If you have a comics panel with a thousand crosshatch marks in it, it’s easier to hide errors, or missteps in drawing. When you have a comics panel that consists of just three simple lines, they better well be the right three lines. There’s no place to hide in that kind of simplicity. I’m not always happy with every single drawing, I feel I’m always learning, but at this point having drawn comics seriously for 35 or so years, much of it is intuitive. I generally don’t have to redraw much from my first draft. On the other hand, when I do have to redraw a panel, I often have to redraw it 10 times. I either get it on the first go, or I can be in for a slog.
The most recent guest on the Process Party podcast is Sloane Leong.
Charlotte Salomon’s short life was haunted—by the rise of the Nazis, who ultimately took her life, but also by her family’s history of severe mental illness. Salomon’s attempt to make sense of this history—and of the role of art in the face of both despair and genocide—is found in her major work, Life? or Theater? A work of almost 800 sequential paintings, Life? or Theater? is arguably one of our most important graphic narratives, and yet until recently few people have had the opportunity to read it in full. The Jewish Historical Museum in Amsterdam recently exhibited the complete work for the first time, and now Overlook Press has produced a gorgeous English-language edition of the complete series that will make the work more widely accessible than it has ever been.
Today at The Comics Journal, you'll find the latest episode of Greg Hunter's dynamite podcast, Comic Book Decalogue, which this month poses its traditional ten questions to Meags Fitzgerald. In the episode, Hunter & Fitgerald discuss Geneviève Castrée, Jillian and Mariko Tamaki, Ames Lettering Guide revelations, and circus art.
And then we've also got a review, this one from Noah Berlatsky. It's on the latest graphic novel from Nobrow, Out Of Nothing. Noah's opening lines are a pretty indication of where he went with this one:
God died a while ago, but we still haven't entirely figured out how to get on without him. The old guy with a white beard still hovers ghost-like in the back of our minds and the corners of our narratives, giving our lives a patina of meaning, comfort, purpose, or morality until we remember, with that sinking sense of grief, that he's not there, and we're alone.
Jeez Noah. So close to Easter, too!
ELSEWHERE, The Daily Beast published a long, detailed pieceon the hate and harassment taking place online and off that's categorized under the name #Comicsgate. It's a depressing look at extremely repellent behavior, which, as the articles makes clear, has no purpose beyond its own repellence.
Looking back on my own interest in the strip, now I realize that "The Wiggglemuch" strips were partly compelling because Crowley suggested an affinity with a larger and also esoteric visual and literary culture, which was unusual in comics at the time. The spiritual allusions, stiffness, and symbol-driven character design also suggested another way to think about comics entirely: less drawing-based and more like moving sculptures. I wondered then, as many others did, just how he intersected with comics. As it turns out, Crowley really was just stopping over. His life and work is now the subject of a large and generously illustrated book, Herbert Crowley: The Temple of Silence by Justin Duerr. It is the kind of scholarly and research-driven deep dive that I wish for about... well, most everything. Duerr gathers every conceivable strand of Crowley's unusual and extremely complicated life and work and weaves them together into a coherent and quite moving whole.
Duerr begins the book with a lengthy illustrated biography of Crowley, and then turns it over to absolutely stunning reproductions of Crowley's work, including the complete "Wigglemuch" run, plus two-unpublished installments, and numerous drawings and paintings. The artwork, aside from the comic strips, is wonderful, but not entirely unique to him. The imagery -- gargoyle-like forms, temples, and other mystical symbols -- is in keeping with slightly older contemporaneous Symbolists, like Odilon Redon and Felicien Rops, and the proto-Surrealist literature bring published at the time in Paris. It is certainly connected to last year's incredible exhibition at The Guggenheim in New York: Mystical Symbolism: The Salon de la Rose+Croix in Paris, 1892–1897.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—The two winners of the sixth annual Slate/CCS Cartoonist Studio Prize have been announced. This year, Keren Katz won for print, and Michael DeForge won for the web.
Today at the Journal, it's Friday: Good Friday, if you care. I'm using the opportunity to get out of work early to visit my local cinema and catch the new Spielberg picture. Not because I'm itching to see that lousy actor who somehow managed to fuck up Cyclops, the second best X-Man, but because I want there to be more movies featuring the Battle Toads. After that? I'll probably re-read today's Journal installments, because they're just that good.
First up, we've got Ardo Omer talking to gg, whose 2017 graphic novel I'm Not Here has been continually accumulating praise since its release. (We reviewed it in January). I was struck by this portion of gg's response to Omer's question about the theme of freedom in her work.
Everyone pushes up against all kinds of walls every day and it's natural to wonder how to go beyond that. I'm don't think we can ever know what's beyond the outermost walls (ie. totally free) but the struggle to get closer is fascinating to me. Isolation, escape, and abandonment (being abandoned and abandoning) can be strategies to deal with this unknowable thing, but as you can probably see in my stories, they're never really effective and often become traps themselves. I think of my work as a way to meditate on my general feelings, whatever they may be at any given time but I guess I think about these particular things a lot and that's why they come up so much.
On the review front, Tegan O'Neil read all 300 plus pages of First Second's latest by Pénélope Bagieu to find out if you had to. (She makes a case that you do.) It's called Brazen: Rebel Ladies Who Rocked The World.
The most remarkable aspect of Brazen is Bagieu herself. She tips her hand early in the book with a profile of cartoonist Tove Jansson, creator of the deathless Moomins. Bagieu draws the Moomins really well, as well as every other Jansson creation she packs into those pages. Jansson is perhaps just one influence but it’s interesting to see just how unerringly her style reflects Jansson’s very particular and peculiar line. Bagieu’s thin and expressive lines communicate a great deal. She has an eye for caricature without which this book would be a futile endeavor.
ELSEWHERE, Buzzfeed published an extensive, revolting piece on John Kricfaulsi's past relationships with two teenage girls. It's a disgusting, criminal situation described in excruciating detail. Buzzfeed has done excellent work exposing and thoroughly documenting the behavior of sexual predators in the past, but what remains even more impressive is the courage shown by the women who are telling their stories, at a time (and via a type of media) that continues to lash out at them for doing so. Although I personally found out about this story via an email from my co-editor, who has by now figured out how bad I am at the linkblog part of TCJ, I was later struck by the comments I saw in response to a successful female cartoonist who had merely linked to the piece on twitter, like countless others had. Over and over, the responses attacked her for daring to even mention the article, and by the time I'd scrolled 15 lines down, the hateful and crude attacks on her began in earnest. Is it a surprise? No, of course not. But it was to me a reminder of how much is owed to people like Robin Byrd and Katie Rice, who are willing to tell their stories in this climate, for a website du jour, knowing full well the sort of targeted harassment that will follow.
RJ CASEY: Your book has no name on the front, no synopsis on the back, but the work inside this book was so singular that, after I finished, I immediately jumped on my computer to attempt to do some research into you. But there’s nothing online but a bare-bones shop selling the book and that’s basically it. Was it your intent for this book to have an air of mystery around it?
D.R.T.: Thank you! Yes, I am naturally wary of the internet and don’t post anything that I can’t easily take down. I prefer to use the Jaws approach, where you just see a glint of teeth and maybe a rough outline of a head and your imagination fills in the rest. I don’t know if that approach is sustainable in 2018 though… It’s a push and pull between getting my art out there and still keeping my privacy at a level I am comfortable with.
Your book says on the back, “Created by D.R.T.” Is that what you go by?
I go by Daniel. I started signing my initials on my “fine art” about seven years ago.
The book I received contained a letter inside written by “LH.” Who is that?
That is my wife, Lori, who lived through most of that with me.
By that, you’re referring to what the letter speaks of. Can we discuss it?
Yes, I don’t want you to feel like there’s anything off limits.
You had a major health issue. Can you break down for me what happened?
I had a hemorrhagic stroke when I was 27 due to an AVM [Arteriovenous malformation].
What is an AVM?
An AVM is an abnormal tangle of blood vessels that bypass the normal flow of blood to the capillaries. There can be a lot of stress on these blood vessels and sometimes they rupture. AVMs are rare and not all of them rupture. I lost a significant part of my left brain. So much so that the right side of my body was paralyzed, and I couldn’t do any of the most basic things like swallow or think with language. I had to start over. With incredible help from my family, my girlfriend (now wife), and therapists, I relearned how to walk, speak, read, write, do math, etc. I still have no functional use of my right arm or hand, so I have to do all of my drawings with my non-dominant left hand and a container of pennies to hold the paper in place.
MOST AMERICAN FOLKTALES are characterized by violence. The American myth glories in the inevitability of westward expansion, venerating war heroes or men who wrangled the land into submission, subjugated the frontier piece by piece until it no longer existed. To be manly is to be strong, and strength is too commonly demonstrated by the physical domination of weaker parties. Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett grew famous through hunting, trapping, and their conquests in the Indian Wars. John Henry and Paul Bunyan exerted mastery over nature by laying railroad track and clearing the forests, subduing the wilderness by fundamentally altering it. The traditional American folk hero adheres to an aggressively masculine stereotype, rooted in destructive traits like violence, coercion, domination, and mastery. In Johnny Appleseed, Paul Buhle and Noah Van Sciver present the life of a man who dramatically defies this characterization. Buhle and Van Sciver’s graphic biography is nothing if not timely: published in 2017, it appears at a moment when some Americans are rekindling and others rejecting the violent and oppressive narratives that have long underwritten the nation’s peculiar brand of patriotism.
I’m interested in the way time passes in these more recent stories, especially in pieces like “Hortisculpture” or “Killing and Dying,” where the gutter between two frames sometimes communicates the passage of months or years. Your work is so often described as realism, but there is something speculative about that disjointed nature of time in Killing and Dying that reminds me of the simultaneous unpredictability and coherence of time in a book like Richard McGuire’s Here. Do you think you’re consciously thinking about temporality differently in your more recent work?
Yeah, I appreciate that — no one’s picked up on that, at least not consciously. To me, that’s one of the huge differences between this and prior books. The old work was, I think, fairly accurately described as “slice of life” — you’re literally peeking in on these characters for a short duration of time, and you just see what happens in that unbroken span of time. The real change for me was having kids. I think that completely affected me on many levels as an artist, but I think you’re picking up on something that was maybe half conscious, but is suddenly becoming apparent: parenthood really affected not only my sense of time as a human in real life, but also my storytelling. And I think that change is evident in the stories. There’s also an anxiety or sadness about that change that infuses a lot of the stories, too.
Today at the Journal, we've got the first piece of evidence that Matt Seneca meant it when he said he was going to review everything he read this year--here it is, his new column, titled Search & Destroy. There's a lot of meat in this column, but the part I liked best was when I read how he refers to the Holy Trio of Violence as "my three favorite rough boys":
When I go to a comic store that only has superhero stuff on sale (most of the time these days), I usually look first at the selection of Wolverine, Batman, and Punisher comics. These have historically maintained a higher standard than most other hero books, I believe because of the smaller amount of imagination necessary to do a serviceable job on them. If you’re doing the Silver Surfer or some shit, you’ve really gotta cast a wide net and pull in something pretty different with it to make a mark. But with my favorite three rough boys, all you have to do is concoct a situation that forces the main character into committing acts of violence. From there, they pretty much write themselves, differing only in milieu and the level of sanction their heroes find it acceptable to administer: Batman usually stops at unconsciousness, Wolverine at grievous bodily harm, and for the Punisher only death will suffice. Like the novels of Jim Thompson, these comics deliver on a hyper-masculine, voyeuristic formula, elevated by the exoticism of their settings and the particularities of their protagonists’ pathologies. And as with Thompson, if you come in with the right expectations it’s hard to go wrong.
And that's not all we've got:Over in the Reviews category, Leonard Pierce has returned to us with a look at Image's latest bestseller, Bingo Love.
It’s a very sweet story, and it’s told with a certain degree of charm and flair. And unquestionably, it’s the kind of story we need to see, especially in comics, where there’s a dearth of anything but lunkheaded superhero variants from companies like Image, let alone stories that center older queer women of color. It was produced outside of traditional venues of publishing, and it showcases creators who don’t normally get this degree of attention. The book’s good intentions are obvious. So…what’s the problem?
ELSEWHERE? The biggest news in comics criticism looks to be two recent hires at the New York Times--Hillary Chute & Ed Park, who have been brought on as regular columnists focused on the graphic novel category. For more information about the hire, Calvin Reid has you covered on that, and the possible connections to a recent agent-led campaign to return a Graphic Novel Bestseller list to the newspaper.
An INTERVIEW I rather liked, in no small part because it is about a book I publish by my favorite cartoonist went up yesterday, you should read it, absolutely. Am I biased? Yes. Of course I am. It's with Michel Fiffe and Kyle Welch, and it's over at Multiversity.
This PROFILEon William Messner-Loebs started making the rounds yesterday, and while I share the writer's emotional connection to those old Wally West issues--not just the Pied Piper ones, but also the ones where Wally was sleeping with a married woman when he wasn't binge-eating hamburgers--said connection is not required to be disgusted at the never-ending cycle of cruelty that is financial difficulty.
Bud Grace's thirty-year comic strip Piranha Club ended this year, and R.C. Harvey is here to tell its history.
How it lasted that long is a puzzler. Like all good comic strips, it was character-driven. The characters determined the action. But the characters in Grace’s strip are scoundrels and frauds. They represent the entire lexicon for “venal”: they are not only capable but eager to betray honor, duty, or scruples for a price. And yet, we loved them. We loved them enough to keep the strip going for three decades. And that says as much about us as it does about Grace. And his characters.
The strip is unlike any other American comic strip, but it is the very epitome of what our culture is. And that is undoubtedly why we kept reading it for thirty years: we saw ourselves—our worst selves—in it. And we laughed about it.
The strip began on February 1, 1988 as Ernie. It changed its name to Piranha Club on September 6, 1998. Said Grace: “We tried a promotion, and we thought that by changing the name we might pick up some papers. That didn't work, so then I thought I’d change my name to Bill Watterson. Piranha Club is still called Ernie in the rest of the world.
“Ernie is the most widely syndicated comic feature in Scandinavia,” Grace continued. “My paternal grandmother was Swedish. Maybe that's the reason it's so popular over there. I also had an Ernie comic book in Scandinavia in which I did special stories every month. I did a Sunday Ernie, too, and unlike my daily strip, it's not nearly as offensive.”
To save a few strokes at the keyboard, Ernie is what I’ll call the strip herein. Ernie ended on Saturday, February 3, 2018. Thirty years almost to the day. And throughout its run, Ernie was a flamboyantly outrageous enterprise, an unabashed assault on ordinary, everyday decorum and civilized sensibilities.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—Interviews & Profiles. The New York Times has a short profile of French cartoonist Yvan Alagbé.
Alagbé consistently gets the same question about his work: “Why do you always draw black people?” His interrogative reply is twofold: “Have you ever once asked a white person why he only draws white people?” and “Is it not possible for me to draw a black person who is representative of humanity in general?”
With his twisted goatee and shaved head, Mr. Alagbé cut a shamanistic figure as he calmly surveyed the teeming hordes at the annual Children’s Books Fair in Montreuil, a suburb just east of Paris. As a co-founder of the comic book publisher Fremok he has been attending the event, where we met at the end of November, every year for the last 17 years.
Though not a children’s book, Mr. Alagbé’s “Yellow Negroes and Other Imaginary Creatures” is popular among the world of French comics. It was published in 2012 in France, and has now been translated into English and is being released by New York Review Comics on April 3. The 47-year-old author began “Yellow Negroes” more than 20 years ago and has been adding narrative layers to it on and off ever since. It has been compared to Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” by the art historian and comic book critic Matthias Wivel.
The most recent guest on the Virtual Memories podcast is Jerry Moriarty, and the most recent guest on Comics Alternative is John Porcellino.
—Reviews & Commentary. Chris Mautner writes about the horror manga of Junji Ito.
There’s a scene in Uzumaki, Junji Ito’s much-lauded horror series, that I think best exemplifies his particular style. The overarching story involves a secluded village in Japan whose residents become obsessed with spirals and usually meet grotesque and destructive ends as a result. In the third chapter, a scar on a teen girl’s forehead turns into a spiral black hole of sorts, eventually consuming her entire body. A horrific reveal shows the spiral hole extending back into her head, her right eye sitting gruesomely on the edge of her face. Then, in a series of smaller panels, the eye starts to roll back towards the vanishing point in the back of her skull.
It is, obviously, pretty horrific. It’s also very, very funny: a rimshot as we literally stare into the abyss, acknowledging the absurdity of the image while underscoring the gore.
Today at the Journal, we'll hear from Tessa Strain, the heir apparent to the Chesapeake County Cheesecake Forum (yup), with her review of Prism Stalker, the latest comic from Sloane Leong and Image Comics. It's a doozy of a piece, befitting a comic that brings no small share of the dooze. Here's a taste of the hurdles Tessa needed the comic to clear, and a hint at whether Leong accomplished said clearing:
The word “worldbuilding” makes my gums bleed, conjuring either a text bogged down with endless exposition (because god forbid your readers not be aware of every detail of your research and design process) or deliberately opaque (smugly suggesting a world so impossibly dense with detail that you can hardly expect to be exposed to more than a delicate truffle-like shaving of it), but the world of Prism Stalker manages to be complex and richly developed without being wankily self-serving, a feat more impressive given that Leong has said that the idea for the series has been gestating for years. Her story and characters have emerged fully realized and sure-footed, without the extra baggage that often comes with extended percolation.
And that's not all. To get your Monday launched properly, we've got another look at one of the comics in the Kilgore Books Seasonal Kickstarter--Tinderella, by M.S. Harkness. In this installment, a young person procrastinates on getting an eye infection checked out, despite the fact that conjunctivitis is highly contagious. They even go to a public pool. Selfish!
If I was Joe Casey, I would be sending invoices to Tom King every couple of days. (Or Joe could just forward the ones he gets from Grant Morrison Alan Moore.)
Within the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, we come across Sherrie Levine's 1989 art work Untitled (Mr. Austridge: 2). It is not currently on view, but was up in the galleries from June 30, 2010 through September 12, 2011. It is an exact replica, save the grain of the wood support, of a drawing by George Herriman from his comic strip Krazy Kat.
About her work, Levine commented: "Every word, every image, is leased and mortgaged. We know that a picture is but a space in which a variety of images, none of them original, blend and clash. A picture is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centers of culture."
Except, in this case, it's one quotation from one specific area of culture. Levine might protest that her larger project shows this specific work as one fabric within the tissue, but for readers of Herriman, there'd be (at the very least) a compelling argument for the former. Now, that alone doesn't invalidate Levine's project in any way. I happen to find her work important and complex. The overarching unity of much of her work, the appropriation of 'idolized' male artists to question ideas about 'artistic genius,' is razor sharp art-as-critique and particularly prescient today.
Levine, if this was her intention, is correct to lump Herriman into the 'idolized' camp. He was beloved by peers and critics of his day, and continues to be in 2018. And yet, as a subject for appropriation, an important question arises: does Herriman have the same visual currency as a Walker Evans photograph?
The Beef goes into very graphic detail about how cows are killed in slaughterhouses. You see the machine that puts the bolt in the cow’s brain. You see the animals being dismembered. Fun stuff.
That warning goes up front because the folks who made The Beef are making a point here. It’s not a particularly subtle point but this kind of messaging rarely is. Slaughterhouses are foul and filthy places under the “best” of circumstances. The premise underlining this book is not just that slaughterhouses are bad, but that the act of killing animals for food – and in such an especially savage way, for both the animal and the man – is inescapably morally corrosive, and that corrosion in turn trickles its way back up the food chain when the meat is processed for human consumption.
Frankly, The Beef is an unpleasant comic. I wouldn’t describe it as a bad comic, however. On the contrary, it definitely knows what it is about and sets about its business with a rather impressive single-mindedness. One issue is really too early to tell which direction the story may be heading, but it’s certainly not heading in a pleasant direction. Anyone thinking about picking this comic up, even given the creative team, should brace themselves for a book that has been purposefully designed to crawl under the skin of anyone who reads it.
Meanwhile, elsewhere:
—Paul Gravett profiles the comics journalist Olivier Kugler.
The proactive, attentive, sensitive approach of Olivier Kugler to graphic reportage takes him into firsthand, face-to-face exchanges with his subjects – confronting and communicating their experiences and realities in print and online press: from features in The Guardian and Harper’s magazine to full-length book projects. While Kugler’s documentary comics are related to the wave of cartoon journalism sparked by Joe Sacco’s genre-redefining comicbook, later graphic novel, Palestine (1993 and 95, respectively), they typically avoid autobiography and self-depiction. Kugler’s focus is on the individual, their appearance, locale and story. Aside from some scene-setting and arrowed captions, all the words are their words, quotes distilled from his extensive audio recordings of their conversations. Self-effacing, Kugler prioritises giving his routinely ignored or overlooked interviewees their voice.
—The most recent guest on the Mindkiller podcast is Jessica Campbell.
