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Today, Sarah Horrocks returns with a review of VS #1.

It takes place in the blurred borders between a first-person shooter and a reality show about war.  The first issue follows soldier/gamer Satta Flynn, as he recovers from an injury and works to get back to fighting with his unit. The book slots alongside things like Robot Jox or Mobile Suit G Gundam; it's another story about protagonists participating in a sort of futuristic sporting replacement for war.

In contrast to something like Mobile Suit G Gundam, the war game aspect of the story exists in a kind of hyper-reality running parallel to a slightly more mundane world, and at least through the first issue, it’s not clear how the two worlds connect or what weight we are meant to give the things that happen in the “game.”  Because of the artifice of the game world, where people stop fighting during commercial breaks, and seem to compete according to the the rules of a first-person shooting game, it’s hard to determine the physical stakes of what you see happening. While we do see Flynn recovering from some sort of injury to his legs, it’s unclear how he sustained those injuries and whether the last quarter of the book is happening in flashback or things are proceeding somewhat chronologically.  While this displacement of stakes in terms of how we watch war is intellectually stimulating, the dramatic edge is almost nonexistent.  

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Misc. Eisner Award voting is open.

—Interviews & Podcasts. The latest guest on RiYL is Gina Wynbrandt, and the latest guest on Virtual Memories is Lauren Weinstein.

—Reviews & Commentary. Mark Dery revisits the collage novels of Max Ernst.

More than three-quarters of a century on, the collage novels still cast an unsettling spell, plunging us into a gaslit Victorian underworld of the unconscious, part magic lantern show, part séance, all Freudian uncanny. Armed with scissors and glue, Ernst performed meticulous surgery on 19th-century engravings— illustrations from Gothic romances, penny dreadfuls, mail order catalogues, and scientific texts — to create disquieting tableaux. Marrying hallucinatory visions to hard-edged realism, true crime horror to black humor, they flicker in the mind’s eye like scenes from a silent movie — a melodrama based on Jack the Ripper’s dream journal, perhaps.

Even now, after countless knockoffs in ads and album-cover art, Ernst’s collage novels pack a wallop. “They are still sinister, disturbing, and marvelous in their unrelenting power of suggestion,” Robert Hughes observes, in The Shock of the New. “The peculiarity of Ernst’s world never lets up or lapses into cliché, and its apparitions are always suddenly there, as if stumbled on.”

Cullen Murphy picks his five favorite books on comics.

Kate Feiffer reviews How to Read Nancy, and briefly chats to co-author Paul Karasik.

I grew up the daughter of a cartoonist and thought I knew a good bit about the craft. I was glued to this book and came away with a entirely new and deeper understanding of the comics form. Karasik and Newgarden turned an experimental idea, one that conceivably could have had limited appeal to students and cartoon geeks, and created a page-turner that should appeal to anyone who has ever loved a comic strip, or is interested in visual storytelling and humor. Not to mention Nancy fans.

Ah, the Comics Journal: it's Valentine's Day! I don't know about you, but up until I got hitched, my only valentine was comics, shoved directly into my mouth, Ash v. Ripley style. Stick with who brung you, I say--and who doesn't love Shaky Kane? We've got a whole pile of Shaky comics for you today, courtesy of Breakdown Press. In the hopes of synergistically building your anticipation for an upcoming review, take a look at this excerpt from their Good News Bible, which reprints all of Kane's Deadline strips. 

Ah. That's not enough though. Let's do some more Breakdown Press stuff today. How about a nice long interview with Antoine Cossé, courtesy of George Elkind? Not to blow the guy's spot up too much, but George has apparently been off huffing some comics ether, some kind of comics critic workout montage--he's promising that his return to these pages will be so expansive we'll forget he ever left. I'm gonna hold him to it, you should too. Funny how this Antoine guy inspires so many critics to get back on the writing horse. Anyway, enough horseshit from me: it's a great interview.

You have a lot of long drives in your comics, but I don’t associate any of the places you’ve lived [London, Paris, Turin] with long drives. Is that kind of an elaboration for you or is that more rooted in some experience?

Well, it’s both. I really like driving. I always find it very meditative--it’s like a nice thing to do. But, to draw, it’s great because it’s a total space. You can control everything and you can vary the speed. Because it’s like a thread. So I found out that, too--but I also really like drawing cars. So that’s good.

Sure.

But you also get to enclose your characters into a really close space, which is weird. Because people in cars are just a bit weird. You’re not really--it’s strange [in Showtime] because it’s his car, and they’re all strangers and they talk together. I mean, there’s different things; if you’re being driven by someone, there’s a strange kind of way of watching landscapes. I don’t know, it’s like if you’re driving… when you drive, it’s different. So there’s loads of different shifts in point of view.

Yeah, it’s kind of its own sort of altered state, I guess.

And there’s the in- and the out- of the car, when you’re [via point of view] in the car or out of the car, which I really like playing with in comics. But you’re right, there’s a lot of driving.

AND THAT'S NOT ALL: I didn't expect Valentine's Day to have such a distinct thru line, but here it is--the man who brought George Elkind into my life, Matt Seneca, who turned up with a review of Uno Moralez's Blue Teeth that had me staying up later than intended. Check this piece out, I read it and immediately incorporated it into my own belief system.

Moralez has internalized one of the most important lessons of the horror genre, one it shares with the kind of esoteric mystical texts that Blue Teeth also slots in comfortably next to. Don't make too much sense! There's a reason every horror movie starts to suck after you see what the monster looks like, and that haters always insist there's no scientific basis for whatever your religion is. Horror is our fear of the unknown; transcendence is our awe of it.

Excellence. I hope you have a great day with whomever it is that you are super into. By the time you read this, I will have shared one of my favorite love stories--Frog & Toad--with my daughter. Arnold Lobel all day, son.

Today on the site, Martyn Pedler talks to Charles Forsman.

You often use teenage protagonists in your work. What’s so appealing about writing teens?

Yeah. It comes down to when I was a teenager. I was pretty depressed. I became disengaged from school and, you know, I got really cynical about life. I’m not special in this. The one big thing that happened was when I was 11, my dad died from cancer, and that was such a changing moment in my little world. It made me grow up a little faster: life is not always running around in the suburbs, riding bikes, and having fun.

There’s a part of me that wants to constantly relive that because when you’re a teenager your emotions are so raw. You think you have everything figured out, but you’re also so lost and frustrated. I just find it fascinating, and I’m trying to organize that time of my life on paper. Figuring out how to get it out, to communicate these feelings. Because it can be pretty complex, and I’m not the best speaker. Comics is how I’m most comfortable.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. Michael Cavna at The Washington Post spoke briefly to Adrian Tomine.

“I think that becoming a parent was by far the biggest influence on me while I was working on ‘Killing and Dying,’ ” says Tomine, who will be speaking Saturday at 6 p.m. at Washington’s Politics & Prose at the Wharf.

“When I finished my previous book, ‘Shortcomings,’ I honestly felt like I’d painted myself into a corner in terms of subject matter and tone and style, and I was kind of stumped about how to escape,” Tomine tells The Washington Post’s Comic Riffs.

The most recent guest on RiYL is Emil Ferris, and the most recent guest on Process Party is Michel Fiffe.

—Misc. Ken Parille remembers Alvin Buenaventura.

Alvin Buenaventura left us two years ago. On the day he died, I had been thinking a lot about calling him, but decided not to. Unless we were in the midst of a comics project for his press, Alvin, ever elusive, often didn't pick up. In the fourteen years we were friends, if I wanted to get in touch with him, I knew what to do: Call him a few times over the course of a few weeks and he’d eventually get back to me, whispering in his almost imperceptibly soft monotone, “Hey Ken, I saw you called.” When this tactic wasn't necessary — when I called and he answered — I felt lucky. I had someone smart, someone engaged to talk comics with. ...

John Jackson Miller writes about the end of DC's newsstand editions.

A moment in comics history passed without any fanfare at all in the summer of 2017. It went unnoticed for several weeks — and while it's been discussed online in the months since, I was evidently the first person to ask the publisher directly about it, more than five months later. And now the confirmation is official: DC ended its newsstand editions of its comics as of the end of August 2017.

See this issue on eBay"DC discontinued much of its newsstand distribution in late 2013 and early 2014," Vice President - Specialty Sales James Sokolowski told me today. Marvel had pulled out of newsstand distribution completely in 2013, but while DC's titles left most independent wholesalers then, the company had continued to distribute a limited slate of returnable titles through Ingram Content Group, which served Barnes & Noble, and Media Solutions, which served Books-a-Million.

Today at the Journal, we've got Rachel Davies and Tommi Parrish talking about The Lie and How We Told It, their most recent release via Fantagraphics, the consequences of youthful indiscretion, the Australian comics scene, and the delights of bookmaking.

I think I’m just trying to make more interesting stuff. I think also my life might be a little bigger than it was before. I’m just more interested in talking about other people’s stories, than like constantly writing about feeling sad. I think it’s totally just a,[product of] maturing as a writer. I was starting to feel frustrated with what my work was looking like––I mean I’m still frustrated with my work, but I was starting to feel frustrated with constantly making the same thing. That’s how it felt, anyway.

That's it for today. There's so many reviews that are coming up this week, from so many great writers! I'm currently in Denver for ALA Midwinter. It's a massively different show than it was last year, when it was held in Atlanta during Trump's Inauguration, the Women's March and an Atlanta Falcons playoff game. The only thing I remember at that show was how March won every award that it was eligible for and how completely empty the room was when all the women walked out of the convention hall. This year, a snowstorm has kept a lot of attendees from being able to make it to the show, which has made the attendees who are here even more curious than they usually are, which is pretty curious. It's the opposite of a fiscally driven consumer show, where the ultimate aim is to conclude any conversation with the sale of a product--here, it feels more about finding the way in which the thing you're speaking about can become part of the catalog of things that these people are going to be speaking about when they return home. How can your work get on board with the conversation that's already happening, that will continue with or without you, and will last after you're gone? Often times, it feels less and less like the place I used to live in comics is still there--a place where multiple strands and styles and genres lived amongst each other. But then you go here, and so few of those prejudices have survived the trip. Comics are back to just being an artform, a style of communication, something that can tell a whole nest of stories, or explore not telling a story at all. The idea that any one publisher or genre or style of art would be enough to fill a library branch with everything their patrons need is so absurd that it doesn't even come up as a concept in a discussion--it would be like saying you can only have yellow boxes at a grocery store, or any other dumb analogy. Here, it's a bunch of people happily embracing the impossible task of trying to please everyone--of trying to return to their homes armed with what they need to entertain and educate, and who don't have the time or luxury to adopt a bunch of grievances they'd have to read actual back issues to have an opinion about in the first place. It's a challenge just to keep up.

Today on the site, we have two reviews for you. First, Tegan O'Neil returns with an assessment of Box Brown's latest comics biography, Is This Guy For Real?

Andy Kaufman was around for just long enough to ensure that people are going to be writing about him for a long time to come. There’s something sticky about his story in the mind, despite (or because of?) its brevity. Box Brown’s new biography of Kaufman, Is This Guy For Real? – The Unbelievable Andy Kaufman is careful to trace the means by which Kaufman’s lifelong obsession with wrestling informed his approach to comedy and performance. Wrestlers adopt larger-than-life personas, complete with accents and backstories – just like Kaufman, who sometimes pretended to be a lounge singer named Tony Clifton, sometimes pretended to be Elvis Presley, and sometimes a raging misogynist. Kaufman plays every role completely straight in the moment, leading to a tendency to be confused with his characters. He played the part of a meathead chauvinist challenging women to live wrestling matches a bit too well. Clips from his wrestling appearances reveal a focused performer who learned to relish negative attention from his audience.

The approach seen here is similar to Brown’s previous comics biography, Andre the Giant: Life and Legend. That book was effective because it focused on the tendency of its titular figure to accrue anecdote and story. Is This Guy For Real? charts more ambitious territory. It attempts to tell the story not merely of Andy Kaufman’s life and career from an early age through to his death, but the story of the Memphis professional wrestling scene in general and Jerry Lawler in particular. Whether or not you think this is an effective book will probably depend on the degree to which you think dozens of pages have to be spent on Lawler’s early career but a few panels spread across the book for Kaufman’s career on Taxi.

And we also have Edwin Turner, proprietor of Biblioklept, who makes his TCJ debut with a review of Paul Kirchner's Awaiting the Collapse.

In "Highwire", the opening entry in Paul Kirchner's new collection Awaiting the Collapse, a tightrope walker navigates the skyway of a busy metropolis. The walker's magical high wire takes him over skyscrapers and into offices, dinner parties, supermarkets, and the homes of the gray citizens who, for panel after panel, fail to look up and see the miracle above them. In the comic's final panels, however, a man gazes up at the high-wire walker in a moment of recognition.

The gazer below, stocky, bald, and garbed in a trench coat and tie, bears more than a passing resemblance to the hero of Kirchner's cult classic The Bus. He strips away his business attire to reveal circus garb beneath and launches after the tightrope walker on his own marvelous trapeze. Thus Kirchner ushers us into the ultravivid, kaleidoscopic world of Awaiting the Collapse. Here, the miraculous is always potential, even in our mundane, mechanized workaday world---we simply have to look up to see it.

This insight---that a more colorful, more surreal world is available to us via imaginative perspective---is threaded throughout Kirchner's cult classic strip The Bus, which originally ran in Heavy Metal between 1979 and 1985. The Bus, which centered on a mundane hero's fanciful duel with the banality of everyday existence, found a second life on the internet through pirated copies---grainy, incomplete versions that hipped a new audience to Kirchner's fabulous comics.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. The latest guest on RiYL is Joseph Remnant.

And this isn't comics-related, but Jeannie Vanasco at the Los Angeles Review of Books has a conversation with one of the great writers on comics of our era, Daniel Raeburn.

The story of an essay or a memoir is really the story of thinking, of your own consciousness. Which requires you, as narrator, to be self-conscious, but not too self-conscious. Not completely self-absorbed. You’re walking a tricky balance beam. There are other paradoxes too, like narrative tone. You have to be confident in your telling of what happened, but not too confident about what it means. You have to have confidence in your own doubts, if that makes sense. They’re what propel personal narratives.

That’s why it’s probably best to err on the side of those doubts. A good rule of thumb comes from Kafka, who said, “In the struggle between you and the world, you must side with the world.” Another good line came from my friend Mark Slouka. After he read an earlier draft of Vessels, he called me and said, “Less knowing, more wondering.” As soon as he said it I knew he was right. I’d been trying to sound wise.

—Reviews & Commentary. Sam Ombiri writes about Nick Drnaso's Beverly.

Nick Drnaso gives a very specific amount of detail, and the stories move along rather rapidly – my eyes automatically go from panel to panel, as the story is so clearly laid out. It might even be my hundredth time reading the story, but it keeps me engaged every time. I can jump into any section, and it’s just as easy for me to recapture the essence of each moment as when I read it the first time. It’s clear that Beverly was made to be enjoyable to read, and the success of the comic is, for lack of a better term, almost severe. It’s strengths are obvious when you read it, so I don’t need to go on praising it. You don’t have to believe the stories in the book, because the book believes them for you.

And Jonathan Rosenbaum remembers the man who may have been the most valuable comics critic of the last century, Donald Phelps.

In some ways, the saddest deaths are those we only hear about accidentally. For me, Donald Phelps was one of the very greatest of American critics — not just literary critic and film critic, but comics critic as well — even though only two collections devoted solely to his written work exist (see above). I would love to imagine that many more will follow, because it’s clear that anyone who tracks down obscure journals, including his own (For Now), looking for Phelps’ insightful and highly original prose, will discover an unending bounty. But it seems like he never had much money, and even before the advent of Trump, Phelps appears to have lived his entire life in the shadows.

Today at The Journal, we've got cartoonist and critic Katie Skelly interviewing comics writer Alex de Campi about the Twisted Romance comic series that launched via Image this very week. 

Sentimentality is a desperately under-used weapon in comics. So much of it is about the widescreen explodo. But ultimately, you never remember the explosions. You remember the stories that made you cry. That should be every writer's objective going into every story they write: make 'em cry once, make 'em gasp once, and try to give them some pants feelings at some point. William Mortensen, in his wonderfully kooky The Command to Look, paraphrases Cecil B DeMille about the three things you need for a successful picture: sex, sentimentality and spectacle. You can make do with two, for a mediocre story. And you can be macho as fuck and sentimental at the same time: I present to you the entire cinematic oeuvre of Sam Peckinpah, the man who, with Naoki Urasawa, taught me how to hold a reaction shot. 

And then, for something completely different, we've got Frank Young on Frank King--a review of the latest giant sized tome from Sunday Press. It's an excellent review that I feel the need to cheapen by pulling the one quote where he mentions Jake Gyllenahaal. 

Photographs of the young Frank King bring to mind the actor Jake Gyllenhaal, circa 2004. One can see a similar glint in King's eye, a brashness in his smile and an undisguised enjoyment of his life and work. King was at first in the shadow of the Tribune's master editorial cartoonist John T. McCutcheon. As one of the lower-status Trib cartoonists, King soldiered through spot illustrations for news stories, feature article illustrations and the occasional comic strip.

ELSEWHERE? Today, the thing I'd recommend you take a look at is Michel Fiffe's recently published posts on a re-reading of the Titans, part one being here, part two being here. For years, the Titans seemed like the only thing DC had that could outsell Marvel (if you only paid attention to single issue sales--Marvel still can't seem to manage to find perennial selling trades like Batman Year One, and when they do, they tend to let them fall out of print endlessly), and I enjoyed Fiffe's attempt to dive so wholeheartedly into a series that, like the X-Men, tends to reward and repel in equal measure, at an increasingly heightened rate, the longer you expose yourself I also have a lot of affection for Titans Hunt, one of those genuinely exciting who-fucking-knows extended storylines that consists of loading up as many spinning plates as possible, up until you just go fuck it, let's add a vampire from a dystopian future, nothing can stop us. 

Today on the site, we have an excerpt from Kate Polak's Ethics In The Gutter: Empathy and Historical Fiction in Comics, published by Ohio State University Press. This particular section deals with a storyline from Hellblazer.

“The Pit” opens with a panel depicting several British soldiers standing atop a trench, text boxes overlays explaining that “Every night they dig the pit. They dig it for the first time. Its sides almost vertical. Stakes just below the edge, pointing down, to stop anyone from climbing out” (121). This first panel already gestures towards what is ventured in the plot: the conflation of temporalities and the crucial dimension of point-of-view. In terms of temporality, while this is a fictionalized account of a past event, it is recounted by a nameless, third-person narrator in the present progressive tense, indicating a continuous action. The narrator aligns herself with neither the soldiers nor the Aborigines, referring to both as “they,” while the reader views the ditch from inside, looking upwards towards the men standing at the top edge, already ensconced within the potential victim’s perspective. The second and third panels show the Tasmanian Aborigines being forced down into the pit from holding pens, the narration shifting in focus between panels. The second panel shows the Aborigines from the perspective of the British soldiers, the point-of-view including their shadows as they look down into the holding pens, the external focalizer remarking that “they say to the prisoners ‘move quickly, jena, jena. We’re taking you to a new place’” (121), while the third panel depicts the Aborigines being forced down into the pit. The narrator tells us that “They don’t want to go down that steep slope. But there’s a wall of men with guns” (121). The shifting point-of-view in the first three panels coupled with the externally focalized narration destabilize the reader’s identification with characters at the outset. Rather than offering an individual’s perspective of the massacre that is represented, the images are framed by a textual recounting. The pictorial element serves to illustrate the textual, but simultaneously, through perspective, offers brief windows into a variety points-of-view.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. All Ben Katchor interviews are good interviews, and this new one is no exception.

At the end of such a successful life, Katchor ought to be happy, right?

"I feel like we're replaying World War I, with the Espionage Act being revived and journalists being threatened for merely doing their jobs," he tells me. "And on top of that, the ecosystem is collapsing. It's a nightmare, quite honestly. It would be one thing to have a dictator in power ... but unbreathable air on an overheated planet? There's no escape."

This was not the Ben Katchor I had expected to interview.

The most recent guest on the Ignorant Bliss podcast is Whit Taylor.

—Reviews & Commentary. On the occasion of a new collection of Philip Guston's Nixon drawings, Chris Ware writes about the artist's "graphic novel" for the New York Review of Books.

What surprises me most about all of the “Poor Richard” drawings is not their recognizable imagery, their directness, or even their satirical and political subject matter, but the fact that Guston apparently intended them to be assembled as a book. He even put together “large black pocket binders” with Xeroxes of the drawings to schlep around to potential publishers. Philip Guston was working on a graphic novel?! Well, not really. Though it tells a story, loosely threading together vaudevillian gags about Nixon’s coming of age (both he and Guston were born in 1913), Nixon’s college years, early political career, his “Checkers” speech, disappearance/reinvention, and election, his trip to China (with it all petering out somewhere in Asia with the characters pictured as spongecake and cookies), one passes through the images much as one might flip through an illustrated children’s book—without actually reading the text. The earliest frontispieces (Guston tried different versions—the original title was “Satirical Drawings”) show a hairy ink bottle with a Nixon-genie rising out of its uncapped top, highlighting it as a collection of cartoons. Perhaps later, after he got into it, he seems to have gone back and drawn something that focuses on his cast of characters qua characters: Nixon, Spiro Agnew, John Mitchell, and Henry Kissinger reclining on a Florida beach surrounded by the paraphernalia of American idleness. (“Reclining” might be too generous of a description, too, since only Nixon himself has a body; Agnew and Mitchell are lumpy, dumpy heads and Kissinger appears simply as a pair of thick glasses; he is the “eyes” of Nixon throughout the latter part of the story, seeing him to ruin.)

Françoise Mouly presents and writes about a selection of Lorenzo Mattotti's New Yorker covers.

Lorenzo Mattotti’s covers for The New Yorker are featured in an exhibit at the Italian Cultural Institute, which runs from February 6th through March 8th. The artist’s covers are created using oil pastels, his medium of choice. The pastels’ bright colors reproduce well—which is important for a magazine that prints more than a million copies weekly. They also create a texture that helps viewers to imagine the artist’s hand layering color over color. All of Mattotti’s images pack the graphic punch of a poster by expressing a strong idea through a perfectly poised composition. A viewer’s eye is skillfully directed to a snowball, or a central figure, or a road that winds through a colorful landscape.

—News. Drawn & Quarterly has announced a new publishing fellowship program, beginning this summer.

Drawn & Quarterly is pleased to announce a publishing fellowship that will focus on all facets of the book business: editorial; production and design; marketing and sales; and retail. The paid position will be in the company’s Mile-Ex office in Montreal, Monday through Thursday, 32 hours a week, 9:30-5:30. The fellowship will be offered biannually: a winter fellow (mid-January through mid-June) with an application deadline of October 1; and a summer fellow (mid-July through mid-November) with an application deadline of March 1. The fellow will interact with all departments and be invited to sit in on meetings.

Today at The Comics Journal, we've got Noah Berlatsky stopping by to interview Dr. Kate Polak about her recently released book of essays examining comics of the historical fiction bent. We'll be running an excerpt from the book tomorrow that focuses on a portion of Hellblazer that I read on my honeymoon, because for some reason I wanted to bring Mike Carey's run of Hellblazer with me to the beach instead of a swimsuit. For those of you who are wondering why Noah is here--for those of you working in the Fantagraphics office, for example--him remembering my fondness for Mike Carey's Hellblazer comics and then manipulating me through that memory is in no small part. 

In your discussion of J. P. Stassen's comic Deogratias about the Rwandan genocide, you say that the comic through point of view makes it difficult to empathize with Deogratias, the main character who participated in the genocide. Is denial of empathy a denial of ethical investment? Don't we need empathy in order to have a moral commitment?

No! (laughs) No! I go a little bit into this in the book. I don't buy empathy as anything related to morality. Empathy is consonant with immorality. It has no ethical valence.

Torturers are great empathizers because they know what's going to make that person hurt the most. People who are highly manipulative are very good at empathizing because they're very good at getting into your head and figuring out how you feel about something and able to take advantage of you. That's empathy.

We like to think of empathy as this pop psychology term, where if only we felt like another person feels then we would behave differently. But I don't think that's true.

My little personal old home week continues, with a review of Nobrow's latest installment in the Geis series by Brian Nicholson. Anyone who believes that I can tell Nicholson what to think clearly doesn't know how violently I disagree with his (very wrong!) opinions about Copra though, so feel free to drink in his praise for Alexis Deacon without the slightest concern that my memory of paychecks has somehow infected this excellent review.

What a relief for the reader to take in the pages of Alexis Deacon's fantasy series Geis. Deacon is primarily a children's book illustrator, and the Geis series constitutes his first graphic novels. Here the painted color and soft pastel palette seem natural to the story's setting within the past. It feels like the light is pouring through castle windows, or supplied by candles. The relief is not just in the way the palette soothes the eye. As we see these things that never existed, we are convinced that this is how they should look. The art makes such a strong case for its aesthetic choices as to convert those who might be skeptical of subject matter of sorcery and curses, castles and kingdoms. Looking at the pages, I feel none of the revulsion I so often feel when looking at fantasy images. There are neither dragons nor elves, and there are no over-sexualized figures coexisting alongside anthropomorphic animals. Just robes and complicated hats as far as the eye can see.

ELSEWHERE: You motherfuckers into donuts? In the lead up to the launch of Andy Diggle's Shadowman #1, Valiant Comics hopes the answer is yes. If you're interested in checking out these official Shadowman donuts, you'll have to make your way to the upcoming ComicsPRO Annual Membership Meeting for Valiant's presentation on their upcoming titles. The donuts will be made available then, t0 all who are interested in finding out whether or not Andy Diggle is alive, and if he is, what comics he is writing. You can see an official picture (from the press release) of what the donuts will look like below. 

Today on the site, Sloane Leong is back with a second round of Comics Dragnet, gathering up webcomics and genre adventures and critiquing them with an artist's eye. One of the comics this time is The Firelight Isle:

A fantasy coming-of-age story set in a pseudo-South Asian-ish culture that follows a pair of childhood friends undergoing their first adulthood rites. It feels like I've been checking in on this webcomic for over a decade but its only been around for a handful of years in existence. Sixteen chapters have been drawn but the story doesn’t seem to have progressed beyond an unaffecting first act. I'm all for taking your time with your work but that remoteness, especially online, can take a heavy toll, both on the reader and the comic itself with the energy waning into a dull fizzle despite Firelight just hitting its first larger narrative development recently. The idea of perfection in comics is often a creative red herring, something to distract you from getting to the truth of your story. If you don’t have truth or beauty, then what is there? I don’t inherently dislike all meticulously rendered art in comics but something about succinct, vivacious, definitive linework has always translated truth and beauty better in comics than micromanaged complexity, which usually falls short of the baroque, and ends up in some awkward in-between state.

...

And Leonard Pierce is here, too, with a review of Tommi Parrish's The Lie and How We Told It.

The Lie and How We Told It draws its name from a song by Yo La Tengo, and the comparisons kept nagging at me while reading the book:  with that particular band, you were always taking a chance whether, in performance, you would get them at the height of their expressive powers or a night of feedback-drenched noise that was only enjoyable to them.  This was especially pronounced by the 2000s, when they settled into a comfortable haze of soundtrack albums and cover songs, some of them made for the film genre suitably known as mumblecore.  For those who don’t remember that particular eructation of American cinema, it mostly revolved around middle-class white people who had a very difficult time making their feelings known to one another, to the detriment of everyone else around them.  Despite it being a decidedly acquired taste, the genre has been oddly persistent and has lately turned up in quantity on second-tier television networks.

Reading through The Lie, it’s almost impossible not to notice its deeply 2000s-ish feel, and while it dresses up its relationships in the complexities of a genderqueer woman and a man in deep denial about his own conflicted sexuality, it’s still that same old story of people who spend all their time not being able to say what’s on their minds.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Reviews & Commentary. Paul Morton writes at length about Jules Feiffer and his editorial relationship with Hugh Hefner.

Hefner, himself an aspiring cartoonist in his youth, had wanted to make Playboy a showcase for cartooning talent comparable to The New Yorker. Still, Feiffer’s work didn’t fit with that of other artists Hefner was recruiting at the time. A typical Playboy cartoon featured an unattractive male and a cartoon version of a Playboy model. If the reader recognized himself, he recognized his imperfect body. On the one hand, the cartoons poked fun at the reader’s low physical status. On the other, they indulged his fantasies, his belief that beautiful women were a right to enjoy as much as good food, books, and music. The magazine’s bullpen in the late 1950s included Jack Cole, most famous as the creator of Plastic Man, and the Mad genius Harvey Kurtzman. Cole and Kurtzman’s lusciously colored cartoons for Playboy indulged their adolescent souls. Their work had little in common with Feiffer’s black-and-white sequential narratives, energetic dialogues, and twisting monologues.

From Hefner’s letters, it seems Feiffer was a hard get. The magazine celebrated a materialist, swinging culture that divorced aesthetics from morality. Feiffer’s work did not. Hefner assured Riley that Feiffer would not have to change his point of view. He only asked that Feiffer agree to not publish at any magazine that could be considered a Playboy competitor. He could keep his strip in the Voice. Feiffer agreed.

Brian Nicholson reviews Rich Tommaso's Spy Seal.

Rich Tommaso has been publishing comics for over twenty years, but by his own account, he never got as strong and immediate a response to his work as he did when he posted a little sketch of Spy Seal, a character he had created as a child, to social media. Fans did cosplay, animation studios offered development deals if a comic could demonstrate proof of concept. Tommaso launched the series through Image Comics, who had previously put out the crime and horror comics he had made, and pretty immediately a panic set in, as serialized installments did not actually sell that well. There was a discrepancy between the “popular demand” as the author imagined it and what the Image audience was willing and prepared to pay for. People assured him: It’s not a book for the comic shop market. It’s a comic that, when completed and in bookstores, would find its ideal audience. That book now exists, printed at the dimensions of a Tintin book, and we can now all collectively discover what it is that Spy Seal actually is: The comic is an outgrowth of a sketch, which seemed to imply a world and a tone, but how exactly do those things manifest in an actual narrative with a beginning, middle, and end?

The Onion profiles a local man who prefers comic books that don’t insert politics into stories about government-engineered agents of war.

Local man Jeremy Land reportedly voiced his preference Thursday for comic books that don’t insert politics into stories about people forced to undergo body- and mind-altering experiments that transform them into government agents of war. “I’m tired of simply trying to enjoy escapist stories in which people are tortured and experimented upon at black sites run by authoritarian governments, only to have the creators cram political messages down my throat,” said Land, 31, who added that Marvel’s recent additions of female, LGBTQ, and racially diverse characters to long-running story arcs about tyrannical regimes turning social outsiders into powerful killing machines felt like PC propaganda run amok.

—Interviews & Profiles. The most recent guest on the Library of American Comics podcast is the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library's Caitlin McGurk, and the latest guest on Inkstuds is Eric Reynolds from Fantagraphics.

We started this week with our Mort Walker obituary, and we're closing it out with RC Harvey's Mort Walker interview from 2009. You couldn't ask for a more immersive dive into the man's life than the one Harvey took--make the time for this one, you won't regret it.

That was funny. Not so long ago, I had an exhibit at the State Department, and Colin Powell said he wanted to meet me, so Cathy and I were introduced to him in his office. He was so friendly and everything. He said, “I read your strip.”

I said, “Really?”

He said, “Oh yeah. I remember when Lt. Flap came in, the first strip. The first thing he said was, ‘How come there are no blacks in this honky outfit?’” He laughed and laughed. [Harvey laughs.] So I was very flattered to know that Colin Powell had read the strip and was interested in it. So we had a good time talking about it.

That's not the only look back we've got for you, of course--it's time for your weekly dose of Tegan O'Neil. This week, she's got the latest installment of Ice Cream For Bedwetters, with a deep dive into the rarely talked about era of Green Arrow when the longtime liberal character turned into...well, something else. 

All well and good, as far as it goes. There’s no arguing that the direction was a productive one for the character, as much of it stuck to this day. The Oliver Queen on the enduringly popular Arrow TV show owes more to Grell’s version of the character, certainly, than Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams “socially conscious” version from the 60s or Jack Kirby’s sci-fi Batman interpretation from the 50s. The main difference between Green Arrow and Marvel’s Hawkeye was always that Hawkeye was a dude whose main power was bluffing, and that’s how he stands shoulder to shoulder with Thor and Captain America. Green Arrow, though, was out of place next to Superman and the Flash, and the reason why is that subsequent generations of creators told us so all the damn time. He sometimes served as the conscience for the Justice League, pointing out that they should be doing a better job by the little people they were ostensibly protecting. But you can only hector Superman for not caring about the little guy so many times before he loses his super-patience and puts you out an airlock of the satellite, because Starro’s coming over and a guy whose main power is righteous indignation is of limited utility against the fury of the Star Conqueror. 

Ah, but as we come into the weekend, let's get locked back into the future--at least for a bit. And we'll do that with Aug Stone's review of Mister Morgan, a recent graphic novel release from Conundrum by Igor Hofbauer.

Hofbauer is also a master of presenting many different psychological aspects at once. This occurs even in the shortest stories but is particularly true of the two major works in this collection, ‘Olympia’ and ‘Plastika’. Each a tour de force, these two vast worlds complement each other like shadows. Both are meditations on the interaction and interconnection between artists and their publics. And like the rest of Hofbauer’s work, what lies only millimeters beneath the already darkened surface is sinister and gruesome.

To creepy? I feel ya. Why don't you kick back and read about Andy Kaufman, who has risen from the dead in the graphic novel form, via Box Brown and First Second. Box Brown? Box Brown, indeed.

And finally, because it was interesting to find out: NPD Bookscan is going to start running four monthly graphic novel bestseller list over at ICv2, in what many--well, me, I think this--are interpreting as a bit of a response to the loss of the NYT Bestseller list that used to cover that same categories. The four lists will cover Superhero, Manga, Kids and Author, and anyone can read the charts. If you want to see the actual numbers of copies sold, you'll need a Pro Account for that. (Or you can use an NPD account and see everything, including the numbers of copies sold or not sold by people you're obsessed with out of spite.) It'll be interesting to see  the data used by people as a point of reference when writing about how the thing they like is better than the thing they think you like.

Wait, will that be interesting?

Today on the site, R.C. Harvey is here with another installment of Hare Tonic, in which he looks back at the life and work of Smokey Stover creator Bill Holman.

In late 1934, Holman heard that Joseph Patterson, publisher of the New York Daily News, was looking for a Sunday comic strip that would display the paper’s civic-minded support of such public servants as policemen and teachers and, in this case, firemen.

“I had sold a lot of firemen cartoons to magazines,” Holman said, “and the idea of firemen running around all over in red trucks seemed like a good gimmick to hang things on.”

Over Christmas while visiting his grandmother in Crawfordsville, Holman drew up a sample Sunday strip and when he returned to New York, he offered it to Patterson, who bought it.

“He wondered if I could keep it up,” Holman said, “and I told him confidently that I could.”

The madcap Smokey Stover debuted March 10, 1935 and continued with the Tribune-News Syndicate until Holman retired in 1973.

The title character is a fireman, and while the strip also features his boss, the fire chief Cash U. Nutt, the activities just as often involve Smokey’s wife Cookie or his son Earl or their cat with a perpetually bandaged tail, Spooky, who, for a time, starred in a companion strip of his own before joining the firehouse gang.

Holman, said comics historian Stephen Becker, “threw himself into his work with unmitigated glee,” creating such “memorable departures from rationality, verbal juxtapositions and misunderstandings, and irrepressible manglings of the English language” that he is forever revealed as “a man to whom reality is subordinate to art” (209).

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. Emily Wilson at The Daily Beast profiles Trina Robbins.

On the day we spoke, Robbins sat in a café across the street from her house in San Francisco, having a bagel and coffee. She had just gotten back from a Comic Convention in Argentina, where, she said, she had a wonderful time.

“I got so much love,” the 79-year-old artist said. “I never hugged more people.”

Debkumar Mitra remembers Bengali cartoonist Chandi Lahiri.

“Chandi-da was a lifelong learner,” says Debasish Deb, a famous illustrator and Lahiri’s former colleague at Ananda Bazaar Patrika. “He used to say, ‘you have to read a lot to draw political cartoons. You may know all the techniques in the world to draw cartoons, but you might still never know what political cartooning is all about.’” Deb finds that reflected throughout Lahiri’s work, often seen in the form of a severe denouncement of the political class, sometimes embracing controversy, but never compromising. From elements of the Mahabharata to the Ramayana to modern political thought, everything found a place in his huge body of work. Despite the breadth of his knowledge, Lahiri remained anchored to his roots: Bengal. There is an acute sense of “Bengaliness” in his cartoons that, perhaps as a result, did not transcend the borders of West Bengal.

Scott McCloud appeared on the popular podcast 99% Invisible.

—Reviews & Commentary. At Artforum, Sarah Nicole Prickett writes an excellent, provocative essay on the cultural and political meanings of Wonder Woman.

Because he was unlikely for his time, it is easy to see [Wonder Woman creator William Moulton] Marston as the hero, the lightning-struck creator of a comic so rich in expression, so queer in theory that it’s as peerless today as it was unprecedented then. He was as Northern as [Margaret] Mitchell was Southern. Born and educated in Boston, he became an experimental psychologist who claimed to have invented the lie-detector test. Before the Depression, he worked as a “consulting shrink” for Universal Studios in Hollywood; after being fired, he decided that comic books, not movies, were the ultimate form of propaganda. Selznick’s Gone with the Wind landed in theaters during what Neville Chamberlain called a “lull in the operations of war.” Wonder Woman made her solo debut two years later, as the first US Army planes flew over Europe, in issue number one of Sensation Comics: “At last, in a world torn by the hatred and wars of men, appears a woman,” as if female leads in action comics had been doing anything besides, as John Berger would say, appearing.

But a superlative heroine was destined to appear sooner rather than later. Marston’s idea was one of many seeds racing toward the egg of necessity, sucked in by timing, chance, fate. The environment was fertile. Victoria Woodhull, the first woman to run for president of the United States, believed in suffrage, free love, shorter skirts, vegetarianism, and eugenics. Margaret Sanger believed in a woman’s right to make informed choices, and also in eugenics. Marston idolized Sanger. He believed, or at least once said, that the next hundred years would see the dawn of American matriarchy, and that women would use love to conquer men in a “serious sex battle” in the twenty-fifth century, a point in time conveniently far from his own. Believing religiously in suffrage, he excelled as a progenitor of so-called male feminism, the supererogatory mode of allyship practiced by men for whom “equality” means easier access, and putting a woman on a pedestal meant looking up her skirt. On hearing, from his publisher, that every comic-book heroine so far had been commercially a failure, he replied, “But they weren’t superwomen. They weren’t superior to men.” His visions of female supremacy took to the limit a bad idea, that a woman can only be a person if she’s not only human.

Today at the Journal, we've got me! Well, not really. I did get a chance to speak with Aleš Kot about their latest book with Image, Days of Hate. As I'm sitting here, post Den of Thieves, writing this little blurb, I realize I totally forgot the most obvious question one should always ask in an interview: how to pronounce the person's name! Hopefully Aleš will stop by and let us know. It's a pretty happy-go-lucky interview, and it'll take you a while to read. Check out this fun bit, which I've pulled completely out of context to entice you further!

The work has to be inclusive, which is the opposite of what the Nazis and the white supremacists want. The Nazis want a divided society against everything but the Nazi. I believe in a society united against the Nazis, united against the white supremacy. Every white person is complicit in the white supremacy. But that doesn’t mean we have to do what the white supremacy dictates or what the Nazis want. I believe we have to learn how those systems operate in us and others and then chip away at those systems with decisiveness and constancy.

And that's not all! Today, we've also got that review you're looking for: Robert Kirby on The Book Book of Bisexual Trials and Errors, a new coming-of-age memoir by Melissa Beier.

Beier goes through enough excruciating angst and existential loneliness in her long sex-and-romance drought that when she finally gets something good going, we feel a genuine sense of relief and happiness for her. With her love life finally bearing fruit, her self-esteem improves, and she locates new talents within herself, winning a MOTH story slam in spring of 2016. Like many other artists, she comes to the realization that producing work does not define a person’s worth: “even though drawing people is something I love and excel at, it’s not something I have to do to be liked.”

ELSEWHERE

While Tim got to be the lucky guy in the hot seat when the ever-so-surprising news broke that the Valiant Comics IP investment odyssey has now reached the point where one of the pursed-lips bozos pushes out his investment partners in an attempt to illustrate the sunk cost fallacy to as many people as is possible, I'll be today's guy who gets to link you to a story everybody knew was coming: and that is the news that IDW ain't doing so hot. Say it ain't so! You mean to tell me that the bookstore market isn't willing to prop up all those horribly drawn comics built around aging television properties now that the direct market has wised up to their game? Why I never would have thought that in a million years! But hey, no worries--pump out some comics about Star Trek Discovery and a Star Wars spin-off that looks like it was drawn by someone who gets drunk on roller coasters, that'll keep the lights on until the Hulu version of Locke & Key brings in millions of new readers. Nothing says mass entertainment like Hulu's slate of original programming! 

Today on the site, Austin English is here with another installment of his 10 Cent Museum column. This week, by way of explaining where his aesthetic comes from, he shares many of the minicomics that are most important to its development, which includes work by a long and disparate list of cartoonists (Aidan Koch, Ben Jones, Lizz Hickey, Ted May, etc.).

Mini-comics, even the "classic" ones, often disappear. Some of the most beautiful ones are never reprinted. Many artists choose not to have their earliest work collected, seeing the flaws ever so clearly, while the reader from the past holds the work close to the heart, aware of all the undeniable beautiful moments it also so obviously contains. Those private moments have shaped so many readers who went on to make mini-comics (or regular comics) of their own. The works disappear, remaining only in the hearts and minds of a happy few, but their essence (whether aesthetic, political, formal, etc.) live on as new shapes in new works of art.

Again, everyone's zine collection is a unique assemblage of specific touchstones. It depends on what area of the world you happened to be living in, whether your co-workers happened to make zines, the various festivals you intentionally or accidentally ventured to, or what you were willing to accept artistically at different moments in your life. To me, a zine collection assembled in this way is far more priceless than one built on determining who were the most important artists of every decade and adopting a completist attitude about seeking out every self published work these artists made. That's the same as reading Tintin; it's open to everyone to do.

For this column, I went through all my zine archives and picked out dozens of publications. While there are important (to me) zines that have been left out, I've tried to cull together a group that explains where I'm coming from. Within these selections, there is work by peers, artists I admired and emulated, people in my life, publications I acquired mysteriously, zines I carried from house to house because I found them comforting, and items that have a hold over me simply due to the moment in time that I found them.

We also have a stellar must-read review of Chris Ware's Monograph written by Joe McCulloch, which is easily and far away the best piece on the book I've yet read.

Ware is frequently praised for the exactitude of his architectural drawings, or the musicality of his page layouts, but less discussed is the talent I've personally found most affecting - the way he composes books. The first comic of Ware's I'd ever read was The ACME Novelty Library #4 (Fantagraphics, 1994), which I'd elected to receive as a bonus prize after buying trade paperback compilations of Jeff Smith's Bone from a mail-order service. I was in high school, so this was the late 1990s, maybe '97. ACME #4 was the second assortment of work later compiled as Quimby the Mouse (Fantagraphics, 2003), and while the comics themselves rightly rewired a complacent brain -- I had read enough edgy and aggressive comics at that point that I was aware comics were capable of adopting impolite themes, but the idea of diagrammatic works that coaxed immense pain from the systems of life were completely foreign -- I was even more stunned by the presentation of that vast pamphlet. The method by which Ware applied a fancy and outmoded language of gaiety to bitter scenarios went beyond direct parody; there was a great deal of contextual work done to set the artifice of Ware's make-believe ACME Novelty Company (the organization ostensibly 'behind' his comics) against what I readily understood to be wildly uncommercial and very personal comics. This was not simple irony to me. This was a comic book that seemed to evoke the very history of printed entertainment, to reveal it, systemically, as first a means of forestalling the signal of human pain, and then as a means of enunciating that pain. A hellish memory palace.

When I read it, comics were in shambles. Distribution had mostly collapsed and many stores had gone out of business; I wasn't even paying attention to comics very much, they had grown so embarrassing to me as a profoundly insecure teen, but I still knew things had gone to shit. ACME read like one last song before the apocalypse, a testament to grand labor and ruined ambition as the flood waters rose to drown the stage.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. DMG Entertainment has purchased Valiant, apparently believing there are some successful movies and/or TV shows to be made from it. (I'm no expert, but unless you're talking characters with strong name recognition or genuinely good or innovative stories, I don't see the point of buying things like this.)

For [CEO Dan] Mintz, Valiant occupies a valuable position in the IP field. Not only is it something with a global awareness, but it is also something that people pay for, month in and month out, and is in a “tipping point” place, making it ready for a next-level jump.

“This is something that is validated already and is on a road that has already been traveled by Marvel and DC,” he says.

The value of the deal was not disclosed and Mintz had no comment, other than to add, “You don’t step into something like this lightly. You don’t want a very expensive pet.”

—Interviews & Profiles. The most recent guest on Process Party is Whit Taylor.

—Reviews & Commentary. Sam Ombiri writes about Coco Moodysson's Never Goodnight.

This comic is one of the most fun autobio comics I’ve ever read. The drawings are spectacular, it’s great that she was able to summon enough of this creative energy for every panel, and deliver consistently. Her drawings are like candy that don’t lose their sweetness when eaten too much. The drawings are simultaneously so expressive, but all done with that line that Sammy Harkham always talks about, where every drawing has the same weight to it and it doesn’t deviate.

At Print, Michael Dooley connects the dots (sorry) between artist Yayoi Kusama and the old Harvey comics character Little Dot.

“Little Dot, artist” is a theme that recurs frequently throughout her adventures, and is an ongoing source of graphic creativity for her illustrators. And as a one-dimensional girl in a two-dimensional world, the edges of her form will often vanish, blending into the background like one of those dapper figures in Ludwig Hohlwein and J.C. Leyendecker illustrations, or a Coles Phillips fadeaway girl.

Dot was widely famous, and occasionally Harvey’s top-seller, from the mid-1950s through the late-1960s. But her popularity began to fade in the 1970s, during a downtrend in which comics were no longer for kids that much. After then, her appearance became spotty, with her total disappearance in 1994. Since then, aside from being name-checked for a split-second in a 2002 Simpsons episode (start at 2:08 here), she’a faded from pop culture’s short collective memory. However, the concept of dots in endless, relentless repetition is alive and prospering in the form of avant-garde art’s latest superstar, Yayoi Kusama.

—Not Comics. Meredith Gran (Octopus Pie) is developing a video game, and raising funds via Kickstarter.

Today at the Journal, we've got Michael Dean's obituary for Mort Walker, whose passing was announced a few days ago. It's an excellent piece of writing, full of the sorts of meat that you can only get when you let an expert go long. Try this one out:

Unlike Beetle, Walker eventually got a taste of the WWII European theater. Shipped to Italy in 1945, he was put in charge of a POW camp housing ten thousand German prisoners. He found he was sympathetic toward the prisoners, who often escaped overnight and returned the next morning. “It came to me somewhere along the way that I didn’t really care if the POWs did escape,” he wrote in Backstage at the Strips. “They never did anyway. Most of them were just poor suckers like I was, waiting to go home and trying to make the best of it until they got there.” As an intelligence officer, he investigated a murder, robberies, rapes and other crimes in Italy.

I am going to be wrapping my mind around the concept of that the investigation of "murder, robberies, rapes and other crimes in Italy" be a fact that only merits one line in an obituary, simply because it turned out that was a small part of my life and not what anyone was going to know me for.

Another big day on TCJ. First, Paul Tumey writes a tribute and remembrance for Mark Campos, the Seattle minicomics artist. He also includes memories of Campos written by many of his friends in and around the comics world, including Roberta Gregory, Kelly Froh, David Lasky, Tom Hart, and many others. Whether or not you know Mark Campos's name or work, I highly recommend reading this and learning why he mattered to so many people.

Although he remained on the fringes of comics publishing, appearing almost exclusively in the small press, Mark Campos was a crucial figure in the Seattle comics scene. From the mid-1980s, he participated in various groups which included many notable comics creators, including Jim Woodring, Lynda Barry, Peter Bagge, Jason Lutes, Tom Hart, Ellen Forney, David Lasky, and Megan Kelso. As Campos himself once put it, he was a part of “the Seattle wing of the alternative comix movement.” Many Seattle creators (myself included) received warm welcomes and gentle ushering into the Seattle comics scene from the soft-voiced, kind-hearted cartoonist. Campos even worked at print shops, where he helped midwife many a comic book by others into publication.

Mark Campos possessed the talent to gain success with a much broader audience. Cartoonist Steve Willis has written, “In all my years of meeting comix artists there are two people who I consider to be master writers in the medium: Matt Groening and Mark Campos.” In his remembrance below, Willis observes that Campos was ahead of his time, a more artful creator in the Newwave Comix movement and Seattle comics scene of the 1980s and 1990s, likening Campos to “a Shakespearian actor in a Wild West boomtown.” In his chronicle of the first decades of the small press comix movement, The Minicomix Revolution 1969-1989, Bruce Chrislip wrote: “Mark Campos is among the greatest writers in comix.” David Lasky has called Campos’ comics “the hidden gems of comicdom.”

We also present the final day of this week's excellent Cartoonist's Diary by Tom McHenry.

And then Tegan O'Neil is here with a review of Rich Tommaso's Spy Seal: The Corten-Steel Phoenix.

I will be completely honest, I did not intend to like Spy Seal: The Corten-Steel Phoenix! That the book won me over is a testament to the skill of its creator.

Why didn’t I think I was going to like the book? Well, here’s where I make my own shameful confession that I’m sure will see me permanently blackballed from the Journal: I’m just not that big into Hergé. So when I saw the cover to Spy Seal I groaned, and although I’m not completely certain I think it was even an audible and not an internal groan. A Tintin pastiche? There are few things within the realm of comic books that hold less inherent interest for me.

Now, as the critic in this instance I think it’s only right and proper for me to frontload my prejudices. That’s part of the story, after all: right off the bat the book starts off with a demerit for me because I never read Tintin as a kid. And the problem with that is actually fairly common in comics: let’s call it the problem of secondhand nostalgia.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—RIP Mark E. Smith

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XzJgUa-f424

Today at the Comics Journal, we've got a collection of doozies for ya. First up, you'll find Day Four of Tom McHenry's Cartoonist Diary. While it's Day Four for Tom, he's only up to Part Two of Carlos. Will he manage to complete the entire miniseries before we run out of Diary entries? You'll have to come back on Friday to find out!

Bling blong! Time to move on to the next thing to link to. What's that, you say? Why, it's an excerpt from Matthew Pettit's upcoming comic Paradise. Check it out! Got it in your system? Great! Then move on and read this interview with Matthew. All in one place! Pretty convenient, if you ask me.

Meanwhile, you can find plenty of original reporting on the big announcement of the week: Richard Corben is the fifth American to win the Grand Prix at Angoulême. I'll just have to content myself by posting some of my favorite images. Here goes!

The site is jam-packed today. First, an interview with the magazine editor and former Prince Valiant writer Cullen Murphy, who recently wrote a memoir of growing up in Connecticut, surrounded by prominent cartoonists (including his father).

You took over writing the strip when [Hal] Foster retired and you have this great account about sending him a story idea and how he tore it apart and explained how comics work and how the strip worked. I was reminded of that famous story of Stephen Sondheim sending Oscar Hammerstein a musical he wrote as an adolescent and how Hammerstein tore it apart and gave him a master class in how a musical worked. Foster seems to have given you a similar master class.

It was. It was on the porch of the Homestead Inn, in Greenwich. There are some things you don’t forget. The conversation could easily have stopped with the words “no good.” In Sondheim’s case, as you know, he went on to become a very close friend of Oscar Hammerstein’s and he took the lesson seriously. I did too. That conversation was such an eye opener because it stripped away the superficialities of the work and went down right into the engine. You need to see how this works. You can put the body on later, you can paint it whatever color you want, but you have to know how the engine of the thing works. I took his advice very seriously. It was so clarifying to have him explain it. The minute it was explained, then of course you think, Oh right, why didn’t I see that? Most people just don’t see these things because they’re not doing it and it doesn’t occur to them to look at the innards in the way in which a practitioner sees them. What strikes me now in retrospect is that Hal was able to explain things so clearly. By that point he’d doing comic strips for fifty years. Some things that are second nature to you are in fact hard to explain, but he was able to explain it.

How did it work when he retired and you took over writing the strip?

I had started sending story ideas to Hal that were just narrative story ideas—written out as if they were extended plot summaries. That was in the early '70s, probably 1972. I was still in college. And Hal began to use them as the basis for continuities in the strip. Then there came a moment when I decided to try my hand at doing them the way he did them, breaking things down into descriptions and text. That was when we had that meeting at the Homestead and he told me that I had not mastered the trick. That would have been in ‘74-75. I kept doing it and got better at it and he began using them in Prince Valiant. I think it was ‘79 when he gave up the writing of the strip altogether and I took over as the writer. As to what happened in the background, I really don’t know. There came a point where Hal sold the strip to King Features, and so King Features would have had a hand in it. By that time I’d been working with Hal sufficiently that I was a pretty good candidate to take it over. Especially because I could work easily with my dad.

Also, Leonard Pierce reviews the latest Larry Gonick book, a collaboration with Tim Kasser called Hypercapitalism.

The degree to which you are already aware of the failures of capitalism is likely to the degree to which you are already one of its beneficiaries. So you may not need to be told that you’re fucked, but maybe it can’t hurt to find out exactly how fucked you are, and why; if that’s the case, you might find yourself reading Hypercapitalism: The Modern Economy, Its Values, and How to Change Them, the latest effort by edu-cartoonist Larry Gonick (best known for his Cartoon History of the Universe), this time in collaboration with fellow academic Tim Kasser. The book is divided into two sections—the first identifying the history, theory, and effects of capitalism on our stricken age, and the second a series of suggestions about what we might do about it.

The first part is better than the second, albeit more depressing. The nature of capitalism is a pretty ugly one, after all, and provides no lack of material for even the most casual historian. Unfortunately, ‘casual historian’ is exactly what Kasser is, and it shows in a number of ways; important developments are glossed over, sins of omission abound, and what is explicit is implicit while what should be text is subtext. Put simply, Kasser and Gonick have approached the problem of runaway capitalism from a reformist’s perspective, and the result is an often toothless and ineffectual attack on what is literally a life-or-death problem. There is little here that questions the idea that our current system is anything but rational and inevitable; it gives only the slightest analysis of issues like incorporation and imperialism, despite their centrality to the issue; and the labor theory of value—inescapably important to any understanding of the nature of capitalism—is referenced with a hand-wave in a single panel.

Finally, we have Day Three of Tom McHenry's Cartoonist's Diary.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—Interviews & Profiles. For Vulture, Abraham Riesman profiles Christopher Priest.

Priest is nothing if not candid about his own career and the industry as a whole. In interviews and copious self-published essays, he speaks fiercely about injustices in comics, naming names and pointing fingers at people responsible for failures he thinks have been undeservedly ascribed to him. You might say that’s just a case of his being, to use his words, an asshole, but he’s frank about his own shortcomings and poor decisions. Still, he sees his predicament as part of a larger pattern. “When I read these self-congratulatory histories of Marvel and DC, they completely omit not just me but other persons of color or firsts,” he tells me. “Who was the first woman editor? Who was the first woman penciler? And I think part of it is that the people who were assembling these histories of it just didn’t think it was important. But these things do count, and they really do matter.”

The latest guest on Process Party is Jason T. Miles.

—Reviews & Commentary. Aaron Peck writes about the comics-adjacent artist Gus Bofa.

Bofa himself has become as obscure as the shadowy figures that populate his drawings. Some of that can be attributed to the fact that toward the end of his life, when he could have consolidated his reputation, he withdrew from public life and became a virtual recluse. Another is the marginal place that a book illustrator receives in literary history. He has enjoyed a minor revival in France, where his books are now collectors’ items, particularly because of his influence on bande dessiné. In 2000, thirty-two years after his death, an exhibition about his collaborations with Mac Orlan was mounted at Musée de l’Abbaye de Sainte Croix at Les Sables d’Olonne, in western France. Throughout the last decade, Éditions Cornélius has reprinted a number of his books and published a biography of him by Emmanuel Pollaud-Dulian in 2013. Although, at first glance, Bofa’s work exists in the tidal zone between the French political cartoons of the nineteenth century and the bande dessiné of the twentieth, on closer scrutiny it has more affinity with modernist literature, a characteristic apparent in his collaborations with Mac Orlan, which also foreground a less examined aspect in Bofa’s work. Since his revival in France, Bofa’s influence on French illustration has been well documented; less has been written about his significance in the history of French literature.

—RIP. Hugh Masekela.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Today at the Journal, we've got a big, honking look at John Pham's J + K, which is currently only available to people "in the know". Now that Frank's let the secret out, will there be a run? Get yourself speculating like it's a Chromium Summer: 

J+K retains the Pham look we know, just with the volume on 11. It seems to me that he took his printed strips and scanned them and touched them up to loomore consistent than the slightly inconsistent riso comic magazines. Like every color is amped up and right on the money. No mis-registration of the printing or streaking or digital effects that look like mistakes. Very smooth and very nice. And simply gorgeous bigfoot cartoony drawing. His approach here, by his own account, channels Suiho Nagawa’s aesthetic by unifying or harmonizing, the color and the line. The lines are made by overprinting colors. Not by a traditional, single “blackline.” So the lines which contain the colors have different values or different sounds, if you will. The effect being one of a warm gauzy magic hour firmly rooted in cartoon symbolism. Meaning it just works on your eyes and brain in a way “blackline” based comics do not.

And in today's installment of his Cartoonist Diary, Tom McHenry makes me feel bad that I'm re-reading this old book about budgeting. He says that isn't what he intended, but I don't believe him. You shouldn't either!

One of the things I like to do when the world all just seems like a lot of horseshit is look at Alcatena's comics and wonder what it would be like to see the world through his eyes. 

Well, him and Bart Sears.

Today on the site, RJ Casey interviews the popular New Yorker cartoonist (and former SNL writer) Zach Kanin.

You used to be the assistant cartoon editor at The New Yorker.

That’s right.

What did that job entail?

That mainly was managing the Cartoon Caption Contest, which was fairly new when I started. I think the contest started a year before I got there. I also had to do data entry and stuff like that for the cartoons in the process of getting them through. There were about one thousand original submissions a week for the regular cartoons. About five hundred from the regular stable of New Yorker cartoonists and about another five hundred from the slush pile. I had to go through them and pick which ones to bring to Bob Mankoff, the editor.

Most of my week, though, was going through eight to 14,000 captions for the Cartoon Caption Contest.

[Laughs] Is there a science to that?

Yeah, there are tricks. I put them all on a spreadsheet and would search for things. I would search for “fuck” and “shit” and things that they wouldn’t publish. I could eliminate all those immediately.

OK.

I would also always start out by searching for the word “Geico.” There were always about five hundred submissions that were like, “Good news. Now you’re getting a better deal through Geico.” [Laughter] So many Geico jokes. I was like, “We’re not going to do that!” Searching for swears or for Geico would immediately take about a thousand out of the running for the contest.

We also have Day One of a new Cartoonist's Diary. This week's Cartoonist is Tom McHenry.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. DC continues to antagonize Alan Moore and his collaborators, this time incorporating his character Promethea into a comic without seeking permission or even notifying Moore or co-creator JH Williams III. (Moore created Promethea for WildStorm, after he had announced his intention never to work with DC again. A few years later, DC purchased WildStorm.)

—Reviews & Commentary. Huib van Opstal writes about The Daily Graphic, an early heavily illustrated New York City newspaper.

In New York City, some forty years later in 1873, The Daily Graphic with a page height of 56 cm (22 inch) was seriously larger in size, featured poster-like full front-page art and more large pictures inside, all done in a single black — and supplied the daily news with it in letterpress. Technically half of it originated from stone, half of it originated from metal. Something it kept up for over sixteen years in 5,129 daily issues. A truly daily myriorama. Over the sixteen years of its existence — a respectable number of years which at least points to some success — nothing is known about circulation numbers, or the volume of the paper’s printing plant. At the very beginning, the month before it started, The Chicago Tribune, in its New York Letter of 13 Feb, 1873, reported: ‘they can make their journal pay with a daily circulation of ten thousand, though they expect one much larger.’

A press run of up to 10,000 copies per day in the early 1870s for a New York newspaper was modest. (The number may have been mentioned by outsiders to belittle the enterprise.) A drop in the ocean compared to the daily circulation numbers papers would have towards the end of the century — when the printers and presses of editor-publishers like Pulitzer and Hearst managed to produce hundreds of thousands of sensational newspapers a day, tons of it — and sensationally illustrated too. Thanks to the latest modern presses, and thanks to the Daily Graphic’s inspiration.

Rather than just steal Sally Ingraham's Library of Congress and Phoebe Gloeckner links from her post on Comics Workbook last week, let me just direct you to it.

Today at the Journal, Tegan checks in with her take on Days of Hate, a new Image series from Danijel Žeželj & Aleš Kot. Things get political because they have to. And then some!

I keep circling around like a falcon in the proverbial gyre to try and get my arms around this comic. I spend all day watching the news and reading the news and listening to the news and discussing the news – everything is bad, yes, but more importantly things feel very desperate. There’s something in the air, I don’t know whether it’s even good or bad, but – if you’re trapped on the inside here in Fortress America it feels like we’re stuck in the middle reel. We’ve had tons of exposition. Every conflict is established. Everything is always happening and nothing changes. Tension keeps ratcheting ever skyward on every side and nothing changes. It’s the strangest feeling. We’re stuck in the Dragonball-Z of governmental crises.

Next week, we'll have an interview with Aleš about the series. But that's not all we've got for you today. Prepare yourself for the weekend with Paul Tumey's latest installment of Framed!, which includes a detailed look at To Laugh That We May Not Weep: The Life and Times of Art Young. 

This is, after, all, work by a cartoonist who went to hell, artistically speaking, not just once, but three times! This is the guy who experienced what for many would be hell on earth, being put on trial for sedition (twice!) with the possibility of years of imprisonment. Undaunted, or perhaps just worn out from drawing his thousands of cartoons, Young famously dozed off in the courtroom during one of these trials. Whether or not you agree with Young’s politics, who could argue with the sad-beautiful reflections found in his gentle work? Art Young’s cartoons are some of the most complex, some of the richest, most original, most refined, most personal art I’ve ever experienced. To Laugh gives us the chance to have that experience. By presenting this work in a beautifully designed compilation, we can finally linger over it, take it in, and expand our understanding of what cartoons can do, and perhaps should do.

From there, Paul goes on to commit multiple cardinal sins of list-making, including praising a book of criticism (HISS) and then concluding his list with trying to convince you that a book written by the She-Hulk guy was better than Judge Dredd: Every Empire Falls, which is so absurd that when I contacted Charles Soule (my wife's godfather and a close personal friend), and he told me I was legally allowed to edit that part out of Paul's list! (Charles Soule is a lawyer, as well as the guy who they made write the Old Man Logan comic.) I would have made those edits but I got so caught up in re-reading Every Empire Falls--the second best comic to have been released in 2017--that I stopped feeling angry and just felt sad.

Today on the site, Greg Hunter returns with a new episode of Comic Book Decalogue. This time, he spoke to the cartoonist and editor Rob Kirby in an episode recorded live. In it, the man behind What's Your Sign, Girl? and The Shirley Jackson Project discusses Eric Orner, Lynda Barry, Peanuts, and more.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—News. This year's Eisner Awards judges have chosen Carol Kalish and Jackie Ormes for the Eisner Hall of Fame, and announced the other nominees for the honor.

At Vulture, Abraham Riesman talks to the people behind indie publishers including Lion Forge, Emet, and Iron Circus.

David Steward II and Carl Reed aren’t impressed with the mainstream’s slow crawl into the 21st century. Both African-American men, they’re co-founders of Lion Forge Comics, an upstart publisher that recently launched its own superhero universe starring and created almost entirely by people who aren’t white males. Sitting in a pan-Latin steakhouse in Hell’s Kitchen, they calmly express their disdain for the big boys on the block.

“When they do diversity, it’s all almost …” Steward says, trailing off.

“Reactionary,” Reed finishes from across the table.

Steward nods and adds, “It’s almost kind of an advertising gimmick of sorts. They take Thor and make female Thor, but female Thor is going to go away, you know? If you’re really going to invest in that at that level, then it needs to be a new character with its own origin that you’re going to push and pull and really get behind.”

—Interviews & Profiles. The most recent guest on Inkstuds is Zach Hazard Vaupen, and the most recent cartoonist guest on Virtual Memories is Seymour Chwast.

—Reviews & Commentary. Alan Moore pays tribute to the recently deceased UK comics artist Jim Baikie.

Developing that strip [Skizz for 2000AD] with Jim was an education into his meticulously thought-through processes: the work that went into the look – and to a great degree the basic conception of the character – was all Jim’s. It was him that decided to depict Earth’s first contacted extra-terrestrial species as a kind of highly-evolved marsupial, reasoning that this would make the entity look alien enough while still allowing it to appear biologically feasible. And then he placed that fantastical creature into a sharply-realised contemporary Birmingham, where even the background faces are full of human character, and somehow made it work.

When I began work for DC Comics, having Jim as the artist on my otherwise-unpromising Vigilante two-parter turned a job that I wasn’t enjoying very much into a pleasure. Several years later we found ourselves working together again, this time for Image Comics and its various splinter-companies, most memorably on Supreme, where I remember Jim contributing to a riotous comedic short piece that played with the most ludicrous and fondly-remembered tropes of early 1960s superhero comics, and gave Jim a chance to indulge his extreme fondness for Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder’s anarchic and demented Mad extravaganzas. Thinking about it, it seems very likely that the fun Jim and I had with that brief outing was what led, with the demise of Supreme‘s publisher and our subsequent involvement with the fledgling America’s Best Comics line, to Jim being the perfect choice for our Mad-inflected patriotic superhero parody in Tomorrow Stories, the to-my-mind underappreciated First American.

Today, the Journal is proud to unleash the first in Sloane Leong's onslaught of 2018. In this month's installment of Comics Dragnet, she grapples with the internet, and the comics it provides. She also delivers a love letter to Bitch Planet, but it's the Frank Booth kind of love letter. (The best kind of love letters.)

BP feels like it’s trying to teach you something, and so its characters are elliptic feminist effigies in the shape of women and not flawed, compelling characters you can fall in love with. It’s applesauce feminism dressed up in faux-exploitation. I wish it would go back and assess its source material: raw, brutal images, passion, and ugly, ridiculous honesty.

Sloane's only competition for your time can't actually be found at the Journal, but at Facebook, where Tom Devlin showed up with his detective skills and impeccable memory of Chris Ware related factoids to make the case that, in a 1989 issue of Home Boy Magazine, a young skateboarder named Greg Neal gave an interview wherein he pretended to have created Ware's old Daily Texan's comic strips. Home Boy Magazine--it breaks my heart that this will probably be the only time I will be writing that title down, professionally--even reproduces some of Neal's "art", which is, even to an eye as untrained as my own, clearly Chris Ware's work. Home Boy only ran for seven issues, but the three individuals most closely associated with it (the Master Cluster) went on to do a few more magazines, like Dirt and Grand Royal. One of the three--all of whom should have done their due diligence when it came time to edit the Greg Neal interview--you'll probably recognize.

Today on the site, Alex Dueben is here with an interview of John Shableski and Illya Kowalchuk, two of the organizers of the new Excellence in Graphic Literature Awards.

So where did this idea of an award start and what were those conversations like?

Illya Kowalchuk: Actually, before the first Denver Comic Con (2012) we wanted to host comic awards that were more focused on literary merit than on the individual technical aspects of comics. One of the great things about comics is that all of those different talented creators come together-the story, art, and lettering all comes together to tell one synthetic story. We didn’t see an award out there that was honoring that. Unfortunately, in 2012 we just didn’t have the bandwidth because we were all volunteers trying to put the show together-make sure the lights stayed on. Over the years, the show grew rapidly and we had to make sure that logistics and operations were successful. This past year we have been doing a lot of thinking about how we want to move forward and what other ways we can have an impact on the industry. And as fans, we want to see the content that we’ve grown up loving be honored. We felt like this was a good time for a few reasons.

There’s this synchronicity that’s happening across academia, library sciences, education, bookselling and comic creation. We’ve arrived at a tipping point where people recognize the educational value of comics and graphic novels. They’re outselling other forms of books, accepted in classrooms, and valued in libraries and corporate offices. The momentum is picking up. When Bruce [MacIntosh - Director of DCC Programming] and I met John Shableski about eighteen months ago, we all recognized that synchronicity. John crosses a lot of industries-comics, education, bookselling, and library sciences. He validated what we had been seeing on our own and we all came together and agreed: this is the time to do this.

We also have a review of Julie Maroh's Body Music, written by Jason Michelitch.

When one hears that Julie Maroh's new book is titled Body Music (Corps Sonores), it is perhaps inevitable to move from the suggestion of rhythmically moving flesh to thoughts of her debut work, the sexually frank romance-tragedy Blue is the Warmest Color (Le bleu est une coleur chaude).  Specifically, one might think of the Palm D'Or-winning film adaptation of the same name*, which secured fifteen minutes of infamy for containing a long sex scene in which the lesbian lovemaking of Maroh's book is revisualized through a heavy screen of heterosexual pornographic conventions.  The phrase "Body Music" would seem to promise further ventures into the sensual.  After reading the book, however, the title takes on the character of a sly joke on the prurient interest that her earlier work is now inescapably saddled with.  Though Maroh returns to the themes of sex, love, and LGBTQ representation, her latest work is a very different kind of book from Blue is the Warmest Color -- in some ways, it is a book that seems to be trying to be different, to break away.

Meanwhile, elsewhere:

—2dcloud. Because of various stories that have been shared and published over the past few days on social media and on comics news sites, I feel obligated to say a little bit about what happened, if only to clarify a few apparent misunderstandings.

Nearly two weeks ago, the small publisher 2dcloud announced, via Twitter, that they were cutting ties with their creative director, Blaise Larmee, due to "predatory" behavior on Larmee's part that was "inconsistent with [their] values." As I wrote then in a blog post, this was the second time in less than two months that the company had announced that they were cutting ties with an artist or associate for misconduct. In November, they revealed, again solely via Twitter, that they were canceling their plan to publish a third book by the cartoonist Andy Burkholder, who they said had been accused of sexual assault. I attempted to reach both Burkholder and 2dcloud for comment, and neither replied. After the January announcement, which also included a second tweet saying that they had destroyed all copies of one of Larmee's titles, 3 Books, I again reached out for comment, both to Larmee and to 2dcloud.

This time, around two hours after I wrote the January 4 blog post suggesting that the comics community may feel like it deserved a less opaque explanation of what was going on at the company, 2dcloud cofounder Raighne Hogan told me via email that he agreed the questions I had sent him should be addressed to some extent, and that he would get back to me soon. Here are the questions I had sent him:

1. There has been speculation that this primarily involves some of the chats Larmee included in 3 Books. If you can say, is that accurate? And is that the entirety of the problem, or are there allegations of other misbehavior?

2. When did 2dcloud learn of the allegations against Larmee?

3. Does 2dcloud have a written policy regarding sexual misconduct?

4. 2dcloud is a very small company and this has happened twice in the last two months. How did this happen? Has 2dcloud been adequately vigilant?

5. "Predatory behavior" is a very serious and also vague accusation to make -- without naming or identifying victims, isn't there a responsibility to identify behavior that others should be aware of?

6. Your twitter account indicated that you are pulping all copies of 3 Books, which seems like a very serious and unusual step to take. Why? Is there material in the book that is illegal or immoral to distribute?

7. If so, what steps did 2dcloud take to make sure the material in the book was proper to publish before contracting?

8. As a publisher that touts its ties with the community, don't you have a special responsibility to be open and transparent to that same community about what mistakes you may have made and what steps you are taking to make sure such incidents don't happen again?

I still believe those are all legitimate questions (though I would have written them more gracefully if I had known that I would later feel obligated to share them verbatim online). Depending on how Hogan/2dcloud responded, I planned to then ask more questions, if any seemed appropriate or necessary. (Note regarding question 5: I knew already that 2dcloud would probably respond that the privacy of the victims made a more explicit explanation of Larmee's actions impossible to give, but I wanted to share their reasoning on this with TCJ readers who may not have been aware of their position.) Larmee himself never wrote me back.

Nearly two weeks went by. I wanted to allow Hogan all the time he and his company needed to formulate their answers and/or a statement. I was planning to contact him sometime this weekend to see if they had made any progress, but had no intention of publishing any more on the story until they were ready. However, on Friday, the former co-editor of this site, Dan Nadel, wrote several tweets in which he forcefully criticized 2dcloud for publicly raising funds without having clearly explained what had happened with Burkholder and Larmee. I didn't see any of this until after Dan had already deleted the tweets, though they remained online for some time in the form of a screenshot of them which was shared online by someone else, and which 2dcloud and others retweeted. (That screenshot seem to have been deleted as of this morning.) Because Dan's tweets and TCJ have been linked multiple times over the weekend by various people I feel obligated to make it clear that I and TCJ had nothing to do with his tweets. Dan is no longer an editor of TCJ. I had no awareness of his tweets beforehand. Dan does not check in with me before writing on Twitter, and if he had done so in this case, I would have recommended that he not publish them.

On Sunday night, 2dcloud released a public statement, in which they announced that in a move that has apparently been in the works for some time, Raighne Hogan will be stepping down, and that Kim Jooha will be the new publisher. They also say that they will be donating 10% of the profits from Burkholder's and Larmee's books (which, except for 3 Books, are still on sale on the 2dcloud website) to RAINN. To various extents, they address many though not all of the questions I sent them in early January. I recommend reading their statement and thinking about it for yourself. In any case, it is an important first step.

I would like to end this on a positive note. I like 2dcloud. We have written about many of their books and projects on this site. Until recently, I have had nothing but pleasant interactions with Hogan, 2dcloud co-founder Maggie Umber, and Kim Jooha, who has written several times for this site and has been one of my favorite recent contributors. It is clear that the company has made some mistakes, and that those mistakes may have been fairly serious. But I attribute those errors to understandable confusion and inexperience, not anything nefarious. I believe that more openness and transparency regarding this incident will not only be good for 2dcloud, which because of its small size and funding model relies on the goodwill and trust of the comics community, but also for that community at large. I believe that an increase in transparency will lead to productive conversations, and that it may help prevent similar mistakes in the future.

Today on the site, Alex Wong returns to catch up with Jason Shiga, who talks about his residency at Angoulême, his most ambitious book yet, and the importance of Asian representation.

My dad was a cartoonist and an animator while he was living in Japan. He always encouraged me as a kid to pursue my art. There’s the stereotype of Asian parents pushing their kids into engineering or whatever, but my parents were never overbearing like that. They were always extremely supportive of my comics career. It’s something that I feel is a part of me, it’s a part of my blood. My half-sister, who grew up in Japan, also works in comics as well. She’s an assistant for a Shojo title that comes out of Nagoya. I feel like it’s this funny connection that runs in my blood.

As for the Asian American experiences, you probably remember as a kid, if there was an Asian character on television you would get really excited. For me, there was this TV show called Ohara with Pat Morita. It was some stupid cop show, but the lead was Pat Morita, and at that time, it was just so rare to see Asian people represented on TV. He was probably literally the only Asian face you could see on TV at the time. I would run into the kitchen every time he was on TV and said, “Mom, there’s an Asian man on TV, you gotta look!!” It was really exciting. It’s better now and it’s better in mediums like comics, but I still feel like white faces are the default when it comes to Hollywood. But I guess one of the nice things about comics is that there’s no producer who says my characters have to look white in order for the comic to be successful.

And Billy Burkert finishes up his week as our Cartoon Diarist.